Municipal Funding of Solar Panels

Now this is innovative and interesting thinking: The goal behind municipal financing is to eliminate perhaps the largest disincentive to installing solar power systems: the enormous initial cost. Although private…

Revisiting Reserve Requirements

I wrote to highlight a blog post redwaterlily wrote over at her blog discussing the current rule change by KWS to reduce the reserve requirements by life insurers — reserves intended to try to ensure that these companies are adequately funded to pay policyholder claims.

The conversation continued over at that post on a number of different fronts, but I want to go back to the reserve requirements, as KWS’s Chief of Staff has added to a comment in that thread.

While I don’t see a ton of news releases, I was struck by how this one was written. It goes through the history of a review of these reserving requirements via analysis groups at an industry trade association (NAIC) and how this association rejected the Life Insurance Industry group’s request for a broad recommendation for reserve “relief”. You can see the summary of that meeting here — this is the NAIC’s own Press Release. This is how Elliot Jacobson characterizes the current position of the NAIC:

On January 29, 2009, the Executive Committee of the NAIC decided to withhold their support of this relief on a national, uniform basis for the 2008 year-end preliminary annual statement filings that are due March 1st due to the inadequate time to perform the necessary evaluation.

The NAIC actually voted against these life insurance industry proposals, saying:

“Today’s vote reflects our belief that it is not appropriate to make emergency, permanent industry-wide changes for which the need has not been demonstrated.”

You should read the whole thing yourself, but even the NAIC decided that there was not enough information to demonstrate that the industry had any real need of relief at this time. Further, they caution against rushing to provide help where the need is not yet proven. This ruling, of course, doe not restrict these companies from appealing directly to the states, which is exactly what has been happening. Elliot Jacobson says that the list of states granting such relief is up on the NAIC website, which I can’t find. (And it may be there, this is a tough to navigate website, I think.) A Google search turns up Ohio as an approver of some reserve relief and Virginia and NH as against.

Elliot’s press release also refers us to the NAIC website for the insurers who got this relief. Why wouldn’t the ICs office just say who they are? It is only three companies and in a release this long, it wouldn’t take up much room. And why wouldn’t these just be listed on the Delaware IC’s website? In any event, I can’t find these on the NAIC website.

When Words Selectively Matter

Pandora wrote a great post on Friday, looking at Steve Newton’s efforts to minimize concerns that liberals (especially those on this blog) might have about the Hannitys and Becks and whoever of the US airwaves who use their broad reach to try to legitimatize (and manipulate) their listeners’ fears and anxieties and resentments by invoking the business of revolution and civil war and various bits of violence targeted to liberals.

His only response was to my comment back to Liz, who made a claim (that Steve does too) that Missouri Law Enforcement was targeting 3rd party members as terrorists.

I can’t speak for the other individual who Steve addresses, but a decent close reading of the report referenced certainly fulfills none of the hyperbolic claims made for it either by Steve or the guy who wrote the article Steve links to. But observe this — Steve represents my claim as follows:

… both of whom challenged me for suggesting that the MIAC report on the modern militia movement encouraged Missouri LEOs to focus on supporters of third-party candidates.

Actually, the “challenge” was to Liz, but after I had read that entire paper, I couldn’t find anything there that serves as explicit “encouragement” or “targeting as terrorists” 3rd party members.

And he concludes his long post thus:

The grim reality here, Tom and cassandra, is that this strategic alert does present political party preference and government criticism as significant identification markers for dangerous right-wing extremists.

Anyone see the problem here? Steve starts out claim that this paper makes 3rd party members into targets and terrorists, and ends up changing that claim to “significant identification markers”. While this paper does include a reference to the tendencies of political preference of militia members, it also discusses the militia insignia they wear, the books they read and the movies they admire as identification markers too. So that what worries Steve is the references to 3rd party membership — not the books and movies. And let’s remember when AG Ashcroft had fantasies of home contractors calling in to report people with Korans or other Arabic reading materials on their shelves.

New Rules

Bill Maher is back and be sure to stick around for the ending where he does a classic takedown of insurance companies:

No One As Irish As Barack Obama

I guess today is the day that St. Patrick's Day celebrations and parades are starting.  Here is something to get you in the mood: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xkw8ip43Vk[/youtube] How cool is it to…