Poker, the Hurricane, and Jobs

Poker

As the congressional super committee looks for ways to boost federal revenue, poker enthusiasts wonder if legalizing online poker will be on the table.

Policy Analyst Brian McGraw comments.

“Online gambling is definitely a touchy issue for many Americans. It’s an issue quite susceptible to fear-mongering, ala the ‘Stop Predatory Gambling’ group or a multitude of socially conservative groups that want it to remain quasi-illegal. The super committee might be a vehicle for politicians to support the legislation without attaching their names to it by truthfully asserting that there wasn’t much that they could to do stop it as they had to support the super duper committee’s bill.”

Hurricane

The University of Maryland’s Peter Morici claims that rebuilding after Hurricane Irene is like a private sector stimulus package.

Fellow in Regulatory Studies Ryan Young explains how Morici is falling for the broken window fallacy.

“While the posting of a notice is hardly assured to send a flood of new members into union ranks, the new notice rule clearly fits into a pattern of pro-union activism by the NLRB — including proposals to shorten election periods and to allow unions to organize by remote electronic voting (essentially electronic card check), as well as the Board’s campaign against Boeing for opening a factory in a right to work state.”

Jobs

The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission is interfering in the hiring practices of private companies; for instance, mandating that trucking companies not discriminate against recovering alcoholics.

Senior Counsel Hans Bader comments.

“The EEOC notes that recovering alcoholics are covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act; but it ignores the fact that even recovering alcoholics often relapse into drinking, and ‘even well-run alcohol rehab programs are known for having high relapse rates.’ The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has a public safety exception designed to prevent things like alcoholics driving trucks (the so-called ‘direct threat’ provision), but the EEOC has recently all but read that exception out of existence through pinched interpretation (In doing so, it has ignored binding federal appellate court rulings, like Doe v. University of Maryland Medical System Corp. (1995), which allowed an employer to not employ an HIV-positive surgeon because of a tiny but real chance that the surgeon would inadvertently transmit HIV to a patient. The chance of an alcoholic driver killing someone may be much greater than the chance of an HIV-positive surgeon killing a patient).”