Yet another reason to not be a Republican....

I have had some epic rants about the anti-science strain currently inhabiting the modern Republican party, but this National Journal article is just plan demoralizing...

Super-Committee...not so super....

I am a little late on this, but evidently the super-awesome-superdooper Committee of "was never going to work" failed to come to an agreement on solutions to our debt issues.

Opening shots for '12...

This is the sort of the comparative combative narrative the White House should have been embracing since late '09. Take a look beneath the fold for the infographic.

Goverment is the problem....except when it comes to your uterus...

Pretty much that is the gist of a ballot initiative in Mississippi this year, as Irin Carmon.

That’s partly because the Personhood movement hopes to do nothing less than reclassify everyday, routine birth control as abortion. The medical definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg successfully implants in the uterine wall. If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.

What I wonder is, if the ACA is so invasive then how is this not?

-Cheers

Tea Party Vs. Occupy Wall Street

It can be summed up with the signs......

Tea Party

Fire up that TARDIS....

The estimable Ezra Klein does thorough cataloging of the what went down with the Obama administration during the Great Recession of 2008. It is a very interesting read and does a good job of getting a lot of the relevant information, that is easily forgotten today, out there.

Pretty much the gist of it is: We were more screwed then we thought, and our systems of governance are just not good at handling these sorts of problem.

But I will let the man speak from himself on the subject:

What this party needs is more graphs....

I know it cause major butt hurt any time "taxing incomes above 250k" is mentioned.

Yes I know that people who make 250k+ are not "rich", but lets not kid ourselves, they are not middle class either.



I have seen the middle and 250k is not it. This is not about class warfare, but an actual accounting of where individuals stand on the income scale.

-Cheers

Take this job and shove it.....

A very depressing infographic about working in the United States. Andy this post is for you!

Time for a change....

It has been a while, but I decided the blog could use a face lift......

So we shall see how it goes, and other then the impenetrable prose, let me know if the contrast makes it harder to read.

-Cheers

A good place to start....

When talking about the diagnosis about what ails our economy it would be good if we could actually agree on the causes. Mike Konzcal does a good round up of the "competing" philosophies being litigated today, in Venn Diagram form! So you know I had to post it!

The Keynesian view

The King I know....

With the recent anniversary of the "I have a Dream" speech, I find myself a bit reflective. When people talk about Dr. King there is this sort of (what is the opposite of demonization?) Santa Clausification.

I understand the need retroactively claim a hero. But let us not forget while King was alive, he was hated and unpopular to large swaths of the public.

So it is important to remember what Dr. King and his contemporaries actually did for the African American community. Not the country at large, but specifically African Americans. I personally do not have the words to describe it, nor did I live it. But my parents did, and my grand parents as well. I remember the "stories" and the "lessons", about how to act. The pervasive sense of fear that existed in this country for a segment of the population.

Word of the day!

Your word of the day is : flounce

flounce

[flouns]   Origin Like this word?

flounce

¹   [flouns] verb, flounced, flounc·ing, noun

verb (used without object)

1.to go with impatient or impetuous, exaggerated movements: The star flounced out of the studio in a rage.

2. to throw the body about spasmodically; flounder.

noun

3.an act or instance of flouncing; a flouncing movement.

-Cheers

Your modern Republican Party....

I understand that my pleas to "No both sides are not the same!", often fall on deaf ears. It is the received conventional that the system is irrevocably broken due to both parties. Even if that is not the case, and demonstrably so, it fits the narrative better.

This piece over at Truth Out by, recently retired, longtime republican staffer Mike Lofgren is jarring.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

It is a long piece, but it very much deserves a read. Republicans the lunatics are running the asylum! I actively support a coherent Republican party. Even if I disagree with them, they form a necessary corrective. What we have today is not that. These are individuals who do not accept even the basic premise of government. They believe in some mythical past, devoid of wrongs and injustice. They ignore or vilify anyone who disagrees with them.

That is no recipe for a functional democracy.

-Cheers

Austerity Now!

Well they released the August jobs numbers, and they are terrible.

Here is a rundown of "teh librurl coverage":

• Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly:

  Whether the GOP wants to admit it or not, the economy is advancing exactly as they want it to. The private sector is being left to its own devices; the public sector is shedding jobs quickly and scrapping investments; and the only permitted topic of conversation is about debt-reduction.

• Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:

  Though the trends might be better than they were in early-2009, the labor market is in much worse shape, and it's clear that more action, and perhaps even big action, is desperately needed. I do not, however, expect that to be the actual response to this news.

• Bill Gross of PIMCO over at Bloomberg is soundingly some wild-eyed hippie.

I would just like to echo what Benen has said. This is exactly what the policies advocated by conservatives yields. I am not saying they sit around trying to screw the economy (though it is hard not to speculate how they might be acting if they controlled the White House and one other branch i.e "in control of government"), but the policies the champion have this effect in a recession. They have told us time and time again, that shrinking government, cutting taxes, and deregulation would spur job creation.

Well not to get into a post hoc fallacy mess, but here are two graphs which show jobs creation since the Obama administration began (via Steve Benen).

Democratic control of Congress


Republican control of the House
Again I know, causation and correlation and all that. But is anyone really going to make the argument that we haven't been essentially following the Republican plan over the last 6-8 months? Basically less government spending and leaving the private sector to its own devices?

This is what austerity gets you in the midst of a severe financial contraction. I wait with baited breath to see the bipartisan rush to ameliorate this. Basic macroeconomics spells out clearly what you do in this situation.....

-Cheers

Word of the day!

It has been a while, but here we go. A new word of the day!

Your word for the day is: parergon

par·er·gon

[pa-rur-gon] Show IPA

noun, plural -ga  [-guh] Show IPA.

1. 1.something that is an accessory to a main work or subject; embellishment.
2. 2.work undertaken in addition to one's principal work.

It would seem that during a period of recession, it is only expected that we all be more of a parergon.

-Cheers

Best hospitals in the world?

Whenever I get into arguments about health care. One of the first rationales proffered for our excessive expenditures is that we "have the bestest hospitals in the world". Generally I just state that yes, we do have some of the finest hospitals in the world, but in the aggregate we are not getting much better care for the money we spend. This is generally met with derision, cause everything the US does is "better". Even though we have demonstrable evidence that we could
be doing much more to bring down costs.

So that brings us to the chart of the day (via the Dish): How Hospitals Harm Us

-Cheers

No Social Security is not a ponzi scheme....

It has become de rigueur, of late amongst Republicans to attack Social Security as a ponzi scheme. Gov. Rick Perry has been the most vocal recently. Of course this completely incorrect! And to help us illustrate that....a venn diagram!


Via Ezra Klein:

As he explains, a Ponzi scheme is a fraud that relies on new investors being unaware of the program’s financing mechanism. Social Security is a fully transparent system of age-based redistribution that releases regular actuarial reports explaining, in great detail, how it is financed now, and what it will need to be fully financed into the future. Or, as Russell Long (apparently) put it, “Social Security is nothing more than a promise to a group of people that their children will be taxed for that group’s benefit.” You may like that structure or you may hate it, but it’s not a Ponzi scheme.

Yeah...I know government is evil...

-Cheers

What the Stimulus did...and didn't do....

Dylan Matthews over at Ezra Klein's blog has been doing serious work. He has gone and compiled the most recent studies looking at whether the ARRA was a net positive or not. I would go into the details of it, but it is definitely worth the read.

I have been hugely critical of the size of the stimulus, mainly that it was not big enough. But that was never to imply that it should not have been done.

But enough of my babbling, I will let Mr. Matthews take over:

Each approach runs into its own set of problems. The econometric studies have to deal with what social scientists call “endogeneity”: that is, the variable whose effect we’re trying to determine (the stimulus) could itself be affected by what we’re trying to study its effect on (the state of the economy). In this specific case, this means that econometric studies sometimes have to correct for the fact that harder-hit areas tend to get more stimulus spending. This says nothing about the stimulus’ effectiveness, but it can confuse attempts to evaluate that effectiveness statistically.

All of these studies have their own methods of overcoming the endogeneity problem, some of which are more effective than others. Whichever corrections one uses, however, one cannot run a perfect experiment with messy, real-world data, which necessarily limits what these studies can say. Of the five econometric studies detailed here, three conclude the stimulus had a significant positive effect, and two conclude it did not have much of an effect at all.

I know this will not really change anyone's mind, but having data always makes me feel a little better on the subject.

-Cheers

Taxes and the Poor...

It has been circulating for some time with mounting rage that there are some lucky duckies who are getting a free ride, because they do not pay income tax. You hear it a lot, "Everyone needs to pay in to have some skin in the game!". It has become near ubiquitous in conservative circles that it would be better to increase the tax burden on the middle class and working poor, then to raise even a dime on high wage earners.


Ezra Klein does the work on this issue showing why exactly the poor are not savaged by income tax by design. It is endlessly pointed out that payroll taxes (SS, Medicare, Medicaid) fall disproportionately on the poor:

A new report (pdf) from the Tax Policy Center breaks it down. In 2011, about 46 percent of households won’t pay income taxes. For about half of them, the standard provisions of the income tax wiped out their liability. If you don’t make any money but you take a standard deduction and have a few dependents, you’re not going to pay any income tax. Roberton Williams, one of the report’s authors, gives the example of “a couple with two children earning less than $26,400. They get an $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700, and that takes their liability to zero. As he says, “the basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax.”

So to reiterate, the reason the poor do not "pay" income tax, is because of credits that wipe out their tax liability. Or better yet, because they are fucking poor.

-Cheers

Both sides do it....

No they don't.

I need to find something to drink.

-Cheers

If you repeat it, it makes it true.....

I have a problem with the modern version of the Republican party it can be summarized with this clip of Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) talking about funding abstinence education in Texas and its consistent dismal record on teen pregnancy.



The repetition, and the lack of an demonstrable facts to support his assertions. This is a prime function of movement Conservative thought. Steve Benen adds this point:

In a case like education and lessons on sexual health, the left tends to look at this in terms of results: what works in preventing teen pregnancies and the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases? For the right, the question is philosophical: what’s consistent with their morality.

I will go further, then that. It is a feature, not a bug, of this day and age to disregard relevant statistical data in favor of ideology. If it does not comport with your philosophy it is simply not true.

The stupid...it burns....

-Cheers

Lucky Ducky

(Scott Meyer's website)

Momma always said......

This is something that just gets under my skin.

Socialism and Communism are political philosophies. The merits of each can be argued for eternity. What they are not however, is synonyms for "things I do not like".

This is something that happens all to often. Even if a policy is socialistic in nature that does not make it bad policy. We have a mixed economy for a reason.

-Cheers

Those evil unions....

I have been off my game for the last couple of months. I blame Facebook and the arguments I have there diluting my desire to post long form entries. Be that as it may, this is an issue I have taken up a few times. The subject being the importance of unions in our economy.
I have often said that unions perform a vital role in our society. Whether you are in one or not, as a worker, they are the may body that works for workers' interest. That should not be underestimated. Of course business does not like them, the very goal of unions is to provide workers with leverage they do not have. As is the case in most things, individuals have very little negotiating strength.

I would like to say something positive here, but unions have been successfully demonized. They lazy union worker is as much a part of the collective psyche as the greedy banker, or the sleazy lawyer. Whether that is the case or not.

In a system where increasingly, power and focus are aligned with the most moneyed interests in society some sort of corrective is necessary.

-Cheers

Nah...I am sure they are just lazy...

The Pew Research Center released some truly disheartening numbers on the wealth disparities between Caucasians and minorities in this country.
Pew goes into some detail about how the recession has hit minorities much harder then their white counter parts, but few have actually looked at the numbers.

According to the study, the inflation-adjusted median wealth among Hispanic households fell 66% from 2005 to 2009. Black households suffered a 53% drop in net worth over the same period. By contrast, whites saw a decline of 16% in household wealth.

In 2009, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth. Hispanic families had about $6,325 in wealth. The average white household had a net worth of $113,149.

The study also showed that a third of black and Hispanic households had zero wealth, meaning that their debts were larger than the value of all their assets.

Overall, the study attributed much of the disparity to the decline in home values, which hit black and Hispanic households hardest.

In addition, the downturn in the housing market was most severe in states with large populations of Hispanics and Asians, including California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Michigan, according to the study.

Combine that with the unemployment numbers for blacks and you have a much clearer picture of the problems we face as nation.

Talk about those shiftless "others" all you want, but there are still serious structural impediments to economic progress amongst minorities.

-Cheers

American Ostrich....

It seems to me that most of the people in this country are willfully ignorant of their circumstances. They do not understand how their government works, nor do they care to. They just assume that there are simple solutions to the vast array of problems, we face as a people.

Governing is hard and this graph is probably one of the most disappointing things I have seen in some time.


That public at large does not know the difference between debt or deficit. They certainly do not understand that the debt limit refers to money we have already spent (or agreed to spend), in the budget. That money is spent. It does not affect future spending. It sounds responsible to say we shouldn't raise the limit. But I ask this question. If we do not raise the debt limit, and the economy implodes, will all those who said it would not stand up and take responsibility for their actions?

Didn't think so.

-Cheers

Logic and Reason ain't what they used to be.....

Recently I have come to some disturbing realizations. First, we are reaching a point of complete political paralysis. This article by Ezra Klein shows how screwed we are:

The president sold himself as the great post-partisan hope, the leader who could bring comity and peacefulness to a town riven by partisanship and rancor. When McConnell refuses to come to bipartisan agreements with Obama, he damages Obama’s brand. More than anyone else, McConnell has been responsible for his failure, and key in demonstrating how little any one leader can do to change the tone in Washington.

There’s supposed to be a curb on this sort of behavior: If you don’t participate in the legislative process, you don’t get anything out of the process. Here’s McConnell’s most important insight: That’s wrong. Withholding minority-party votes forces the majority party to hand its most moderate members — and the most moderate members of the other party — an effective veto, which drags the legislation substantively to the center, and in the current situation, to the right.

Health-care reform was more conservative than it would have been if more Republicans had been willing to support it. The stimulus was smaller than it would have been if conservative senators had been willing to back the whole in return for concessions on the parts. It turns out that a partisan political strategy results in more bipartisan policy. The opposition can have its cake and eat it, too. That doesn’t leave much reason for it to be bipartisan, of course. But for a minority party that wants to defeat a president who sold himself as a unifier, that’s a plus.

What you are left with is an opposition that has no incentive to ever compromise. Think about that. Possessing a majority in 2/3rds of the government means you can not govern. The public has so little interest/knowledge in policy that this is an effective strategy.

The majority is so desperate to accomplish anything, they will accede to the demands of the minority, just to look as if they are moving forward. So you get bad policy. I do not want to mince words here. The main republican goal is to defeat Obama. If they must blow up the economy to accomplish that. The so be it. They have told us so themselves. Crying hypocrisy is useless, call them out for what they are doing.

Secondly, bad economic argument is all the rage. Bad ideas get traction because the media is compliment and people are stupid. No one likes taxes, so Republicans have the ability to just lie about basic economics. Two graphs that illustrate our problems:





Revenues are simply a part of the equation. With out them, you have no equation. You can not have deficits and you can not have surpluses. It is just juvenile to assert otherwise. The President absolutely needs to hold Republicans to the fire on the debt-limit. It needs to be draped around their neck like a gigantic scarlet letter of mendaciousness and stupidity. But the President is so wrapped up in his brand that we will all suffer on the alter of false comity. And when the policies he capitulates on don't work or out right make things worse, he will be blamed. As well he should, because it is his own hubris which made it happen. One person does not change Washington. You have to have willing partners. He does not. It is time to accept that.

That he won't is what keeps me up at night.

-Cheers

Austerity is the new black

Watching Fareed Zakaria this morning and he had an interesting panel Eliot Spitzer, Chrystia Freedland, Ann Coulter, and Andrew Roberts.

They were talking about the Republican presidential field as well as a discussion of Keynes vs Hayek. What I found interesting is, that when you have austerity advocates, they never explain the mechanism by which austerity works. Do not get me wrong there is a time and place for cuts in spending and to be more thrifty in general, however, when you are in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression and pushing up against the zero lower bound. You need to explain how removing money from the economy will encourage growth. I have not heard that explanation given. Generally it is cloaked in talk of "confidence", and not the standard language of supply and demand. So I am highly suspect of it as an explanation.

That being said, Paul Krugman does a spectacular job of illustrating what the problem is with the austerity movement during a recession:

Self-defeating Austerity

There’s a quite good case to be made that austerity in the face of a depressed economy is, literally, a false economy — that it actually makes long-run budget problems worse.

People like me have been hesitant to make this argument loudly, for fear of being cast as the left equivalent of Arthur Laffer — but the heck with it, I’m going to lay it out.

So here’s the outline. Suppose you slash spending equal to 1 percent of GDP. That looks like a budget saving, right? But if you do it in the face of an economy up against the zero bound, so that the Fed can’t offset the demand effects with lower rates, it’s going to shrink the economy. Let me use a multiplier of 1.4; you can adjust the numbers as you wish.

Now, a weaker economy means less revenue. Assume that every dollar up or down in GDP means $0.25 in revenue, which is conservative. Then the fiscal austerity reduces revenue by 0.35 percent of GDP; the true saving is only 0.65 percent.

Now, the government has to borrow those funds; let’s say the real interest rate is 3 percent (it’s actually much lower now). Then the long run impact of the austerity on the fiscal position is to reduce real interest payments by 0.0195 percent of GDP.

But wait: what if there are long-run negative effects of a deeper slump on the economy? The WSJ piece showed one example: workers driven permanently out of the labor force. There’s also the negative effect of a depressed economy on business investment. There’s the waste of talent because young people have their lifetime careers derailed. And so on. And here’s the thing: if the economy is weaker in the long run, this means less revenue, which offsets any savings from the initial austerity.

How big do these negative effects have to be to turn austerity into a net negative for the budget? Not very big. In my example, the real interest payments saved by a 1 percent of GDP austerity move are less than .02 percent of GDP; if the marginal tax effect of GDP is 0.25, that means that a reduction of future GDP by .08 percent is enough to swamp the alleged fiscal benefits. It’s not at all hard to imagine that happening.

In short, there’s a very good case to be made that austerity now isn’t just a bad idea because of its impact on the economy and the unemployed; it may well fail even at the task of helping the budget balance.

It’s important to realize that I’m not saying that government spending always pays for itself, and that saving money is always counterproductive. These kinds of effects are specific to a liquidity trap situation. But that’s the situation we’re in.

I have not seen a counter to this other then, "Austerity will increase confidence!". We have a demand problem. Until that is addressed confidence is the least of our worries.

-Cheers

The Resilence of Zombie Lies.....

The 10th anniversary of the Bush tax cuts was early this week, and it is safe to say that they were pretty much the mistake economists said they would be.

Annie Lowry does a great job of summing up just how spectacular they were at not accomplishing anything they were predicted:

In 2001, the Bush administration inherited a few years' worth of budget surpluses, so it decided to cut income tax rates, double the child-care credit, and sharply reduce the levies on investment income. The economy then slowed, even entering a brief recession. As a form of stimulus, the administration doubled down, expanding and hastening the 2001 changes. Bush promised that the tax cuts would do a whole lot more than put money in people's pockets—which, in fact, they did. He said they would "starve the beast," forcing Congress to reduce the size and scope of government. He promised they would increase the prosperity of all Americans. He also vowed: "Tax relief will create new jobs. Tax relief will generate new wealth. And tax relief will open new opportunities."

.....What about the president's claims? Take his pledge that the cuts would spur job growth. To be fair, we'll ignore employment changes during 2008, the year the Great Recession seized the economy. During the 2001 to 2007 business cycle, America's economy enjoyed 52 straight months of job growth. But it was sluggish—in fact, the slowest rate of jobs growth on record since World War II, and just one-fifth the pace of the 1990s.

Then there's wealth. Put simply, the aughts were a decade of income stagnation: The tax cuts failed to bolster most taxpayers' earnings, even before the recession hit. Median real wages actually dropped from 2003 to 2007. Household income from business-cycle peak to business-cycle peak declined for the first time since tracking started in 1967. As documented by my colleague Timothy Noah in his series "The United States of Inequality," this did not hold true for the nation's billionaires and millionaires. Garden-variety high-wage earners saw their income go up. And incomes for the top 1 percent skyrocketed. For some people, obviously, the cuts "generated new wealth," in the president's phrase. But overall, inequality got worse.

Interestingly enough....this is virtually the same exact logic that Gov. Tim Pawlenty is using.
Whatever the problem, tax cuts are the solution. Economic boom? Tax cuts! Economic Recession? Tax cuts!!!! Global warming? Well that doesn't exist...but if it did...TAX CUTS!!!!!

Not make light of the subject, but honestly there is a time an a place for cutting taxes. This just isn't it, especially when you are going to run around screaming about the debt.

-Cheers

Gone Fishing....

A bit of a long break from blogging recently. Contracted some virulent virus that sidelined me for a few weeks. But everything seems to be on the mend, so back to complaining!

First off a couple posts on the state of the economy:

• Paul Krugman on the mis focus of our economic discussion
• Jared Bernstein on "Shoulda vs Coulda" in politics
• Krugman again, on how it is looking more like 1937

I am going to avoid the "Weiner-gate" and "Palin's ride with Paul Revere". The truth is I just don't care. The unemployment rate has jumped back up and all the commentariat can talk about is debt. We have human capital being squandered and the only thing Republican's want to talk about (and by extension the media), is how to shrink government.

I would honestly like, just once, for someone to ask the leading Republican officials/contenders how austerity will create jobs or growth in the economy. And if I hear one word about confidence, I will hit them with a fish.

-Cheers

New day...same as any other...

So I am officially one year older today, and I thought, "What would be better then posting about health care?".

"Nothing!", was my answer. So here you go. A nice infographic that illustrates what is wrong with our health care system.

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

-Cheers

A wrong set of priorities.

This is just disturbing.

A teenage girl who was dropped from her high school's cheerleading squad after refusing to chant the name of a basketball player who had sexually assaulted her must pay compensation of $45,000 (£27,300) after losing a legal challenge against the decision.

The United States Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a review of the case brought by the woman, who is known only as HS. Lower courts had ruled that she was speaking for the school, rather than for herself, when serving on a cheerleading squad – meaning that she had no right to stay silent when coaches told her to applaud.

I am sure what to even say about this, honestly. The dripping misogyny is disturbing.

She was 16 when she said she had been raped at a house party attended by dozens of fellow students from Silsbee High School, in south-east Texas. One of her alleged assailants, a student athlete called Rakheem Bolton, was arrested, with two other young men.

In court, Bolton pleaded guilty to the misdemeanour assault of HS. He received two years of probation, community service, a fine and was required to take anger-management classes. The charge of rape was dropped, leaving him free to return to school and take up his place on the basketball team.

Four months later, in January 2009, HS travelled to one of Silsbee High School's basketball games in Huntsville. She joined in with the business of leading cheers throughout the match. But when Bolton was about to take a free throw, the girl decided to stand silently with her arms folded.

"I didn't want to have to say his name and I didn't want to cheer for him," she later told reporters. "I just didn't want to encourage anything he was doing."

Richard Bain, the school superintendent in the sport-obsessed small town, saw things differently. He told HS to leave the gymnasium. Outside, he told her she was required to cheer for Bolton. When the girl said she was unwilling to endorse a man who had sexually assaulted her, she was expelled from the cheerleading squad.

This is one of those stories that makes me feel ashamed. The sort of "sports mentality" that made the superintendent think this was the best way to handle this situation is one reason, that I have very little love for organized sports.

I guess the thought is, it is her fault for being a victim. Further cementing my view of Texas as the shit hole of the universe.

This ruling lacks even basic humanity.

-Cheer

Why go after Unions?

Two graphs that illustrate why we see the republican movement against unions.




Lets repeat together. It is not about balancing budgets.

Between that and the attempts to pass numerous "anti-voter fraud" laws, you might think they were just trying to starve their opposition of resources.

-Cheers

News of the day

It is hard to judge or measure the effect of these events, and I am sure I could write reams on various issues with regard to the death of Osama bin Laden.

Evidenced by the numerous writing battles I have engaged in on Facebook. But I think here, in this space I will instead just be relieved that someone so heinous is no longer walking the earth.

And well this:


-Cheers

The bar...

Is simply higher for a minority then it is otherwise. I do not know why I forgot this. But today I feel sorry for the President. I wish he had not had the state of Hawaii release his "long form" birth certificate. It will only embolden the opposition.

The President has done more then any other, to prove his citizenship. Now he has asked the
state of Hawaii to wave its privacy laws.

The problem is, they will never stop. The main impulse behind the birther movement is bigotry. They do not believe he is legitimate. There is nothing that will dissuade him. Now they will ask for his college records, then his tax forms, probably even his children's birth records.

They will never stop.

-Cheers

Oh no that isn't racist.....

Yep. I am glad, that someone has these facts! I did not know I was on welfare!

Wow....seriously. Wow....

You know sometimes when you call someone racist...they are in fact racist.

-Cheers

Health Care is not like other products...

We here a lot, that we just need to open health care up to the "free market". That the "invisible hand", will do wonders for the health care market.

The problem is, as many have pointed out patients are not consumers (in the normal sense of the word). This is an excellent graph that gets to the kernel of the issue.

This graph was part of an excellent post on the subject here.

Shadowfax list 3 compelling reasons why health care expenditures are not like any other market. Amongst those reasons are:

1. health care is generally not a refusable or electable
2. asymmetry of information (doctors don't know how much a procedure will cost to a given consumer, consumers have no good way to judged varying costs between providers)
3. purchasing power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of "consumers".

While all of the points mentioned are important, the third one is perhaps the single most compelling one.

This is the wooden stake through the heart of the idea that consumer behavior can effect cost containment. The functioning of a free market is dependent on the ability of consumers to vary their behavior to force suppliers to compete. However, you and I can be as scrupulous and cost conscious as we like. We are not sick. (Well, I'm not anyway. I hope you're OK.) The driver of cost is the small fraction of people who have serious medical conditions. It's the old 80/20 rule writ large.

Though the data is a few years old, I doubt the distribution has changed. To emphasize, HALF of all health care costs in the US is concentrated in only 5% of the population, and 80% of costs are accounted for by the top quintile! (source: Kaiser Foundation PDF)

So the effect here is that with such a concentration of costs in such a small segment of the population, the ability of the larger population to move the market is highly restricted. You can make 80% of consumers highly price sensitive, but they can only affect a tiny fraction of healthcare spending. And for the generally well, their costs are probably those which are least responsible for the spiraling inflation. They're not getting $30,000 stents or prolonged ICU stays, or needing complex chronic disease management.

Conversely, those who are high consumers of health care simply cannot be made more price sensitive, since their costs are probably well beyond what they could pay in any event, and for most are well beyond the limits of even a catastrophic health insurance policy. Once you are told that you need a bypass/chemo/stent/dialysis/NICU etc, etc, etc, the costs are so overwhelming that a consumer cannot possibly pay them out of pocket. Since, by definition, these catastrophic costs are paid by some form of insurance, the consumer cannot have much financial interest in cost containment. For most, when they are confronted with a major or life-threatening illness, their entire focus shifts to survival, and they could care less about the cost. Further, many who are in this sick/expensive category have some diminished capacity with regard to their information gathering and decision-making.

So yeah, if ever there were an argument for some sort of single payer/hybrid/NHS style health care system this would be it. Individual "consumers" simply do not have the power to shift costs much, even with perfect information. You need a system which allows the entire market to be affected as a whole. Competition over state lines simply won't accomplish that.

-Cheers

For the last time Government is not like a household!

Seriously, it just a plain bad analogy. Ezra Klein does a great job of explaining why it is so bad.

When economic times are good, households should spend and invest more, while government should spend and invest less. When they’re bad, households need to cut back, and the government needs to step in. But as Karl Smith says, that’s not the only place where the analogy breaks down. Another — and one that’s increasingly relevant — is “not realizing your personal control over spending versus revenues is essentially the exact opposite of the governments control over spending versus revenues.”

Mr. Smith goes on to explain the different relationship governments and households have with revenue and spending:

Most middle class folks can cut back on their spending with relative ease. They probably won’t get sick, malnourished or injured from exposure as a result of spending cuts. What this means is that if revenues are running higher than spending – a necessary condition for building up debt – the most obvious choice is to cut spending. Therefore, as a rule of thumb people develop the notion that debt comes from living beyond your means...to the government, the exact opposite is true.

It is much easier for the government to raise revenue than to cut spending. Moreover, most of the movement in the deficit is tied to movements in revenue, not movements in spending. Thus the exact same reasoning that leads you to associate debt and spending in your personal life should lead you to associate debt and revenue for the government.

This is not to say that that government can not spend too much. But that the primary reason the deficit has grown so much over the last decade is mainly due to a massive drop off in revenue, Bruce Bartlett explains:

Revenues were 20.6 percent of GDP in 2000 and 18.5 percent of GDP in 2007, at the peak of the business cycle before the recession reduced them to 14.9 percent of GDP, where they have been for the last two years. (The postwar average is about 18.5 percent of GDP.) Without the Bush tax cuts – and those added by Obama – revenues would likely be more like 17.5 percent of GDP, which is where they were at the trough of the last three recessions.

If revenues had been 2 percent of GDP higher over the last 10 years, the federal debt would be about $2.5 trillion smaller. Instead of having a debt of about 60 percent of GDP last year, it would have been about 44 percent. And that doesn’t take into account all the interest that would have been saved that now adds about $60 billion to the deficit annually. Together, higher revenues and lower interest spending would have reduced last year’s deficit by one-third.

I know it won't stop people from saying it, but it is a bad analogy. Reality works the opposite of what is implied.

-Cheers

These days are still those days....

In honor of the anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball, I wanted to post something nice and reflective.

But as it seems to be the case these days, I am finding it increasingly hard to note the progress made. Instead focusing on the distance we still need to travel.

Two stories caught my eye this week:

Via Balloon Juice, Mickey Kaus is a Jackass. Now you might be wondering why someone would say that, here is the offending text in a blog post Mickey wrote about President Obama's badness as a politician:

Cost doesn’t go into why Obama managed to get to the top of politics without being all that good at it. The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history.

Now this bothers me. It bothers me on a personal level. We are not talking about Flava Flav being the President, Jay-Z or even Al Sharpton. We are talking about a Harvard trained constitutional lawyer, who was a state legislator and then a U.S senator. Despite what you think of the Presidents politics, he earned his place in life. Fighting against the constant racial inequities that most individuals of a fairer heritage have no inkling of.

This is very personal to me. That someone who seemingly knows nothing of the individual he comments on or how he won his office would make such a comment is jaw dropping. That I have had people say similar things about myself probably doesn't help matters. Evidently because I am black getting into Northwestern/U of I is impossible with out the help of affirmative action.

The President is a Harvard trained constitutional lawyer, who was a state and national legislator. That hardly sounds unqualified. Bad at politics? That is completely possible. But an Affirmative Action baby? Not hardly. Implying such is the worst sort of bigotry out there.

Combine that with this and you don't have to wonder why minorities are quick see bigotry, or to comment that racial issues have not noticeably changed.

The Weekly has obtained a copy of an email sent to fellow conservatives this week by Marilyn Davenport, a Southern California Tea Party activist and member of the central committee of the Orange County Republican Party.

Under the words, “Now you know why no birth certificate,” there’s an Obama family portrait showing them as apes. (I won't post the picture, because I find it offensive)

I know that Mr. Robinson, would have just held his chin up, smiled and took it. Because that was
the only way he could get that door open for rest of us. He had to take it and endure, so that we all would even have the chance.

That is courage. I wish I had it.

The President has some of it. Sometimes it is easy to forget, the risks he has taken to get to the White House. The vitriol he has to take and endure, all the while keeping up that smile. So that the rest of us have a chance.

Savage his policies. He doesn't deserve this sort of attack.

-Cheers

Backing it up...

The other day the frustrations of the last couple of day boiled over into this post.

Some may have noticed that the President gave a speech this past week on the budget. It was a pretty good speech actually.

But consider me skeptical. I need to see some steel and fire out of the democrats. I need to see them willing to engage and argue for progressive aims. They may lose that argument, but they need to make it. Dr. Krugman sums up most of my feelings on the speech here.

To get my active support, that is what will be necessary. Make the Republican party pay for their fecklessness.

And since it is tax day this little chart for you all:

Yep, collectively we are paying way too much.

-Cheers

Enough is Enough....

I have been a fairly reliable supporter of the President and his Administration, but at what point does a person stop reacting to the fear of "Palin, Bachmann, or Newt" and actually hold their elected officials responsible?

The President has done an absolutely horrid job negotiating with a petulant GOP. He has shown no inclination whatsoever, to defend any liberal/progressive alternative, or even offer one.

Bipartisanship is no virtue in service to bad policy.

I am tired of the constant pre-capitulation on every issue. The GOP's plan is to destroy the democratic party and this administration. Look at who and what they target. If there is a
source of democratic support, they attack it, they defund it and if they can they try to outlaw it
(unions, "trial lawyers"/tort reform, ACORN, NPR, voter ID laws).

The president says and does nothing about this. Have to protect that brand after all.

Whether it was the budget deal, the tax cuts, or even the ACA all we ever get is increasingly a right wing frame on right wing terms.

I promise if I get a fund raising letter from OFA, I may have to slap someone.

I will vote, I always do. But unless I see some fire and steel from Obama and the dems, they need to just forget about my enthusiastic support.

The GOP has become a party of bullies, unless you are willing to stand up to them and make them pay a price for their actions they will continue what they are doing.

Don't like them playing "games" with budget? Stop. Fucking. Pre-negotiating. They want a far
right propsal? Then you slap down a far left one and then haggle from there. That is how negotiating works.

Not happy.

-Cheers

Safety Net? What Safety Net?

Personally I think it is time to call the Republican Party the "Let them Eat Cake" party. In the next day or so the Republican leaders in the House will release their budget plan.

Now until we have the specifics a few items have come to light and it seems that Republicans are going to try to privatize and voucherize Medicare/Medicaid.

Dr. Paul Krugman had this to say about what we know initially:

More when we have some details. But two key points:

1. Privatizing and voucherizing Medicare does nothing whatsoever to control costs. We’ve seen that from the sorry history of Medicare Advantage. I’m sure that the Republicans will claim savings — but those savings will come entirely from limiting the vouchers to below the rate of rise in health care costs; in effect, they will come from denying medical care to those who can’t afford to top up their premiums.

Oh, and for all those older Americans who voted GOP last year because those nasty Democrats were going to cut Medicare, I have just one word: suckers!

Ezra Klein talks a bit about it as well this morning:

The House GOP’s 2012 budget, prepared by Rep. Paul Ryan, will privatize Medicare, block grant Medicaid, and cost $4 trillion over a decade, reports Naftali Bendavid: “Republicans will present this week a 2012 budget proposal that would cut more than $4 trillion from federal spending projected over the next decade and transform the Medicare health program for the elderly, a move that will dramatically reshape the budget debate in Washington...The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills...Mr. Ryan’s proposal would apply to those currently under the age of 55, and for those Americans would convert Medicare into a ‘premium support’ system...The proposal would also convert Medicaid, the health program for the poor, into a series of block grants to give states more flexibility.”

First they targeted unions, now they come for the social safety net.

Targeting those who are the most vulnerable is the means and the ends of the modern Republican Party.

-Cheers

It's the Stupid....it Burns....

I have to say, this is probably one of the more willfully ignorant gambits the Republican Party has engaged in.

• 1) Plays on the public's inability to understand complex subjects.
• 2) Would make our current fiscal problems worse.
• 3) Mind-numbingly stupid.

Specifically this segment of the proposal:

Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year, unless two-thirds of the duly chosen and sworn Members of each House of Congress shall provide by law for a specific excess of outlays over receipts by a roll call vote.

This is what California has, pushed through during a republican administration many years ago. Do nothing to actually effect spending, while making it near impossible to raise revenue (taxes!). There is more stupid here that should be talked about, but my head is sore from banging it into my desk, while reading the actual document and then the 'objective' reporting on the subject.

So instead, Ezra Klein, Johnathan Bernstein, and Bruce Bartlett go to town on how this idea is just more of the stupid. From Ezra:

A world in which this amendment is added to the Constitution is a world in which America effectively becomes California. It’s a world where the procedural impediments to passing budgets and raising revenues are so immense that effective fiscal management is essentially impossible; it’s a world where we can’t make public investments or sustain the safety net; it’s a world where recessions are much worse than they currently are and the government has to do more of its work off-budget through regulation and gimmickry. I would like to say something positive about this proposal, say there’s some silver lining here. But there isn’t. This is economic demagoguery, and nothing more. It’s so unrealistic that it would’ve ruled all but two of the last 30 years unconstitutional, which means it’s so unrealistic that there has not yet been a Republican president who has proven it can be done. And that doesn’t just suggest it can’t be done: It suggests that when Republicans are actually in power and have control of the budget, they know perfectly well that it shouldn’t be done. They’re just pretending otherwise for the moment.

-Cheers

A note on Collective Bargaining....

April 4th is the anniversary of the Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.

I thought it was important to remember why it was, that Dr. King was in Memphis.

Dr. King was there to:

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to stand with sanitation workers demanding their dream: The right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a better life. The workers were trying to form a union with AFSCME.

I really don't have much more to add then that. But I just want to say that worker rights have long been a civil rights issue. It is important to remember where have come from, and what is at stake.

-Cheers

Douche-Bag of the day.

What does it take to be a Republican nominee these days? This is the sort of bigotry that the republican party has cultivated.



The sort of willful ignorance of the constitution should disqualify you from holding office. There is no law against being a bigot, but if you use that as a means to deny employment, then you are breaking the law.

-Cheers

Happy Birthday ACA!

On the anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, the Kaiser Foundation has put together a very nice flow chart on how the ACA works (h/t Ezra Klein).


Pretty straight forward. While, I am still not pleased with the process, it is an impressive first step for dealing with health care costs in the States and in making the system both less costly and more humane.

There is still more work to be done, but it is important to see how far we have come.

Also Mr. Klein does an admirable job of explaining the whole thing here.

-Cheers

....A little bit more...

I initially posted this as an article on Facebook, but I thought it could probably use a little more discussion:

Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.

As to why this is extremely disturbing:

The bill also calls for unconstitutional residency requirements, not allowing the debit card to be used across state lines and other provisions that the Welfare Rights Committee and others consider unacceptable.

Buechner testified, “We’ll leave you with this. It is not right to punish a whole group because of the supposed actions of a few. You in this room could have a pretty rough time if that was the case. It is not right to stigmatize and dehumanize women living the hard life of trying to raise children while living 60% below the poverty level. It is not right to use racist, bumper-sticker hate to inflict human misery for political gain.”

E.D Kain does a nifty job of analyzing this issue. I like the gratuitous addition of limiting teachers' ability to negotiate.

It seems to me that very notion of equitable negotiation is under attack these days. Employers should have all the leverage, and the only option the worker should have, is to find another job. So really, no negotiation at all.

A world where the poor and middle class are constantly under attack, is a world where the wealthy consistently erode the rights and wealth of the middle class and the poor.

-Cheers

It bears repeating....

I am glad that Dr. Krugman went back to this issue again. With all the strum und drang over the deficit, it is worth remembering that this is always the case. Once again I think Matt Yglesias' (By way of Greg Sargent) comments on the subject ring true:

Public understanding of fiscal policy is hazy, inaccurate, and dominated by fallacious analogies between a national government and a household. What’s more, voters believe that deficits are primarily driven by wasteful government spending. So when a recession strikes the deficit spikes, and people complain.

The government is not like your household. It just isn't. It is like comparing a remote control car to the space shuttle. Sure they both have "engines", but they do very different things.

As Steve Benen notes, I do not even know why most republicans in congress are being treated like they have any authenticity on deficit reduction:

I'd be remiss if I neglected to mention how amusing it is to hear Mitch McConnell express concern about the debt. The Kentucky Republican voted for the Bush tax cuts, and added the costs to the national debt. McConnell then voted to finance the war in Afghanistan by adding the costs to the national debt. He then voted to put the costs of the war in Iraq onto the national debt. McConnell supported a massive expansion of the government's role in health care, Medicare Part D, and voted to pile all of its costs right onto the national debt, and then backed the financial industry bailout, and added the bill to the national debt. All the while, McConnell had no qualms about voting to raise the debt limit.

But now McConnell is willing to risk default unless Democrats agree to a plan to help clean up the mess McConnell helped create. Fascinating.

It would be fascinating if it weren't so terribly frustrating.

In other news. With all the focus on Japan after the horrific earthquake/tsunami that struck late last week. I have found this post to be the most important in regards to the reactor issues going on there.

Finally this is one of those stories (via Glenn Greenwald) that has people wondering if the parties are any different. I have to admit this is horribly disappointing on the part of the administration. This is not the sort of treatment that someone who speaks honestly on a despicable situation should be treated. And why exactly should the military be the objective source consulted when talking about possibly illegal activities that the military is involved in?

Just poor form on the part of the Administration. Just leading more credence to the the David Frum axiom: The Republicans fear their base, while Democrats despise theirs.

-Cheers

On the side your bread is buttered.

Of late there are just so many things to write about, that I am suffering a bit of writer's block.

So instead of the pieces I wanted to toss out on Wisconsin, or the Luddite leanings of our new Congress, instead I will just focus on this little chart comparing the stated deficit reduction targets of the GOP versus the tax breaks they are offering. Consider it "The rich have needs too!" chart.

When you look at this chart, I can't help but think what insulated bastards we have running our country. The rich must never be made to share in any sacrifice, because they are innately responsible and all our well beings are dependent on the beneficent ruler-ship. While the poor (cause they are always irresponsible) and middle class needs to reign in their behavior and to stop expecting any assistance from the federal government.

Combine that with a shaky understanding of budgetary issues and the lack of any meaningful push back from the center-left contingent, I think Matt Yglesias gets to the kernel of why the public doesn't care about deficits yet politicians are obsessed with it:

Politicians don't understand that the voters don't care about the deficit because the voters themselves don't understand that they don't care about the deficit. Black, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and I all believe that with unemployment high and interest rates and inflation low that a larger short-term deficit will help post real output and reduce unemployment. If most people agreed with that, then politicians would talk about the deficit in a different way.

But they don't. Public understanding of fiscal policy is hazy, inaccurate, and dominated by fallacious analogies between a national government and a household. What's more, voters believe that deficits are primarily driven by wasteful government spending. So when a recession strikes the deficit spikes, and people complain.

So that is what is consuming my thoughts for right now. Why more people don't stand up and fight about this, is beyond me.

-Cheers