The amazing thing about the transgender military ban is that no one was really pushing for it. It wasn't really on anyone's radar. It's a bone Trump threw to the Religious Right. But it reveals how little he understands them. He just assumes the real lunatic fringe represents most of them and does whatever they want.
She wasn't just a prosecutor. She was a bad one. One who fought any accountability for cops or prosecutors, tried to deny compensation to people unjustly imprisoned, brought garbage lawsuits against backpage, argued against decarceration because the state would lose cheap labor and thought parents of truant kids should be arrested. Fie on her faux progressivism.
"Armchair economists, like our aunts and uncles, believe hiking the federal minimum wage would cost human jobs. The entire accumulated life work of many honest economists has refuted this claim again and again in manifold ways. "
This is ... not right. "Armchair economists" don't say this; every economist said it up until relatively recently. And "entire accumulated life work of many honest economists" is a handful of studies, which the authors themselves think are being over-interpreted. The Seattle study you cite is highly questionable as the Seattle govt has limited the information available and hand-picked who they share it with to make sure no one gainsays anything that's happening.
My problem with the economists with this is that they see human beings as nothing but subjects for their little experiments. If it turns out their theory that the Law of Supply and Demand is magically suspended for low-wage labor is wrong and hundreds of thousands of working poor lose their jobs, well I guess that was just another calculated risk. And all of the health problems, life setbacks and suicides that result from job losses is just collateral damage.
That's the problem isn't it? No one ever got unelected running to the Right on drugs. It's only recently that running to the left on the issue hasn't been political suicide.
I think this is a terrible idea. I'd actually prefer price-fixing to this. Drug manufacturing by an entity that has sovereign immunity and shown a past tendency to muck up everything it touches? No thanks.
There are very few players in the generics industry and an ongoing series of lawsuits accusing them of fixing prices. Chase that down first.
Terribly sorry for your loss, Em. And your beautiful post strikes a chord with me. I'm 46 and keep thinking of the line from Indiana Jones -- whether I've reached the age where life stops giving me things and starts taking them away. In the last year, I've lost my childhood best friend, my sister and my sister's boyfriend. Even my cat is on her last legs.
Ryan came in touting well-proven ideas: fiscal discipline and government reform and completely failed to execute them. These were the ideas that drove the Clinton Administration. AOC is coming in with completely discredited ideas and pretending that they are fresh and original insights. Ryan never said anything as silly as that you could milk $3 trillion+ in new spending based on Pentagon accounting errors. Or that you could pay for ten years of a program based on one year of revenue.
Except I saw it first hand. The tax code before Reagan's 86 reform was insanely complex. You had 16 different income tax brackets. You also had a bewildering variety of shelters and exemptions that phased in and out at different income points. So, yes, it was very possible to get a raise and see your income go down.
1) 2000 is when spending really began to get out of control. During the 90s, it was rising at about 3.5% per annum. Under Bush, it started going up 8% per annum, which was unsustainable. If you look at that plot, you'll see the inflection point in the graph. So we're "back" to the unsustainable Bush II-era increases. If we'd stayed on the trajectory we were on in 1999, spending would be about $500-800 billion less than it is today.
2) It is true that a lot of spending is on autopilot. However, both discretionary spending and military spending have gone up dramatically over the last three years. And entitlement reform was supposed to be Ryan's entire game.
3) "Remember the one about how the government should borrow lots of money now because it’s cheap? Who could possibly have predicted that it wouldn’t stay cheap?"
Yeah, I was saying that a LOT Over the last eight years as various Keynesians argued we should be borrowing like crazy.
Those of you bringing up Reagan: it's a poor comparison. Reagan may have tried Starve the Beast and the Laffer Curve but:
1) when he took office, top marginal tax rates were 70%. No one paid it because of tax shelters, but the tax system was INSANE. My dad gave his secretary -- hardly a wealthy person -- a raise and her takehome pay went DOWN. That's how bad it was in 1979.
2) Reagan quickly realized this strategy wasn't working and changed course. Over the last years of his Administration, he enacted multiple tax hikes -- most notably the 1986 tax reform that raised rates but benefited the economy because it eliminated much of the deadweight loss of an archaic system. He supported the Graham-Rudman-Hollings amendment -- a precursor to the sequester. His successor -- Bush -- enacted a budget deals that paved the way for the balanced budgets of the 90s (thanks to Clinton and the GOP Congress).
The problem that the Republican Party has -- if you want to credit them with this much intellectual rigor -- is that they've taken the solution Reagan applied to the problems of the 70s and are applying them to the problems of today, which are very different. It's one thing to talk about the Laffer Curve when tax rates are 70% (or 97% as they were when Kennedy cut taxes). It's silly to talk about it at 34%. It's one thing to actually, you know, reform taxes while raising them as Reagan did in '86. It's another to disguise a tax cut as tax reform as they did now.
The GOP has shown the ability to be fiscally responsible in the past -- Reagan, Bush I, the 90's Congress. But the dunder-headed populism that began in the mid-90s took over the party in 2000 and has yet to be cured. I they really wanted to follow in Reagan's footsteps, they'd be talking about a VAT as a supplement or replacement for much of the current tax system.
Radley Balko has been writing a lot about the "killology" lessons cops are taught these days: a pseudo-military training that teaches them to be paranoid and tell them, among other things, that the day the shoot someone they'll go home and have the best sex of their lives.
Interesting that the man with ACTUAL military training chose not to shoot, isn't it?
Just to state where I'm at on this issue: I've come around to the idea of universal healthcare. I'm more in favor of a model similar to Singapore or Australia.
The $3 trillion we currently pay for healthcare comes from a broad variety of sources.. Fair or not, the political implications of taxation are different than paying for it privately. There's also that you would be raising taxes on *everyone* which makes it even more politically thorny. You also start running into problems where the return on rising levels of taxation stars diminishing. Honestly, the only way you could pay for MFA would be a value-added tax and that would face stiff opposition.
True. But this is the kind of power that's easier to abuse. For example, Trump is already easing off the requirements for birth control coverage in ACA and it hasn't been noticed. If Pence were to take over, how long would it be before he banned a Medicare for All for paying for any birth control? Ten seconds?
But let me give you a different example of how trusting politicians with this power can go wrong (less an example of abuse than ignorance).
In recent years, the utility of routine mammography has been called into question. There is little evidence that it catches tumors that wouldn't be caught otherwise. And there is evidence it provokes unnecessary surgeries for benign lumps. We have now had two giant meta-studies that have concluded that mammography should only be routine for women with family histories of breast cancer.
But the reaction from women was less, "Great, I don't have to get my breasts squeezed between cold metal plates" and more "this is insurance companies trying to kill women". So Congress immediately passed a law mandating coverage for routine mammography. IF -- and it's still if -- those studies are correct, that's billions of dollars being wasted, thousands of unnecessary surgeries and zero improvement in women's health.
The more control we give to politicians over healthcare, the more those decisions will be made based on these kinds of political twitches (as it is in socialized systems like the UK). Insurance companies aren't *great* at this and it is sometimes a struggle to get them to pay for stuff. But their power is more limited.
I grew up in Atlanta and almost all the top tier providers would not take Medicaid. Most Medicaid patients ended up going to Grady Memorial, which was known for poor quality of care simply because they were overwhelmed and Medicaid pays very low rates. You may remember King's County in NY, here a woman died on the floor of the psych unit. King's also takes a lot of Medicaid patients. And while their trauma center is excellent, their standard of care elsewhere is poor (they are responsible for about one-third of the malpractice claims in the area).
In theory, Medicaid provides equal care. In practice -- at least in urban areas -- you are not getting the best care. Medicine is like everything else: you get what you pay for. Medicaid pays poorly.
My first day in Australia, I turned on the news and they had a story about a women with huge breasts (like severe back-pain level busty) who needed a reduction and Medicare wouldn't pay for it.
It was an interesting introduction to the country, to say the least.
Ugh. Medicaid is ... not a good healthcare system. Many doctors won't take it. And Medicaid hospitals are some of the worst.
However ... it touches on something I've thought about. In Australia, my understanding is that Medicare is the basic healthcare system. It's guaranteed and provided a minimum. You can then buy additional and better care. The system is also paid by patients -- you pay and then the insurance reimburses you. So some places will take the Medicare rates -- they're not the best, but they are there. Better hospitals require more money from you or additional insurance. Such a system could probably put together by expanding Medicaid. You would still have to figure out revenue sources, but it would cheaper and probably more palatable to the American public.
On “Fyre and the Age of Humbug”
Great comment. I always love it when a student asks a question I don't know the answer to. I get really excited and say, "That's a great question!"
"
Was that the guy McFarland told to go perform oral sex on the customs agent to get their water approved? He was a great interview.
On “Wednesday Writs for 1/23”
[L9] He's lucky. Hippos are incredibly dangerous animals. This could have ended with him being killed.
On “Trump’s Transgender Military Ban Remains- For Now”
The amazing thing about the transgender military ban is that no one was really pushing for it. It wasn't really on anyone's radar. It's a bone Trump threw to the Religious Right. But it reveals how little he understands them. He just assumes the real lunatic fringe represents most of them and does whatever they want.
On “Kamala Harris Announces Run for Presidency”
She wasn't just a prosecutor. She was a bad one. One who fought any accountability for cops or prosecutors, tried to deny compensation to people unjustly imprisoned, brought garbage lawsuits against backpage, argued against decarceration because the state would lose cheap labor and thought parents of truant kids should be arrested. Fie on her faux progressivism.
On “A Higher American Minimum Wage Is Something We Shouldn’t Even Be Debating”
"Armchair economists, like our aunts and uncles, believe hiking the federal minimum wage would cost human jobs. The entire accumulated life work of many honest economists has refuted this claim again and again in manifold ways. "
This is ... not right. "Armchair economists" don't say this; every economist said it up until relatively recently. And "entire accumulated life work of many honest economists" is a handful of studies, which the authors themselves think are being over-interpreted. The Seattle study you cite is highly questionable as the Seattle govt has limited the information available and hand-picked who they share it with to make sure no one gainsays anything that's happening.
My problem with the economists with this is that they see human beings as nothing but subjects for their little experiments. If it turns out their theory that the Law of Supply and Demand is magically suspended for low-wage labor is wrong and hundreds of thousands of working poor lose their jobs, well I guess that was just another calculated risk. And all of the health problems, life setbacks and suicides that result from job losses is just collateral damage.
On “An Historic Parallel For the Wall and Opioids”
That's the problem isn't it? No one ever got unelected running to the Right on drugs. It's only recently that running to the left on the issue hasn't been political suicide.
"
These aren't bad ideas. As long as we keep our expectations reasonable.
On “Senator Warren’s Office of Drug Manufacturing”
I think this is a terrible idea. I'd actually prefer price-fixing to this. Drug manufacturing by an entity that has sovereign immunity and shown a past tendency to muck up everything it touches? No thanks.
There are very few players in the generics industry and an ongoing series of lawsuits accusing them of fixing prices. Chase that down first.
On “She’s Running: Elizabeth Warren Announces 2020 Presidential Campaign”
She'll be 71 next year. It would be nice to have a Presidential candidate who's not ANOTHER God-damned Boomer.
On “Some Thoughts on an Occasion of Sudden Death”
Terribly sorry for your loss, Em. And your beautiful post strikes a chord with me. I'm 46 and keep thinking of the line from Indiana Jones -- whether I've reached the age where life stops giving me things and starts taking them away. In the last year, I've lost my childhood best friend, my sister and my sister's boyfriend. Even my cat is on her last legs.
Time sucks.
On “Wednesday Writs for 12/19”
L1. It took TWELVE YEARS to discipline him?
On “Paul Ryan and the Beast That Didn’t Starve”
Ryan came in touting well-proven ideas: fiscal discipline and government reform and completely failed to execute them. These were the ideas that drove the Clinton Administration. AOC is coming in with completely discredited ideas and pretending that they are fresh and original insights. Ryan never said anything as silly as that you could milk $3 trillion+ in new spending based on Pentagon accounting errors. Or that you could pay for ten years of a program based on one year of revenue.
"
Except I saw it first hand. The tax code before Reagan's 86 reform was insanely complex. You had 16 different income tax brackets. You also had a bewildering variety of shelters and exemptions that phased in and out at different income points. So, yes, it was very possible to get a raise and see your income go down.
"
A few points:
1) 2000 is when spending really began to get out of control. During the 90s, it was rising at about 3.5% per annum. Under Bush, it started going up 8% per annum, which was unsustainable. If you look at that plot, you'll see the inflection point in the graph. So we're "back" to the unsustainable Bush II-era increases. If we'd stayed on the trajectory we were on in 1999, spending would be about $500-800 billion less than it is today.
2) It is true that a lot of spending is on autopilot. However, both discretionary spending and military spending have gone up dramatically over the last three years. And entitlement reform was supposed to be Ryan's entire game.
3) "Remember the one about how the government should borrow lots of money now because it’s cheap? Who could possibly have predicted that it wouldn’t stay cheap?"
Yeah, I was saying that a LOT Over the last eight years as various Keynesians argued we should be borrowing like crazy.
"
Those of you bringing up Reagan: it's a poor comparison. Reagan may have tried Starve the Beast and the Laffer Curve but:
1) when he took office, top marginal tax rates were 70%. No one paid it because of tax shelters, but the tax system was INSANE. My dad gave his secretary -- hardly a wealthy person -- a raise and her takehome pay went DOWN. That's how bad it was in 1979.
2) Reagan quickly realized this strategy wasn't working and changed course. Over the last years of his Administration, he enacted multiple tax hikes -- most notably the 1986 tax reform that raised rates but benefited the economy because it eliminated much of the deadweight loss of an archaic system. He supported the Graham-Rudman-Hollings amendment -- a precursor to the sequester. His successor -- Bush -- enacted a budget deals that paved the way for the balanced budgets of the 90s (thanks to Clinton and the GOP Congress).
The problem that the Republican Party has -- if you want to credit them with this much intellectual rigor -- is that they've taken the solution Reagan applied to the problems of the 70s and are applying them to the problems of today, which are very different. It's one thing to talk about the Laffer Curve when tax rates are 70% (or 97% as they were when Kennedy cut taxes). It's silly to talk about it at 34%. It's one thing to actually, you know, reform taxes while raising them as Reagan did in '86. It's another to disguise a tax cut as tax reform as they did now.
The GOP has shown the ability to be fiscally responsible in the past -- Reagan, Bush I, the 90's Congress. But the dunder-headed populism that began in the mid-90s took over the party in 2000 and has yet to be cured. I they really wanted to follow in Reagan's footsteps, they'd be talking about a VAT as a supplement or replacement for much of the current tax system.
On “Incentive to Kill”
Radley Balko has been writing a lot about the "killology" lessons cops are taught these days: a pseudo-military training that teaches them to be paranoid and tell them, among other things, that the day the shoot someone they'll go home and have the best sex of their lives.
Interesting that the man with ACTUAL military training chose not to shoot, isn't it?
On “Briefly, On Trusting The Police”
Translated from government-speak: He was a black man who had a gun. Ergo, he was brandishing it.
On “How To Pay For It”
Just to state where I'm at on this issue: I've come around to the idea of universal healthcare. I'm more in favor of a model similar to Singapore or Australia.
"
The $3 trillion we currently pay for healthcare comes from a broad variety of sources.. Fair or not, the political implications of taxation are different than paying for it privately. There's also that you would be raising taxes on *everyone* which makes it even more politically thorny. You also start running into problems where the return on rising levels of taxation stars diminishing. Honestly, the only way you could pay for MFA would be a value-added tax and that would face stiff opposition.
"
True. But this is the kind of power that's easier to abuse. For example, Trump is already easing off the requirements for birth control coverage in ACA and it hasn't been noticed. If Pence were to take over, how long would it be before he banned a Medicare for All for paying for any birth control? Ten seconds?
But let me give you a different example of how trusting politicians with this power can go wrong (less an example of abuse than ignorance).
In recent years, the utility of routine mammography has been called into question. There is little evidence that it catches tumors that wouldn't be caught otherwise. And there is evidence it provokes unnecessary surgeries for benign lumps. We have now had two giant meta-studies that have concluded that mammography should only be routine for women with family histories of breast cancer.
But the reaction from women was less, "Great, I don't have to get my breasts squeezed between cold metal plates" and more "this is insurance companies trying to kill women". So Congress immediately passed a law mandating coverage for routine mammography. IF -- and it's still if -- those studies are correct, that's billions of dollars being wasted, thousands of unnecessary surgeries and zero improvement in women's health.
The more control we give to politicians over healthcare, the more those decisions will be made based on these kinds of political twitches (as it is in socialized systems like the UK). Insurance companies aren't *great* at this and it is sometimes a struggle to get them to pay for stuff. But their power is more limited.
On “Thursday Throughput”
The variance hypothesis is a popular one and I do think it plays a role. But:
1) Most people in the sciences aren't THAT far along the bell curve. The difference shouldn't be quite so dramatic.
2) That hypothesis is under a lot of fire lately as the data supporting it is thin.
On “How To Pay For It”
I grew up in Atlanta and almost all the top tier providers would not take Medicaid. Most Medicaid patients ended up going to Grady Memorial, which was known for poor quality of care simply because they were overwhelmed and Medicaid pays very low rates. You may remember King's County in NY, here a woman died on the floor of the psych unit. King's also takes a lot of Medicaid patients. And while their trauma center is excellent, their standard of care elsewhere is poor (they are responsible for about one-third of the malpractice claims in the area).
In theory, Medicaid provides equal care. In practice -- at least in urban areas -- you are not getting the best care. Medicine is like everything else: you get what you pay for. Medicaid pays poorly.
"
My first day in Australia, I turned on the news and they had a story about a women with huge breasts (like severe back-pain level busty) who needed a reduction and Medicare wouldn't pay for it.
It was an interesting introduction to the country, to say the least.
"
Ugh. Medicaid is ... not a good healthcare system. Many doctors won't take it. And Medicaid hospitals are some of the worst.
However ... it touches on something I've thought about. In Australia, my understanding is that Medicare is the basic healthcare system. It's guaranteed and provided a minimum. You can then buy additional and better care. The system is also paid by patients -- you pay and then the insurance reimburses you. So some places will take the Medicare rates -- they're not the best, but they are there. Better hospitals require more money from you or additional insurance. Such a system could probably put together by expanding Medicaid. You would still have to figure out revenue sources, but it would cheaper and probably more palatable to the American public.