Tag Archives: abortion

Why Is the Abortion Rate Down Since 2008?

by DeneseLamble Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

National Review‘s Michael New is unhappy with Guttmacher’s latest report on the abortion rate:

Last week, the Guttmacher Institute released an analysis of the recent decline in the incidence of abortion. Overall, the abortion rate declined by an impressive 13 percent between 2008 and 2011 and reached its lowest level since 1973. This Guttmacher analysis joins a chorus of pundits — including Andrew Sullivan — who were quick to credit contraception for this decline in the abortion rate. And like most Guttmacher studies, this analysis is quick to downplay pro-life laws and other pro-life efforts.

…There is less than meets the eye here, however. The author finds that fewer women under 30 at risk for an unintended pregnancy were forgoing contraception. Yet the decline was slight — only three percentage points.

…The author makes a fair point that the abortion decline was fairly consistent throughout the country….However, the study presents a false dichotomy between either crediting legislation or crediting contraceptives for the falling abortion numbers….The link between abortion attitudes and abortion incidence is not well documented. That said, the shift in public opinion is still worth considering.

Well, look: the abortion rate in America has been steadily declining since 1973. Trying to figure out why it dropped specifically between 2008 and 2011 is a mug’s game. There’s just nothing unusual going on that even requires an explanation. It’s true that the post-1973 decline continued at a rate that was slightly higher than before—but so slightly that it’s just as likely to be statistical noise as anything else.

Both sides should probably stand down in the face of the long-term evidence. Most likely, neither contraceptives nor state laws nor public opinion played a substantial role that was any different from the role they’ve played since 1973. Over the long term, there’s less teen pregnancy, more use of contraceptives, and, as near as I can tell, barely any change in public opinion at all. Beyond that, who knows?

See original:  

Why Is the Abortion Rate Down Since 2008?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Is the Abortion Rate Down Since 2008?

The New York Times Fails to Explain Why "Super Predators" Turned Out to Be a Myth

by ArcherRetzlaff Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Sorry for the radio silence. I went in to see my pulmonary specialist today, and he was very distressed at my lack of progress on the breathing front. So he immediately sent me downstairs for a new battery of tests, including a stat review of the echocardiogram I did last week. Verdict: I am in the bloom of health. I have the lungs of a sperm whale and the heart of an ox. As a last ditch diagnostic effort—and since they already had an IV tube in my arm anyway—the ER doctor pumped me full of an anti-anxiety drug just to see if my attacks were brought on by stress. Apparently not, which isn’t surprising since I lead an enviably stress-free life.

Unfortunately, once they had done that I wasn’t allowed to drive myself home, so I had to wait for Marian to get off work and come pick me up. In the meantime, I kept up on the latest news with my iPhone. Or tried to, anyway. Kaiser brags about its Wi-Fi network, but it didn’t work at all, and the nurses confirmed that everyone complains about this. So I switched to the cell, but despite the fact that there was a cell tower about 200 yards away, Verizon was unable to provide me with even 3G service most of the time. Bastards.

Still, while I was crawling through the news at 300 baud speeds, I did come across a New York Times story about the mid-90s fear of “super predators,” teenage criminals with no conscience and no impulse control, who would soon be rampaging across the city destroying everything in their wake. In fact, just the opposite happened. Teen crime has declined dramatically since the mid-90s, and New York City is safer now than it’s been since the 60s. What happened?

But how to explain the decline in youth violence?

Various ideas have been advanced, like an improved economy in the late ‘90s (never mind that it later went south), better policing and the fading of a crack cocaine epidemic. A less conventional — not to mention amply disputed — theory was put forth by some social scientists who argued that the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling on abortion in Roe v. Wade had an impact. With abortions more readily available, this theory went, unwanted children who could be prone to serious antisocial behavior were never born.

That’s really disappointing. The burnout of the crack epidemic is at least plausible as a partial explanation, but the rest is nonsense. Nobody still thinks the economy had anything to do with the drop in crime. Better policing might have had a minor impact, but crime dropped even in cities that didn’t change their police tactics. And the abortion theory hasn’t really weathered the test of time well.

I swear, I think the New York Times has some kind of editorial policy about never mentioning the most obvious link of them all: the decline in gasoline lead between 1975 and 1995. It’s not as if I think the lead-crime theory is a slam dunk or anything, but surely the evidence is strong enough that it belongs in any short summary of the most likely causes of crime decline? It sure as hell has more evidence in its favor than economics, better policing, or legal abortion.

And yet the New York Times stubbornly refuses to so much as mention it in passing. I found one short piece on the subject from 2007, and then nothing. During the past seven years, even as the evidence linking lead to declining crime rates has become more and more solid, they don’t seem to have mentioned it even once. Are they afraid of pissing off the police commissioner or something? What’s the deal?

Continue at source: 

The New York Times Fails to Explain Why "Super Predators" Turned Out to Be a Myth

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The New York Times Fails to Explain Why "Super Predators" Turned Out to Be a Myth

Sorry, But Childhood Obesity Hasn’t Budged in the Past Ten Years

by EstelaPalfreyma Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Remember that CDC study showing a dramatic drop in obesity among 2-5 year olds that I wrote about last month? I was skeptical that it was real, and today Sharon Begley of Reuters follows up. Her conclusion? The whole thing is almost certainly bogus:

The latest study is based a well-respected data set taken from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES….The 2011-2012 version of the survey included 9,120 people; 871 of them were 2 to 5 years old….”In small samples like this, you are going to have chance fluctuations,” said epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

….A study of preschoolers in the federal WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program, which provides food vouchers, nutrition classes and counseling to low-income families, found virtually no change in obesity rates….”We agree there is a slight downward trend in obesity among 2-to-5-year olds,” said Shannon Whaley, a co-author of the WIC study. “But a 43 percent drop is absolutely not what we’re seeing.” The WIC study included more than 200,000 children

….Other studies also raise questions about the 40 percent claim. An earlier CDC study, reported in JAMA in December 2012, found that the prevalence of obesity among 2-to-4-year olds in low-income families fell to 14.9 percent in 2010 from 15.2 percent in 2003. That represents an improvement of less than 2 percent.

….For obesity rates to drop, researchers reckon, young children have to eat differently and become more active. But research shows little sign of such changes among 2-to-5-year olds, casting more doubt on the 43 percent claim….In 2010 Whaley and her colleagues examined the effectiveness of WIC classes and counseling to encourage healthy eating and activities for women and children in the program. Their findings were discouraging: Television watching and consumption of sweet or salty snacks actually rose, while fruit and vegetable consumption fell — changes that could lead to weight gain. One positive was a rise in physical activity.

To recap: the CDC study was small and had large error bars; other, larger studies find only slight drops in obesity; and there’s no indication of any behavioral changes that might have produced a dramatic weight loss. I’d add to that the fact that the CDC data showed no correlation between lower weight at ages 2-5 and lower weight a few years later at ages 6-11.

Bottom line: I hate to be such a buzzkill, but the CDC result seems highly likely to be nothing more than statistical noise. Childhood obesity has barely budged in the last decade.

Continued: 

Sorry, But Childhood Obesity Hasn’t Budged in the Past Ten Years

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sorry, But Childhood Obesity Hasn’t Budged in the Past Ten Years

Let Us Sing a Dirge for "Spit and Image"

by marekso65 Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

We got some quick work from the Times copy desk today: the blurb on the left lasted only a couple of minutes before someone rebelled and fixed it. This reminds me of a Slate column from a couple of years ago in which Juliet Lapidos tried bravely to defend her use of spit and image on the grounds that “it makes more sense to me,” but that’s hopeless. Idioms aren’t supposed to make sense. (On the other hand, her plea to “make absolutely sure that you’re right, and the author’s wrong” before sending out grammar police nastygrams is good advice.)

It’s possible that you’re surprised to see this usage at all. But until the mid-50s it was pretty common. However, as a quick glance at the Google Ngram viewer will show you, that was its last hoorah. For more than a decade, spitting image has been more than 20x more common than its original variant. It’s time to throw in the towel.

UPDATE: Now it’s been changed yet again, to “who also looks nearly identical to Kermit.” I guess spitting image didn’t pass muster at the Gray Lady either.

View original post here:

Let Us Sing a Dirge for "Spit and Image"

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Let Us Sing a Dirge for "Spit and Image"

Are Corporations Hoarding Cash? It’s Complicated.

by ArdenCulbert Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over at the newly launched—or relaunched—FiveThirtyEight.com, Ben Casselman updates us on the enormous mountains of cash that have been piling up in company treasuries ever since the recession ended:

One of the early narratives of the economic recovery was that companies were “hoarding” cash….The data backed up the story: The Federal Reserve in 2011 reported that American companies had more than $2 trillion stashed away in overflowing vaults.

Then the Fed revised its data. New figures released in early 2012, based on more complete tax filings, showed that American companies actually had close to half a trillion dollars less cash than previously thought….The revision didn’t just change the numbers—it undermined the whole narrative.

….It’s understandable that so many experts bought into the “cash on the sidelines” narrative. What’s less understandable is that they’re still buying into it. Despite the big revision, the corporate-cash narrative remains very much alive.

Hmmm. I think there’s a little more to it. It’s true that two years ago the Fed revised down its corporate cash estimate1 for the first quarter of 2012 from $2.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion. But even taking that into account, corporations have been increasing their cash holdings about 15 percent per year since 2008. In 2013 corporate cash increased another 12 percent. That’s a pretty steep increase.

Beyond that, David Cay Johnston estimates that when you count cash worldwide, not just domestically, American corporations are holding something like $7.9 trillion in liquid assets. He calculates that this number has grown six times faster than corporate revenues since 1994. “When liquid assets grow six times faster than revenues, it tells you that companies are hoarding cash, not investing or spending.”

Now, it’s true that the huge spike initially reported in 2011-12 was mostly illusory. But it’s not clear to me that this undermines the entire “cash hoarding” narrative. Even without that spike, corporate cash holdings have been growing strongly over the past decade. What’s more, corporate profits have been booming ever since the recession ended—without a correspondingly dramatic increase in capital expenditures.

There are plenty of other arguments floating around. If you remove the tech sector, the whole phenomenon looks less dramatic. Corporate debt has been increasing too thanks to ultra-low interest rates, which suggests that companies are simply making a rational decision to borrow rather than spend their own cash. Cash overseas is piling up because companies don’t want to repatriate it and pay the taxes that would be due. Etc.

In other words, it’s complicated. I think Casselman has a point that the Fed’s revision wasn’t very widely reported or acknowledged, but I’m not sure that’s quite as damning as he suggests. The corporate cash pile-up, though less startling than we thought in 2012, is still real. Probably.

1Actually, this is an estimate of “liquid assets.” We’re just using cash here as shorthand.

Link:

Are Corporations Hoarding Cash? It’s Complicated.

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Are Corporations Hoarding Cash? It’s Complicated.

The Strange, Suicidal Odyssey of Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan

by CorneliusDowse Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Dave Camp’s tax reform proposal, and I was predictably dismissive. It was decent effort, I said, but it was DOA before Camp even officially announced it. Still, “I’ll be interested in following the reaction as everyone figures out just whose ox would be gored by his various bullet points. Should be fun.”

In reality, I just forgot about it entirely. But it turns out that the biggest ox being gored by Camp’s plan was Wall Street, which was very much not amused by his proposal to levy a small tax on large banks. They threatened to cancel all GOP fundraisers as long as the bank tax was on the table, and this was enough to bury Camp’s proposal once and for all.

So far, so boring. Camp’s proposal never stood a chance, and the fact that Wall Street happened to put the final nail in the coffin is basically just a footnote. Jon Chait, however, gets at something more interesting:

The whole point of the push-back from Wall Street, which has reinforced a wildly unenthusiastic reception within the GOP, is not only to prevent Republicans from striking a deal with Democrats…. It’s to murder his plan in a public way so as to prevent it from becoming the baseline for any future Republican agenda. That effort seems to be meeting with predictable, depressing success.

It leaves unanswered the basic mystery of why Camp thought he could write a plan like this in the first place. Sources I’ve asked believe Camp was playing a kind of double game, an interpretation that closely fits all the public reporting. He promised Republicans he could produce a tax reform that would lower the top rate to 25 percent, a holy grail of GOP policymaking, and which would produce a massive windfall for the rich. He had also given lip service to make sure his reform did not decrease tax revenue or increase the tax burden on the poor and middle class.

Meeting all these goals was arithmetically impossible. But Republican fiscal proposals usually come face-to-face with arithmetic impossibility. It is their oldest and most bitter foe. Usually they step around with some kind of evasion or chicanery. Camp actually gave in and acceded to his other, un-emphasized goals of revenue and distributional neutrality (that is, ensuring his plan raised the same amount of tax dollars and didn’t shift the burden downward). Nobody outside of Camp and a handful of allies seems to have realized this until the plan was already out in the open.

Unfortunately, this still leaves the basic mystery unanswered. It’s true, as Chait says, that the usual Republican promise—we can lower top rates to 25 percent and make up for it by closing tax breaks—is plainly impossible and everyone knows it. It’s a nice applause line, but it only works as long as the tax breaks are never spelled out, something that requires even more than the usual amount of smoke and mirrors we expect from politicians.

But here’s the thing: obviously Camp knew this. Just as obviously, he knew that making the math work out would produce a plan that Republicans and their interest groups would hate. In the end, he could reduce the top rate only to 35 percent, and only at the cost of killing or reducing some very specific tax breaks that rich people didn’t want killed or reduced.

Camp has been in Congress for more than two decades. He’s hardly an ivory tower naif, and he must have known perfectly well that his plan would do little except to expose Republican hypocrisy on taxes. So why did he do it?

Taken from: 

The Strange, Suicidal Odyssey of Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Strange, Suicidal Odyssey of Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan

Obamacare is Probably Safe, But It’s Not a Slam Dunk

by Prokippxv Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I was chatting with a friend this weekend about what Republicans will do if they manage to win total control of the government in 2016. Will they abolish the filibuster and repeal Obamacare? I think the odds are low. At a guess, I’d put the chances of winning total control at p=20%, the conditional odds of abolishing the filibuster at p=50%, and the conditional odds of then repealing Obamacare at p=50%. (Why so low for repeal? Because by 2017 there are going to be a lot of people benefiting from parts of Obamacare; at least a few Republicans will recognize that you really can’t repeal just the unpopular bits; and the health care industry will have spent billions of dollars committing itself to operating within the framework of the law.) So that’s about a 5% chance that Obamacare dies in 2017. Not zero, but not very significant either.

But what about 2015? What if Republicans win the Senate later this year? Paul Waldman surveys the landscape and notes that House and Senate Republicans are offering very different campaign visions of what to do about Obamacare:

See the difference? The senators accept that the ACA is law and are thinking about how they’d like to change it. The House members are coming up with another way to make a futile, symbolic shaking of their fists in the general direction of the White House. And this may offer a clue to how legislating would proceed in a Republican Congress. The House, still dominated by extremely conservative Republicans for whom any hint of compromise is considered the highest treason, could continue to pass one doomed bill after another, while the Senate tries to write bills that have at least some chance of ever becoming law.

And that would be just fine with Barack Obama. If he’s faced with both houses controlled by the opposition, there’s nothing he’d rather see than them fighting with each other and passing only unrealistic bills that he can veto without worrying about any backlash from the public.

Allow me to be a bit more pessimistic. Even if they lose the Senate, Democrats will still have the filibuster available to them, and they’ll use it. And as Waldman says, Obama can veto anything he doesn’t like.

But there are two wild cards here. First, the usual way that you get difficult provisions passed is by tacking them onto must-pass legislation. Pentagon appropriations bills are the traditional favorites. Depending on the provision, this might require monkeying around with the reconciliation rules, but Republicans have few scruples about that. So the odds are that we’ll end up with yet another series of showdowns. Maybe not huge debt-ceiling style showdowns, but big fund-the-military type showdowns. And the question is who wins.

And that brings up the second wild card: will Democrats stay united in defense of Obamacare? After watching Dems scatter like frightened children over the nomination of Debo Adegbile to lead the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and then scatter again when the NRA started mau-mauing them over Vivek Murthy’s nomination as Surgeon General—well, you have to wonder, don’t you? Add in the fact that Democrats have been running away from Obamacare for months, and it’s hardly unrealistic to think that they might be less than adamantine when it comes to a showdown over protecting Obamacare while Fox News is pillorying them nightly as playing politics with our brave troops in order to save a failed health care policy.

As it happens, I’d say the odds of caving in are fairly low. Even if Republicans win the Senate, they’d need eight or nine Democrats to defect in order to break a filibuster. And Obama isn’t running for anything. He can afford to hold out.

Still, it’s not a slam dunk. Republicans won’t be able to repeal Obamacare if they win the Senate later this year, but there’s a chance they could do it some damage. It all depends on how willing Democrats are to defend their principles. Unfortunately, that’s always a thin reed.

Taken from:

Obamacare is Probably Safe, But It’s Not a Slam Dunk

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obamacare is Probably Safe, But It’s Not a Slam Dunk

The United States Is a Data Wonk’s Dream

by CarleyHannan Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Via Emily Badger, here’s an interesting chart showing which countries are most open with national data. Obviously rich countries do best at this kind of statistical recordkeeping, but some rich countries do better than others, and the US is one of the best. In fact, it would be the best if not for the fact that corporate registration is a state function, and the US therefore scores approximately zero for its lack of a national corporate registry database. Full data for all countries is here. Enjoy.

More here: 

The United States Is a Data Wonk’s Dream

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The United States Is a Data Wonk’s Dream

If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Fareed Zakaria has a piece in the Washington Post about Ukraine. Here’s the headline:

Why (this time) Obama must lead

So I clicked. Plenty of sensible stuff. The EU dithered. Ukraine blew up. Putin responded stupidly. “Let’s not persist in believing that Moscow’s moves have been strategically brilliant,” Zakaria says. His invasion of Crimea has turned the rest of Ukraine irretrievably pro-Western; triggered lots of anti-Russian sentiment on his borders; soured relations with Poland and Hungary; and sparked Western sanctions that are going to hurt.

And Zakaria says this is important stuff. “The crisis in Ukraine is the most significant geopolitical problem since the Cold War….And it involves a great global principle: whether national boundaries can be changed by brute force. If it becomes acceptable to do so, what will happen in Asia, where there are dozens of contested boundaries — and several great powers that want to remake them?”

OK, fine. So what should Obama do? Here it is:

Obama must rally the world, push the Europeans and negotiate with the Russians.

Go ahead and click the link if you don’t believe me. This is, literally, the sum total of Zakaria’s advice. So what’s the point? Obviously Obama is already doing this. Is he doing it badly? Is he pressing for the wrong sanctions? Is he working too much behind the scenes and not enough publicly? Should he be threatening a military response? Should he ask Zach Galifianakis to tape an episode of “Between Two Ferns” with Vladimir Putin? Or what?

Maybe I’m more frustrated than usual with this because I tend to like Zakaria. Sure, he’s sometimes a little bit too weather-vaney for my taste, but he’s smart and practical and tends to understand the big picture pretty well. So why not tell us what he thinks the US response should be? We could use some judicious advice to make up for the tsunami of idiocy emanating from the crackpot wing of the foreign policy community right now.

Excerpt from – 

If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It

Chart of the Day: China’s Debt Bubble Continues to Swell

by CeliaHdack Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Via Paul Krugman, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi give us the chart below today to chew over. It shows China’s declining trade surplus over the past decade, which authorities have effectively offset by a dramatic increase in private credit in order to boost domestic demand. The authors explain how this happened:

China got a break starting 2003….The rest of the world — and in particular the United States — was willing to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars every year to purchase Chinese goods (among other things)….The result was reduced pressure on domestic debt creation, and domestic debt went down from 125% of GDP in 2003 to almost 100% of GDP in 2008.

….The continued borrowing by western countries was not sustainable and by 2008 global demand for Chinese goods collapsed….How could China create new demand for its productive capacity? The answer once again came in the form of a rapid rise in domestic private debt. The Chinese state-owned banks with explicit prodding from the government opened their spigots. The country has seen an explosive growth in domestic private debt since 2008.

Is this sustainable? Probably not. It’s yet another reason to be concerned about the continued fragility of the global economy. We’re probably not strong enough to withstand a major shock from China.

Link:

Chart of the Day: China’s Debt Bubble Continues to Swell

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chart of the Day: China’s Debt Bubble Continues to Swell