I like the Urbanophile’s summary of the different economic approaches the Great Lakes States (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan) are taking to the recent economic challenges they are all having.

1. Indiana. We’ll be the South-lite. Think K-Mart, not Wal-Mart. Bare bones and proud of it, though unlike Texas and Tennessee we don’t have right to work but we do have a state income tax.

Reminds me of Morton Marcus’s comment about how Indiana is the middle finger of the South thrust into the north.

I don’t have much in the way of commentary about last night’s elections. They were municipal and important, but local issues that effect these kinds of elections vary so much from place to place, I think it’s foolish to try to draw broad lessons about “what it all means.”

For my part, I’m happy with the results in Tippecanoe County. We seem to have competent management in Lafayette and West Lafayette, and the voters, with an exception in maybe one race, seem to have returned the incumbents to office.

Heather Gillers has an interesting article in the Indy Star on the Daniels’ administration’s failure to execute a 2005 law concerning the expansion of birth control available through Medicaid to women at or near the poverty level.

Current law is that pregnant women with income at 200% of the poverty level or less qualify for Medicaid during pregnancy. After the pregnancy, in order to qualify for birth control assistance, they have to be making 23% of the poverty level or less. The 2005 legislation intended to change that system so that, following the birth of their child, women eligible for Medicaid during their pregnancy would continue to be eligible for Medicaid funded birth control (but no other services) for a period of two years following the birth of their child. This is not a novel concept; apparently some 20 odd states structure their Medicaid plans in this fashion. The experience of those states suggests that Indiana would have realized savings in excess of $1 million per year because it would be paying for fewer subsequent births; because second births within two years of the first are more likely to result in medical complications; and the like.

In order to make a change to a state’s Medicaid plan, the state has to apply to the federal government for approval. There were also, apparently, some start up costs involved – such that the state would be about $1 million in the red before the savings started kicking in.

The article says that it’s not entirely clear why the Daniels administration’s application to the federal government was late and inadequate, but that’s apparently what happened and why the changes were never implemented. But, when it’s a snafu at FSSA during the Daniels administration, the first two words that have to jump to mind are “Mitch Roob”, who you might remember from such public sector cautionary tales as “Privatizing Welfare Eligibility Determinations” and “Phantom Economic Development Jobs,” and “Indiana Doesn’t Do Studies, It Does Deals (Just Not Very Well)”. And, indeed, his tenure was from 2005-2008 which seems to be the most relevant time period to this discussion.

The two justifications for this failure seem to be “it’s the Feds’ fault” and “we couldn’t afford it.” The feds dispute that it’s their fault, and, that seems to be a more recent explanation. The start up costs would have been about a million dollars, but would have saved $7 million. (And, the article says that the data is pretty solid on the savings.)

The article also points out that the FSSA knows how to move rapidly on a Medicaid change application when it wants to. The legislation told FSSA to submit the application by Jan 1, 2006. It didn’t submit anything until 2007, and then the submission was inadequate and has been withdrawn and resubmitted and withdrawn again. By contrast, when the General Assembly told the governor to cut off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood; FSSA managed that within five days.

Some parts of the Republican coalition are simply not happy with the idea of birth control or family planning in general. But, I don’t really peg Daniels or Roob as holding that view. However, I can definitely see them not being excited about any additional services being provided by Medicaid or the government — even if doing so actually saves the government money. It goes against a dogmatic belief that government can’t (and almost shouldn’t) do anything well; certainly not act in a way that saves taxpayers money. That combined with Roob’s track record in his other government endeavors probably go a long way toward explaining the failure in this case. The administration could have come up with the start up money if it had really wanted to (after all, Mourdock and the Treasurer’s office managed to scrape together $2 million for a doomed legal challenge to the Chrysler bankruptcy restructuring.) So, I doubt lack of money is the real answer.

John Powers, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has been doing an outstanding series of articles about the events leading up to the Battle of Tippecanoe. Today, he has another excellent one about the battle itself.

The battle was a much closer affair than I had been lead to believe. But, the stories about the Prophet telling his men that the enemy’s bullets would bounce off of them is apparently more or less true.

In an effort to give his warriors a psychological edge, [The Prophet] promised to use his magic to protect them. The Prophet assured his warriors that if they killed Harrison, the Master of Life would grant them victory. The Prophet promised that the Americans’ gunpowder would turn to dust and their bullets would turn into mud.
. . .
As the battle continued to rage, messengers brought word to the Prophet that the American’s bullets were quite effective. He told them to continue to fight and that soon everything would be as it should.

This should be a lesson to prophets and religious people everywhere that statements about what your higher power can or will do should never be falsifiable. You should always be able to plausibly say that your higher power behaved exactly as promised or that he/she/it did not do so because of the believers’ lack of faith.

In any event, my understanding is that, following this battle, Tecumseh’s resistance was effectively over and that American settlement was opened to the Mississippi.

Niki Kelly has a good article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that I probably would’ve just added to my “News of Interest” widget on the sidebar, but Google Reader has switched to a “Google+” model and that feature is broken for the time being.

It discusses state employee health plans. Apparently the traditional plan has become cost prohibitive enough that most state employees have gone into a high deductible, Health Savings Account plan. I would suspect the ones who have remained on the traditional plan are those with known health issues in the family who know that paying for their known issues would be more expensive than paying the higher premiums. I would further suspect that this is creating a vicious cycle in the traditional plan where, with primarily high cost individuals in the plan, the premiums go up, forcing more less expensive policy holders out of the plan, leading to a more expensive average plan participat, leading to higher premiums, forcing more people out; etc.

I don’t know where the balance is. It seems fine to make people rethink when to go to the emergency room versus urgent care versus regular doctor’s hours and fine to have people consider using generics versus higher cost prescriptions. But, the HSA/high premium model goes much further; causing people to have to, essentially, gamble on their health in ways they can’t afford if they lose.

And, incidentally, these gambles probably increase overall health costs and public spending if we aren’t willing to let people who lose these gambles simply die without spending public money on them. If the public is the health care financer of last resort, paying only when the individual is wiped out and only for acute, crisis care; the public is going to pay a lot of money and the individual is going to have a miserable quality of life.

Angela Mapes Turner has an article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette entitled “State Enters Debate Over Wind Energy.” The article refers to people and organizations in the state as opposed to state government. It seems that most action on wind regulation is taking place at the local level. My law partner was actively involved in developing Tippecanoe County’s, so I’m not going to get into any specifics about wind regulation in my area.

I think counties are going to be better off if they get ahead of this issue. The article says that Whitley County starting developing its ordinance only after wind development was getting started. This caused a problem because the ordinance under development had to be scrapped when it came to light that the plan commission’s President had signed a contract related to the lease of his land to wind developers. DeKalb County is apparently preparing land use regulations in advance of any specific interest in wind development.

It will be interesting to see the long term viability of wind energy. At the moment, it is very dependent on subsidies; but, then, our entire energy economy is lousy with subsidies. What would oil energy look like if U.S. foreign policy resolutely treated countries with oil the same as countries without? Or, if government never got involved in building roads? Let alone the direct subsidies for, among other things, exploration. In terms of good policy, I’m more enthusiastic about wind than, say, biofuels — using your top soil and food to power your cars just sounds like bad long term thinking.

But, Benton County gives me pause on wind energy. At first, those wind farms are pretty cool looking; but I’m not sure that I’d want to live next to them. Maybe it’s something you rapidly get used to; but they dominate the landscape. I imagine it’s disconcerting when the sun is shining through the blades and you get a movie projector flicker going.

The State government isn’t, so far as I know, taking an active role in regulating wind farm development; so local governments that want to strike a balance between the wind developers and the neighbors of landowners selling or leasing to those developers probably need to make an effort now rather than after the wind turbines all go up.

I saw three headlines that somewhat unintentionally went together:

Senate Republicans block Obama infrastructure plan. Even though the plan had a majority support, because of a filibuster, the $60 billion infrastructure plan won’t go any further.

Work has begun on the Sherman Minton Bridge across the Ohio River. The bridge was closed because of a significant crack in a load bearing part of the bridge. The winning bid was $13.9 million and work is estimated to start in December.

Economists expect slow growth in 2012. The state and national economies should expand somewhat in 2012 but not enough to reduce the unemployment rate. A major component of the weak economy, according to an economist quoted in the article, is government inaction.

So, we clearly have an infrastructure need. We have people unemployed, able and willing to do the work – probably cheaper now than when the economy recovers, and we have government inaction standing in the way. Senators Lugar and Coats both contributed to that inaction. Thank you gentlemen.

I did a lot of driving today and listened to one of my favorite podcasts, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. Among a lot of other things, he clued me in to a man by the name of Luigi Galleani. If I’d ever heard about this guy, it never took. He was a charismatic anarchist who advocated direct violence against the powerful. But he never, apparently, engaged in direct violence himself. Sacco and Vanzetti are counted among his most prominent followers.

I knew of them, but mostly heard that their trial was sketchy and tainted by racism. Probably I’d heard something about anarchism; but really have never studied what anarchism meant in the context of the day. They were a source of great anxiety in the U.S. (and elsewhere – e.g. the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand) in the early 20th century. They were tied into and inspired by the Labor movement in the 19th century.

Anyway, Galleani seems to have been one of the more influential people I never heard of. Of his oratory skills, one guy said, “You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw.” The Wikipedia entry also had the text of a flyer accompanying a series of bombs apparently set by Galleanists at homes of Mayor Harry L. Davis of Cleveland, Judge W.H.S. Thompson, Massachusetts State Representative Leland Powers, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer:

War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.

Interesting article by Brian Zimmerman, writing for the Palladium-Item, on decision making on how to change things up at Richmond Community Schools. Their test scores and graduation statistics are indicating improvement, but now the school system is facing declining enrollment and $2.3 million less in funds.

What caught my eye was something mentioned in a way that gives me the idea the Pal-Item has covered the issue more extensively in the past:

At Richmond High School, a reported 29-percentage-point gain in graduation rate — from 54 to 83 percent — exists against the controversial backdrop of students with academic records approximating those of high school dropouts leaving RHS under cover of being home-schooled.

Today’s reform is tomorrow’s corruption. Little oversight over home schooling is seen as a way to allow parents to educate their children as they see fit; without much government interference. The implication from that paragraph, suggests that the same mechanism can be used as a substitute for formally dropping out due to lack of interest or academic ability. Which raises a secondary question: who should get tagged with the failure of these students? Is it a failure of the public school or of the home school? This looks like the educational equivalent of setting up subsidiary corporations to move losses off the books of the main corporation.

John Powers, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier has a truly excellent article explaining the run-up to the Battle of Tippecanoe. Today marks the 200th anniversary of William Henry Harrison’s departure from Fort Harrison near Terre Haute. The battle itself would take place nine days later near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers; the town of Battle Ground has grown up in the area.

This battle ended up breaking the back of Indian resistance east of the Mississippi. The remarkably capable Shawnee leader, Tecumseh, had been organizing tribes, trying to get them to agree to the principle that the Indians owned their land in common and would not negotiate sale of their land. In 1809, about two years earlier, there had been the Treaty of Fort Wayne where Harrison had negotiated the acquisition of about 3 million acres in what is now Indiana and Illinois. Tecumseh refused to recognize the deal and, on two occasions, met with Harrison. Critically, according to Powers, Tecumseh refused to guarantee the safety of parties attempting to survey the new acquisition.

Tecumseh and his brother, Tenskwatawa a/k/a “the Prophet,” had built a village on the Wabash, just downstream from the Tippecanoe River. (Incidentally, reading Tenskwatawa’s biography on Wikipedia has strong similarities to Sen. Joe McCarthy — an alcoholic who rises to prominence demonizing a foreign power and persecuting members of his own tribe (“witches”) as being in league with that power.) The settlement of Tecumseh and the Prophet had somewhere on the order of 400 warriors dedicated to the notion that Native Americans owned the land in concert and that, among other things, the Treaty of Fort Wayne did not constitute a valid transfer of property. If Harrison couldn’t survey the land, he couldn’t sell it. Stale mate. However, after the second meeting, Harrison knew that Tecumseh would be away from the village (Tecumseh went south to recruit other tribes to his alliance), and Harrison didn’t think much of the Prophet. So, Harrison took the strategically sound, if not entirely honorable, tactic of moving on the village while Tecumseh was gone.

The rest, as they say, is history. It’s also a good illustration of how the real world works. Property rights, far from being inalienable or natural, don’t mean squat – effectively don’t exist, I’d argue – without a government strong enough and willing to enforce them. The same holds true for other kinds of rights. We should keep this in mind when property right purists seem to take for granted that property rights will be enforced and other rights will either be ignored or be subservient. There may be good policy reasons for granting this kind of preference, but the priority of property rights should not be assumed as some kind of natural order.