On the ACA, forecasters overestimated total exchange enrollment, the share of higher-income individuals enrolling, and the general health of those who did enroll

See Downgrading the Affordable Care Act: Unattractive Health Insurance and Lower Enrollment by Brian Blase of Mercatus. Excerpt:

"KEY FINDINGS

• Enrollment figures fell short of projections. Initial Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections overestimated the number of 2014 enrollees by 2.5 million and 2015 enrollees by 3.5 million, and other forecasting organizations overestimated by even more.
• Enrollment of all but the near-poor is far below projections. Individuals and families earning more than 200 percent of the federal poverty line, who do not qualify for subsidies that significantly reduce high exchange plan deductibles, are largely shunning exchange plans.
• The individual mandate failed to motivate as many uninsured to enroll as predicted. Projections assumed that a large noneconomic motivation to conform to a social norm of having insurance would motivate people to comply with the mandate, but financial incentives to remain uninsured appear to be dominating insurance decision-making for the middle class.
• The pool of enrollees is sicker and more costly than projected. Despite an $8 billion subsidy to cover most of the cost of their expensive enrollees, in 2014 insurers suffered losses equivalent to about 12 percent of the premiums of ACA plans (plans satisfying the law’s new rules and requirements). Insurers are increasing premiums, raising deductibles, and narrowing provider networks in response to unexpectedly large losses on ACA plans.

ENROLLMENT SHORTFALL

As Congress was debating the ACA in March 2010, CBO released initial projections of ACA exchange enrollment. They were followed by more optimistic projections by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and RAND Corporation later that year. The three-year projections are displayed in table 1.

In July 2012, CBO revised its estimates slightly upward following the Supreme Court’s ruling that Medicaid expansion would be at the option of the states, which meant more people just above the poverty line gained eligibility for subsidized exchange plans.

Following the initial failures of HealthCare.gov, CBO revised its projections downward, and has repeatedly downgraded its estimates over the past three years. However, data from the Department of Health and Human Services show that even the downgraded estimates are overly optimistic. Table 2 shows CBO projections over time and compares them with actual enrollment data.

Low enrollment figures have been driven, in large part, by the exchange plans’ failure to attract middle-class uninsured people. Most recently, CBO projected 3 million unsubsidized enrollees in 2015, when in fact there were only 1.6 million. In early 2015, the Urban Institute estimated that 25 percent of enrollees in 2016 would be earning more than 400 percent of the federal poverty line; at the end of the 2015 open enrollment period, only 2 percent of enrollees fell into that income class. Most strikingly, only 2 percent of eligible individuals earning more than 400 percent of the federal poverty line chose to purchase exchange plans.

A contributing factor to these forecasting errors was the assumption that the individual mandate would be a more effective tool than it has been thus far. Several forecasting organizations assumed a large noneconomic motivation to conform to laws and to a new social norm for having health insurance. However, a recent study found that most households above 200 percent of the poverty line would be financially better off forgoing ACA insurance for economic reasons, an effect that appears to be dominating decision-making more than any noneconomic desire to conform to the mandate. Moreover, numerous exemptions to the mandate allow people with a broad range of financial difficulties to remain uninsured and not pay the penalty.

HIGH-COST RISK POOL

Early results from the risk corridor program, an ACA-created profit- and loss-sharing program between insurers, show significant losses for insurance companies selling ACA plans. Specifically, profitable insurers owed $360 million, while unprofitable insurers filed claims for $2.9 billion, a shortfall of $2.5 billion. The risk corridor data indicate that insurers’ 2014 losses on ACA plans equaled about 12 percent of the premiums collected.

The performance of the risk corridor program falls short of CBO projections and reflects a significantly sicker (and thus more expensive) pool of enrollees than originally expected. The sicker-than-expected risk pool, together with the phase-out of a large back-end subsidy program to offset insurers’ costs for the most expensive enrollees, is already translating into plans with higher premiums, higher deductibles, and narrower networks. These changes will make ACA plans look even less attractive to the relatively healthy uninsured, creating conditions for an adverse-selection “death spiral” in the individual market."

Inconvenient truths for the environmental movement

By Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker. Joshua S. Goldstein is emeritus professor of international relations at American University and a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Steven Pinker is professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” Excerpts:

"The first is that, until now, fossil fuels have been good for humanity. The industrial revolution doubled life expectancy in developed countries while multiplying prosperity twentyfold. As industrialization spreads to the developing world, billions of people are rising out of poverty in their turn — affording more food, living longer and healthier lives, becoming better educated, and having fewer babies — thanks to cheap fossil fuels."

"Nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source. In today’s world, every nuclear plant that is not built is a fossil-fuel plant that does get built, which in most of the world means coal. Yet the use of nuclear power has been stagnant or even contracting."

"Nuclear today is relatively expensive, but that is largely because it must clear massive regulatory hurdles while its fossil competitors have been given relatively easy passage. New fourth-generation nuclear designs, a decade away from deployment, will burn waste from today’s plants and run more cheaply and safely."

"Without nuclear power, the numbers needed to solve the climate crisis simply do not add up. Solar and wind are growing quickly, but still provide about 1 percent and 4 percent respectively of electricity production, and cannot scale up fast enough to supply what the world needs. Moreover, these intermittent energy sources could power the grid only with big advances in battery technology that are still in the basic-science stage. Even with them, we must not triple-count the energy promised by renewables: they cannot supplant existing fossil fuel use and replace decommissioned nuclear plants and meet the skyrocketing needs of the developing world."

"These arguments have been forcefully made by pragmatic environmentalists such as James Hansen and Stewart Brand."

"The second priority is carbon pricing: charging people and companies to dump their carbon into the atmosphere. Economists across the political spectrum agree that such a price would incentivize conservation, decarbonization, and R&D far more effectively than regulating specific industries and products (to say nothing of sermonizing for a return to an abstemious preindustrial lifestyle). Without carbon pricing, fossil fuels — which are uniquely abundant, portable, and energy-dense — simply have too great an advantage. Yet despite a strong campaign by Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a policy that ought to be a no-brainer has yet to catch on with politicians or the public." 

Will Obama Make Housing Affordable?

By Randal O'Toole of Cato.

"Property-rights and housing-affordability advocates were surprised and elated that the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, Jason Furman, gave a speech blaming housing affordability problems on zoning and land-use regulation. They shouldn’t be: while Furman is correct in general, he is wrong about the details and the prescriptions he offers could make the problems worse than ever. 

There is no doubt, as Furman documents in his speech, that land-use regulation is the cause of growing housing affordability problems. Yet Furman fails to note the fact that these problems are only found in some parts of the country. This is a crucial observation, and those who fail to understand it are almost certain to misdiagnose the cause and propose the wrong remedies.

Citing Jane Jacobs (who was wrong at least as often as she was right), Forman blames affordability problems on zoning that “limits density and mixed-use development.” Such zoning is found in almost every city in the country except Houston, yet most cities don’t have housing affordability problems. Thus, such zoning alone cannot be the cause of rising rents and home prices.

Based on this erroneous assumption, Furman endorses what he calls the administration’s agenda, which is its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program. Rather than making housing more affordable, this program is aimed at ending racial segregation of middle-class suburbs by requiring the construction of multifamily housing in suburbs that are not racially balanced relative to their urban areas. It assumes that multifamily housing is less costly (and thus more affordable to low-income minorities) than single family, but that is only true because units are smaller: on a dollar-per-square-foot basis, multifamily costs more than single family, especially for mid-rise and high-rise apartments. Multifamily also uses more energy per square foot than single family, which means heating bills will be higher.

In other words, the fundamental assumption of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing is that it is “fair” to put low-income minorities in cramped apartments with little privacy so long as those apartments are in the same suburbs as single-family homes with large private yards occupied by the middle class. It also assumes that the solution to problems created by zoning is even more government interference in the market, either through regulations mandating certain housing types or subsidies to that housing (another part of the administration’s agenda). It is worth noting further that nothing in the program would insure that the people in those apartments are, in fact, racial minorities.

In any case, even when accompanied by housing subsidies, building expensive apartments in middle-class suburbs does little or nothing to make housing more affordable, mainly because even the most aggressive subsidy programs will build too little housing to have much of an effect on the market. This is especially true since this prescription will be diluted by applying it as much to regions like Dallas or Raleigh, which don’t have housing affordability problems but may have suburbs that are not racially balanced, as to places with real housing affordability issues such as the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Boston.

Once we recognize that housing affordability is a crisis only in some urban areas and not others, we have to ask what it is about those urban areas that makes housing expensive. It is not zoning that limits density or mixed-use, which is found almost everywhere; it is growth-management planning that limits development at the urban fringe, which is found mainly in coastal states (CA, FL, HI, MA, MD, OR, VA, WA, and most New England states)–not coincidentally, the very places where housing affordability is a major issue.

Without land-use regulation outside of the cities, all the city zoning in the world won’t stop developers from meeting demands for affordable high- or low-density housing outside city limits. On the other hand, if growth management, whether through urban-growth boundaries, urban-service boundaries, large-lot zoning, greenbelts, or other means, limits expansion of the urban area, then housing will become both more expensive and more volatile.

Personally, I would be willing to give up all city zoning restricting density and mixed-use development provided we also give up all zoning and land-use regulation outside of city limits. This will allow developers to meet whatever demand there is for high-density housing as well as for traditional suburbs. Neighborhoods could continue to protect themselves from unwanted intrusions and nuisances using deed restrictions, as is done in much of Houston, one of the nation’s most affordable cities and urban areas.

One of the major points of my 2012 book, American Nightmare, is that zoning was originally developed to keep not just racial minorities but the working class in general out of middle-class neighborhoods (a point more recently made in Sonia Hirt’s 2014 book, Zoned in the USA). When that failed to work due to rising working-class incomes, middle-class planners supplemented zoning with growth management. That policy appears to be working as blacks and other working-class populations are fleeing many of the urban areas that have applied it, urban areas that celebrate themselves as havens for the “creative class,” which is simply another name for the middle class.

In short, Furman’s and the administration’s focus on zoning is wrong and will fail to make housing more affordable. Instead, they should look at growth management as the cause of housing affordability problems and at eliminating such growth management as the solution."

An Anonymous First-Rate Economist On the Economics of the Minimum Wage

From Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek. Excerpts:

"First-year GMU economics masters student Ash Navabi sent to me notice of a commenter at on this post at Economics Job Market Rumors.  According to Ash, the commenters “Economist 1C88” and “Economist E446” are the same person.  Whoever this commenter is, I tip my hat to him or her.  He or she says in these seven short comments at least as much as, and perhaps more than, I’ve said about the minimum wage in dozens of longer blog posts – and he or she says it more eloquently, clearly, thoroughly, and cogently.  I paste these seven comments [I only post some-CM] with my own numbering, but without further edit or comment by me, below the fold.  Read these comments and treat yourself to the reasoning of a first-rate economics mind.  Every word below the fold (save for the obvious quotations from other commenters) is that of Economist 1C88/E446.  (For the record, I have no idea who this economist is.)"

"suppose that for every single margin, you’ve found a way to argue that the supply and demand responses are inelastic. Now take a step back and think about the hypothetical world you’ve created. In this world, both the supply and demand curves for low-wage labor are near-perfectly vertical. This means, of course, that any shocks to supply or demand must result in massive equilibrating movements in the market-clearing wage. Does this actually happen? Not even close: 10th percentile wages are surprisingly stable relative to 50th percentile wages, and the big changes that do occur tend to come from the minimum wage itself.

So the project of denying every supply and demand response at the low end of labor markets is doomed from the start. But this doesn’t stop many of you from attempting it. I call this (forgive the alliteration) the Selective Skepticism of Substitution Syndrome.

Whenever someone mentions a margin along which firms or households could substitute in response to changing prices, thereby creating unintended consequences from the policy you support, you’ll dig deep and find a way to argue (earnestly as ever) that the substitution response is actually close to zero. Then they’ll mention another margin; again, you’ll find a way to deny it, and so on it goes…

The problem with all this Selective Skepticism of Substitution is that it makes you look silly. Surely there are, in reality, plenty of ways in which agents substitute in response to changing relative prices. That’s how the economy works! It would really be quite a coincidence if substitution happened to be shut down in only those cases that matter for the minimum wage.


**********

I want you to look at the table of occupations from the BLS’s Occupational Employment Statistics, and sort by median wage. Think about all those occupations with median wages below $15 – and then also think about all the occupations with median wages a bit above $15 that still have 20 or 30 or 40 percent of workers making below $15.

If we raise the minimum wage to $15 and entry-level fast food or cashier jobs are just as easily available as they are today, do you really think that none of the kinds of people who currently train for the other jobs with median wages below $15 will be tempted to just pick the lower-end jobs instead? “Pest Control Workers” have a median wage of $14.74 – are you really so confident that none of them will say “f*** pest control, I’m going to earn the same wage working the counter at McDonald’s”? The 25th percentile wage for “rock splitters, quarry” is only $12.81 – are you really so sure that none of them will get tired splitting all those rocks and take the Safeway cashier job closer to home instead, once it pays just as much?

The answer is that of course some of them will be tempted to switch jobs (or choose different jobs in the first place). It won’t necessarily happen right away – there are costs to moving between jobs, and even bigger costs to switching careers, so you’re not going to do it in response to a fleeting, idiosyncratic, almost below-the-radar change in the minimum wage (like, erm, virtually all of the cross-state minimum wage changes used for identification in existing “cleanly identified” studies). But it will happen in the long run, and even a very small response would be enough to swamp low-end labor markets – which are quite small relative to the vast middle of the distribution – and displace the existing workers.

***********

They’ll say that some kind of Keynesian channel, with minimum wage workers spending out of their now-higher wages, boosts demand and undoes the negative effect. (This is deliciously innumerate: only a tiny fraction of the marginal consumption basket of minimum wage workers flows through to other minimum wage workers. Perhaps 189d is trying to argue otherwise by complaining that “preferences are not homothetic” – with the presumption, I suppose, that at the margin minimum wage workers happen to spend 100% of their income on McDonald’s, even though the inframarginal share is more like 5%!)

– They’ll say that it’s really a story of monopsony – where firms face upward-sloping supply curves for labor, and use this market power to pay workers less than their marginal product. If you force them to pay a minimum wage, the story goes, then monopsony considerations will disappear and firms will actually demand more labor. (Of course, unless the monopsony wedge is huge, it’s not clear how this story can justify an aggressive minimum wage – and if the monopsony wedge was really that big, it would imply massive returns to employee recruitment that are hard to reconcile with the evidence. Nor is it clear why monopsony is such a big deal in the low-end labor market – of all places!

********

To top it all off, none of these stories can explain the key feature of the minimum wage literature that supporters are always citing – which is that estimates for the disemployment effect are generally near zero. Not positive or negative depending on the exact balance of the monopsony and substitution effects (which might vary predictably based on the features of the industry or occupation), but zero.

To be precise, the estimates cluster around zero, with these researchers never able to reject the null hypothesis of zero at a rate higher than you’d expect from chance alone, and the most precise point estimates getting closer and closer to zero (as you may have seen in all those funnel graphs). Taking all the evidence at face value, in fact, you must believe that we have a rather precise quantification of the effect of the minimum wage, at almost exactly zero.

How remarkable that the monopsony or Keynesian or whatever channels happen to precisely cancel out the substitution channel in every environment that left-leaning labor economists study!"

The future of Obamacare now looks like more money for less generous coverage than its architects had hoped in the first few years

See Obamacare Insurers Are Suffering. That Won't End Well. by Megan McArdle. Excerpts:

"UnitedHealth abruptly said it expected to lose hundreds of millions of dollars on its exchange policies in 2015 and 2016, and would be assessing whether to pull out of the market altogether in the first half of next year."

"Stories included not just UnitedHealth’s dire warnings, but also updates in the ongoing saga of higher premiums, higher deductibles and smaller provider networks that have been coming out since open enrollment began.

It now looks pretty clear that insurers are having a very bad experience in these markets. The sizeable premium increases would have been even higher if insurers had not stepped up the deductibles and clamped down on provider networks. The future of Obamacare now looks like more money for less generous coverage than its architects had hoped in the first few years.

But of course, that doesn’t mean insurers need to leave the market. Insurance is priced based on expectations; if you expect to pay out more, you just raise the price. After all, people are required to buy the stuff, on pain of a hefty penalty. How hard can it be to make money in this market?

What UnitedHealth’s action suggests is that the company is not sure it can make money in this market at any price. Executives seem to be worried about our old enemy, the adverse selection death spiral, where prices go up and healthier customers drop out, which pushes insurers' costs and customers' prices up further, until all you’ve got is a handful of very sick people and a huge number of very expensive claims."

"Most of the people buying exchange policies are subsidized, so to them, it doesn’t much matter whether their premiums go up, because the price of the cheaper plans is capped as a percentage of their income."

"To be sure, over the long term, that could change, because the subsidy calculation has a weird time bomb in it. Right now, subsidies are calculated so as to make the second-cheapest Silver plan on the exchange cost a fixed percentage of your income, or less. That percentage is calculated on a sliding scale -- low for people near the federal poverty line, and rising to around 10 percent for folks making closer to four times the baseline. (People who make more than that aren’t eligible for subsidies.) But the moment that subsidies start costing the government more than 0.504% of GDP, which would currently be about $85 billion, the expenditure is supposed to be capped, which would mean that subsidies would have to be decreased or withdrawn for some folks.

So concerns about the death spiral never quite went away. But they did recede, because, thanks to lower-than-expected enrollment, subsidy expenditures are supposed to come well below $30 billion this year. It’s unlikely that we’ll hit the trigger until 2019 or later, if indeed we ever do.

But on the conference call, Stephen Helmsley, the CEO of UnitedHealth, expressed concerns that the exchanges were seeing adverse selection anyway. Not just that the Obamacare insurance pool is sicker and more expensive than expected, which we already knew. But that the pool is experiencing adverse selection over the course of the year, as healthy people stop paying their premiums, and sicker people buy in. According to Helmsley, the people who bought insurance from them through the exchange, but outside of the open enrollment period, are averaging about 20 percent more expensive than the rest of the pool."

"possibility that only two years in, people have figured out how to game the special enrollment process so that it’s safe for them to go without insurance, and then sign up for coverage if they get sick."

"UnitedHealth really is losing money on these policies right now. It really is seeing something that looks dangerously like adverse selection."

Evidence of employers paying women 23% less than men for doing the same work is as elusive as Bigfoot sightings

From Mark Perry.

"There is widespread acceptance by the general public, especially among women, progressives and Democrats, of the completely bogus claim that women are paid “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men,” in the words of President Obama. Hillary Clinton repackaged the bogus claim by stating recently that “On average, women need to work an extra two hours each day to earn the same paycheck as their male co-workers.” The National Committee on Pay Equity claims that women have to work until sometime in mid-April each year to earn the same amount of income a typical man made the previous year. A recent report from the World Economic Forum claims that it will take 118 years – until 2133 – to close the world gender pay gap

Despite the widespread acceptance of the “77 cents on the dollar for the same job” claim, there is rarely ever any specific evidence presented showing that specific firms are in violation of federal law by paying women 23% less than men for doing the same job. What Obama, Clinton and gender activists are really implying is that firms across the country are illegally violating the Equal Pay Act of 1963 by paying women 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men, and those deliberate and ongoing violations are somehow going undetected. If there were such ubiquitous gender wage disparities in violation of federal law, why are there not extensive investigations by the Department of Justice or the Office of Civil Rights? And why isn’t there a cottage industry of law firms specializing in representing women who are victims of the supposed pervasive gender discrimination, the way there are hundreds of law firms representing mesothelioma victims who were exposed to asbestos on the job?

Just where do we find these companies that apparently have illegal dual-wage policies: one wage schedule for men and another one for women at wages 23% below their male co-workers for doing the same job? Where are the organizations that are paying women 23% less than men and exposing their organizations to legal prosecution, fines and penalties? Those questions are never answered by Obama, Clinton, the National Committee on Pay Equity, or the gender activists.

Well, let’s start by considering some examples of cases where it’s pretty clear that we would NOT find the kind of blatant gender discrimination that would result in women earning “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” Here are some of those examples:

1. Women-owned businesses. According to this report, there are nearly 9.1 million women-owned businesses in the United States, employing nearly 8 million workers or 1 of every 7 jobs in privately held firms. It seems highly unlikely that women would engage in the highly illegal and highly unethical activity of paying other women who work for them 23% less than their male co-workers. If the implication of “77 cents on the dollar” is that women are being victimized by employers, we wouldn’t accuse women of being the victimizers of other women, would we? Not likely.

2. Female CEOs. According to the BLS, there are 421,000 women holding the position of “Chief Executive” of their organization. Would these female CEOs have any tolerance for an illegal company compensation policy that paid female employees 23% less than their male co-workers for the same job? Not likely.

3. Union Members. In 2014, there were more than 16.2 million wage and salary workers represented by unions. Unions typically negotiate for pay based on seniority, not gender, and it would be impossible that unions would violate federal law by negotiating contracts with employers that called for paying women 23% less than men for the same position with the same seniority.

4. Workers Paid by Commission. There are almost 1 million real estate agents in the US who are paid by commission, and 55% of them are women. There are more than half a million insurance sales agents and nearly half of them are female. When compensation for these sales agents is primarily determined by commission, and those commissions are based on some percentage of sales volume, there doesn’t seem to be much support for any claims of a 23% gender pay gap in those industries. For example, when have you ever heard that “female realtors or insurance agents are paid 77 cents on the dollar for selling the same amount of real estate or insurance as their male colleagues”? Just what I though — never.

5. Government Employees. There are about 22 million Americans who work for the government at the federal (2.7million), state (5 million), and local level (14 million). Illegal discrimination by paying a female government employee 23% less than a man for doing the same government job? Not likely at all. Salaries are strictly determined by job classification, experience and seniority, and are clearly not gender-based.

6. Waiters and Waitresses. There are about 2 million waiters and waitresses in America, and nearly 72% are female. Because their compensation is based primarily on tips, I don’t think there could be any case made that “waitresses are paid 23% less on average than waiters for doing the same job, working the same number of hours, serving the same number of customers that generated the same dollar amount of sales.” Unless, of course, customers discriminate against women and give waiters tips that are 23% higher than the tips they leave for waitresses? Not likely.

7. Public School Teachers and College Professors. There are nearly 5 million teachers at the elementary and secondary level, and another 1.2 million college professors. Of course, some of these educators might also be represented in “Union Members” and “Government Employees” categories above, but when have you ever heard a female elementary school teacher or female college professor claim that they were being paid 23% less than their equally-qualified male colleagues? Never.

8. Human Resource Professionals. There are about 236,000 human resource managers in the US, and roughly 75% of them are female. Would it be even remotely possible that any of the nearly 200,000 female HR managers are engaged in illegal activity and violating federal law by paying other women in their organizations 23% less than men for the same position? Not likely.

9. Many Large Companies Have Females as Their Top HR Executive. For example, the top HR position at the Target Corporation — Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer – is held by a woman; and five of Target’s top 11 executives are female. Any possibility that Target is violating the Equal Pay Act, exposing its organization to possible lawsuits, penalties and fines by paying female Target employees 23% less than men for the same job? Nope. Likewise, Walmart’s top two HR executives are women. Any possibility that those female HR executives would tolerate systematic illegal and unethical gender pay discrimination that would result in Walmart paying women 23% less than men and thereby expose the organization to lawsuits and investigations by the Office of Civil Rights? Not likely.

Of course, the list above is not exhaustive and does not completely cover all industries, all occupations, and all female workers, but it should challenge the narrative that women are routinely paid 23% less than men – across the board in all industries and for every occupation, even in firms owned or managed by women, or whose HR departments are headed by a woman.

So where are the organizations that have blatant dual-pay schedules that compensate women 23% less than men for the same job? In reality, those companies are as rare as a sighting of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. And shouldn’t the nearly complete absence of any actual documented cases of women being paid 23% less than men for doing the same job lead us to reject the “77 cents on the dollar” myth once and for all? Apparently not. The myth just keeps getting recycled over and over again, and occasionally repackaged by Hillary Clinton and others. The fact that the myth is clearly unsupported by any actual evidence doesn’t seem to matter to most women nor to nearly all Democrats.

Perversely perhaps, maybe the false “77 cents on the dollar” narrative is actually perpetuated by the total lack of any evidence that any employers actually pay women 23% less than men for the same job. After all, it’s better to keep those mythical violations very vague, ambiguous, and undocumented as a way to keep the myth alive, like very rare sightings of Bigfoot. If the bogus myth of widespread 23% gender wage gaps throughout the economy was ever exposed to the sunlight of evidence and truth, it would wilt and disappear, no longer available as a popular issue to generate political support and votes from women.

So maybe it’s just the distant hope that someday there could be actual evidence of an organization paying women 23% less than men for doing the same work, or that there could someday be a sighting of Bigfoot, that keep those myths alive.

Bottom Line: If there are actually employers who are illegally paying women 23% less than men for doing the same job, those companies should be exposed, publicized and prosecuted. Just like if the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot do actually exist, they should be exposed and publicized with video footage. But just like the elusiveness of actual evidence for Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster should make us question their existence, the elusiveness of any actual evidence of “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men” should also make us question that unsubstantiated gender pay gap myth.

Unfortunately, the 23% gender pay gap for the same work claim is a statistical fraud that keeps getting recycled and promoted by politicians like Obama and Clinton because it apparently has a huge political payoff for uniformed voters. And it will continue to have a political payoff as long as average Americans, especially women, buy the statistical snake-oil promoted by Democrats that women are paid 23% less than men on average for doing the same job. Along with the myths of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, the 23% wage gap claim is a myth that just won’t die, regardless, or maybe because of, the scant evidence."

CBO: Tangled Web of Welfare Programs Creates High Tax Rates on Participants

By Charles Hughes of Cato. Excerpts:

"The dozens of different programs that form our tangled welfare system often impose high effective marginal tax rates that make it harder for low-income people to transition out of these programs and lift of those programs and into the middle class. As the people in these programs enter the workforce, get a promotion, or work more hours, they can lose a significant portion of those earnings through reduced benefits and increased taxes. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) illustrates this predicament: many households hovering around the poverty level face steeper effective marginal tax rates than even the highest earners. These prohibitively high tax rates can discourage work and limit their prospects, ultimately making them less likely to escape poverty."

"CBO’s analysis looks at the range of effective marginal tax rates households face at different levels of income. The median marginal tax rate for households just above the poverty level is almost 34 percent, the highest for any income level. Some households that receive larger benefits or higher state taxes have even higher effective rates: 10 percent of households just above the poverty line face a marginal rate higher than 65 percent. For each additional dollar earned in this range, these households would lose almost two-thirds to taxes or lost benefits. The comparable rate for the highest earners, households above 400 percent of the poverty level, is only 43.4 percent. If anything this analysis might understate how steep the effective marginal rates are for some households. CBO only considers the combined effect of income taxes, payroll taxes, SNAP and ACA exchange subsidies, so households that participate in other programs like TANF or housing assistance could face even higher rates. These results mirror some of Cato’s past work investigating the issues and trade-offs involved with these welfare programs.

The nature of the welfare system contributes to the prevalence of these poverty traps. A House and Ways Human Resources Subcommittee recently held a hearing on issue and released a chart illustrating the complex, labyrinthine nature of the welfare system."

"New programs were grafted onto the existing system over time, each intended to address a perceived problem afflicting people in poverty, but they can interact in ways that can deter people from striving to create a better life for their families. That’s part of the reason the status quo system, which the Government Accountability Office estimates spends $742 billion at the federal level each year, has achieved such lackluster results to date."