The subjects differ, but basic problems in two US political issues are identical. In both, Americans face the need to part with money for failing to meet impossible requirements imposed by federal law. Common to both issues is a government trying to do too much.
When a requirement that individuals using new government exchanges buy health insurance by Feb. 15 or pay tax penalties proved unachievable, regulators essentially extended the deadline. Refiners needing to sell impossible amounts of legislatively specified vehicle fuel haven't been so lucky.
It should surprise no one that a legislative abomination affecting individuals drew prompt repair while refiners wait in vain for relief from an analogous predicament. Individuals vote; refiners do not. Refiners also elicit little sympathy from the public when victimized by ill-considered law. Still, legislative extortion should offend everyone in a free society, no matter who's paying.
The RFS fiasco
The problem for refiners is the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires sales of fuel ethanol and advanced biofuel in volumes rising annually. Because Congress guessed wrong about gasoline demand, the requirement for fuel ethanol has begun to exceed the market's need for it. And because Congress also guessed wrong about supplies of advanced biofuels, particularly those made from cellulose, refiners face requirements to sell more of those fuels than exist. Refiners unable to meet their volumetric obligations must buy chits to cover the deficiencies—pay penalties for not performing the impossible, in other words.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which administers this fiasco, hasn't done enough to adjust the RFS program to market reality. It even has aggravated problems by being perennially tardy with the RFS target amounts it administers. Now the American Petroleum Institute is calling on EPA to get reasonable with its mandates and threatening to sue if the agency doesn't publish 2014 requirements by the end of November. From Congress, API, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, and other groups seek repeal of the RFS.
Both fights are righteous but tough. The Obama administration's EPA exhibits little worry about realism. And agricultural interests, stoked by an ethanol lobby never able to do better than call the oil industry big and awful, hold enough power to defend the RFS. Still, the punishing implementation of misguided law is unacceptable and must be resisted. The RFS is nothing less than scandalous.
The Affordable Care Act looks no better. Warnings about problems that inevitably arise when the government tells people what to buy received as much attention when Congress passed the health-care law as they did when it usurped fuel choice. Faster than it took the RFS to create a crisis of compliance, Americans found themselves unable to comply with the new requirement to own health insurance. If the problem were just bad internet technology, it would be transitory. But things are much worse.
The federal government didn't just tell Americans they had to buy health insurance; it told them they had to buy plans meeting its approval. Those plans, it turns out, provide more coverage than many Americans would choose to carry. They're more expensive. So millions of once-insured Americans are receiving cancellation notices and resorting to government exchanges on which policies are costlier than those they held before.
Obama's promise
Now President Barack Obama's promise that Americans would be able to keep plans and doctors they liked looks as substantial as congressional assurance that 1 billion gal of cellulosic biofuel would be available this year. But there's a difference. Congress didn't know when it set the cellulosic fuel mandate that insufficient supply would make compliance impossible. Obama, according to news reports, had reason to know when he made his promise that the health-care behemoth named for him would force many Americans out of individual plans.
This, too, is no surprise. When government leaders believe they know better than citizens do what's best for citizens—with health care, fuel choice, or anything else—truth becomes whatever leaders say it is.
