Tag Archives: california

In Shocking News, Scott Walker’s Health Care Plan Screws the Poor

by ForrestTrujillo Posted on August 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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This is going to be the most anticlimactic blog post ever, but can you guess how Scott Walker’s health care plan compares to Obamacare for the poor? And how it compares for the upper middle class and the wealthy?

Damn. You guessed. But just to make it official, here are a couple of charts that show how the subsidies in the two plans compare at different income levels. I used the Kaiser calculator to estimate Obamacare subsidies and Walker’s written document to calculate tax credits under his plan. The chart on the left shows a 3-person family with 30-year-old parents. The chart on the right shows the same thing with older parents.

And have no fear: I chose $30,000 as the minimum income level because most families below that level qualify for Medicaid. And you guessed it: Walker’s plan slashes Medicaid too. So the poor and the working class get screwed by Walker no matter what their income level is.

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In Shocking News, Scott Walker’s Health Care Plan Screws the Poor

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E-Cigarettes May or May Not Be a Gateway Drug. (But Probably Not.)

by Juliann48Z Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Are e-cigarettes a gateway drug to traditional cigarettes? There’s a new study out that suggests they might be:

The study focused on ninth-graders at 10 public schools in Los Angeles who had tried e-cigarettes before the fall of 2013. Researchers surveyed those students in the spring of 2014 and fall of 2014, and discovered that they were about 2½ times as likely as their peers to have smoked traditional cigarettes.

This is a classic case of correlation which may or may not also be causation (something the authors acknowledge). Did more of the e-cigarette kids take up smoking because e-cigarattes gave them a taste for it? Or do the kids who are most likely to take up smoking in the first place simply start with e-cigarettes? There’s no way to tell just from this study.

That’s not to say it’s worthless, though. If the study found no correlation, then you could be pretty sure that e-cigarettes don’t lead to cigarette smoking. That would be worth knowing. But since it did find a correlation, we need more research to know if there’s causation here.

One way to get a tentative read on this is to look at total cigarette smoking among teens. If it’s up, then e-cigarettes might be leading more kids to cigarettes. If it’s not up, then e-cigarettes are probably just temporarily replacing cigarettes for kids who were going to take up smoking anyway. So which is it?

As it happens, we know the answer to this: cigarette smoking has plunged among teenagers over the past four years. On the other hand, total cigarette use among teens (cigarettes + e-cigarettes) has gone up. The cigarette plunge makes it unlikely that e-cigarettes are a gateway to traditional cigarettes. But the increase in total cigarette use suggests that e-cigarettes really are creating a new market. It’s complicated.

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E-Cigarettes May or May Not Be a Gateway Drug. (But Probably Not.)

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We Are All Fans of Self-Deportation

by MichellQka Posted on August 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein has read Donald Trump’s immigration plan and finds it even worse than he expected. I didn’t feel that way: it read to me like a pretty standard right-wing take on illegal immigration, with just a few added Trumpisms (Mexico will pay for the wall, we should force companies to hire Americans, etc.). But two things in Klein’s piece struck me enough to want to comment on them:

The plan would be a disaster for immigrants if enacted. But even if it’s not enacted, the plan is a disaster for the Republican Party, which is somehow going to need to co-opt Trump’s appeal to anti-immigration voters, but absolutely cannot afford to be associated, in the minds of Hispanic voters, with this document.

….When Mitt Romney embraced “self-deportation” in 2012, it was considered an awful mistake….But self-deportation is Trump’s plan, too. And Trump’s insight here is that the best way to drive unauthorized immigrants out of the country isn’t to target them. It’s to target their children and families.

On the first point, I think this ship sailed a long time ago. Maybe the Trump publicity juggernaut will aggravate things further, but I honestly don’t see how the Republican Party could appeal to Hispanics much less than it already does. The anti-immigrant rhetoric from leading Republicans has been relentless for years, and Trump is merely adding one more voice to the chorus. Will Trump’s bluster about making Mexico pay for the wall really make things any worse?

The second point is a little trickier. It’s true that Mitt Romney blew it in 2012 with the infelicitous phrase “self-deportation.” But the uproar that followed elided an important point: every immigration plan involves putting pressure on illegal immigrants in order to motivate them to (a) leave or (b) not come in the first place. There’s a sliding scale of pain involved, and liberals tend to want less while conservatives tend to want more. But both sides make use of it.

The easiest way to think of immigration control is like this:

  1. Figure out how many illegal immigrants you’re willing to tolerate.
  2. Ratchet up the the cost of illegal immigration and ratchet down the cost of legal immigration.
  3. Eventually, you’ll figure out the right combination of costs that gets you to your number.

Nobody talks about immigration like this, but it’s the thought process behind every immigration plan. Both Republicans and Democrats support E-Verify, for example, which makes it harder for immigrants who lack legal documents to get jobs. But what is this, other than a way to use economic pressure to persuade illegal immigrants to go back to Mexico? Likewise, both Democrats and Republicans support border security. Republicans may generally want more of it than Democrats, but Democrats are nonetheless willing to use increased security to raise the cost of crossing the border.

In the end, everyone uses this calculus,1 whether consciously or not. The amount of pressure—or cruelty, if you prefer—that you’re willing to employ depends on just how low a number of illegal immigrants you’re willing to tolerate. But no matter what that number is, if you put any pressure at all on illegal immigrants, you’re exploiting the power of self-deportation. Just don’t say it out loud, OK?

1The exception, I suppose, are the people who advocate completely open borders. But they’re a very tiny minority.

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We Are All Fans of Self-Deportation

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Obamacare: Still Working, Still a Pretty Good Bargain

by CathyHuntley Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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This week the CDC confirmed what we already knew: the rate of uninsurance has dropped dramatically since Obamacare started up. It’s gone from about 20 percent in 2013 to 13 percent in the first quarter of this year (chart at top right). This matches the Gallup data that we get quarterly, which shows a drop from about 18 percent to 12 percent (chart at bottom right). Note that the Gallup numbers are about 2 points lower across the board because Gallup surveys everyone over 18, including seniors on Medicare, who are 100 percent covered. The CDC counts only adults aged 18-64.

Either way, this comes to about 16 million adults who now have health insurance who were previously uncovered. And the number would be even higher if so many red states weren’t refusing to expand Medicaid.

And the cost of all this? About $70 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That’s roughly $4,000 per person. Not a bad deal.

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Obamacare: Still Working, Still a Pretty Good Bargain

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Iran Deal: As Good as We Could Have Gotten Unless We Were Willing to Threaten Immediate War

by PhilomeLoggins Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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One of the big criticisms of President Obama’s nuclear deal is that he could have done better. In this case, Donald Trump really does speak for the entire GOP when he says that Obama’s team were all terrible negotiators who were too desperate for a deal and got suckered by shrewd Iranian horsetraders.

Is this true? Could we have gotten a substantially better deal if we had tightened the screws more? Gary Samore is the former president of United Against Nuclear Iran—”former” because he stepped down after he examined the deal and decided it was pretty good after all. Samore has decades of experience with Iran’s nuclear program and is well respected in the arms control community. So does he think we could have gotten a better deal?

Max Fisher: Could we have gotten a better deal?

Gary Samore: It’s very hard for me to answer that question. Unless you’re actually sitting in the room, doing the back-and-forth, it’s very, very difficult to say with any confidence that we could get a substantially better deal. When I say substantially better, I’m talking about much more dismantlement of Iran’s enrichment program, unlimited duration or a longer duration, and more robust challenge inspections of undeclared facilities.

I’m not talking about — I mean, the difference between 6,000 centrifuges and 5,000 centrifuges is trivial. Yes, you could probably get slightly different terms. We could have allowed them to keep a larger amount of low-enriched uranium, in exchange for having fewer centrifuges. There are all of these trade-offs embedded in the deal. But I don’t consider these kinds of details significantly better.

Max Fisher: It sounds like what you’re talking about, in terms of any different deal we could’ve gotten, is more about pushing around the numbers than getting a deal that looks fundamentally different.

Gary Samore: With the leverage that we have — which is economic sanctions and political pressure — I don’t think we can achieve a dismantlement of their program, unlimited duration, “anytime, anywhere” inspections. I just don’t think those are possible under current circumstances. Their economic situation would have to be much more dire, or we would have to be willing to use a military ultimatum to get those kinds of concessions from Iran.

Bottom line: Samore started out skeptical, but when he saw the actual text of the deal he was surprised at how good it was. Most importantly, he doubts that a substantially better deal would have been possible unless we had issued a military ultimatum.

So there’s something here for everyone. For people like me, it’s nice to hear that an expert came around when he took the time to look seriously at the deal’s terms. But Samore also concedes that we might have done better if we had credibly threatened to bomb Iran—which is precisely what a lot of conservatives think we should have done.

This is, perhaps, the fundamental dividing line. If you think we should have set a date certain for the missiles to fly unless we got what we wanted, then the deal was a lousy one. We could have done better. If you think—as I do—that this is insane, then the deal looks pretty good. Opinions about the final agreement have less to do with the precise terms of the deal than it does with your willingness to threaten immediate war to get what you want.

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Iran Deal: As Good as We Could Have Gotten Unless We Were Willing to Threaten Immediate War

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Achtung! Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Math Homework.

by CaitlynEoff Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Pacific Standard reports today on a recent study about learning math, but I think they bury the lede. “New research finds that when parents with math anxieties try to help their kids, their efforts could backfire,” says the headline. But here’s the text:

Remarkably, the more that math-anxious parents helped their kids with their homework, the worse the kids did on end-of-year math tests, an effect that in the worst cases cut students’ progress in math nearly in half. Meanwhile, among low-anxiety parents, the team found that parents helping their children with math homework had little to no effect on the kids’ test scores. That effect remained even after controlling for parents’ education levels, teachers’ math anxiety and ability, and other factors, such as a school’s socioeconomic status—a good indication that parents were passing their arithmetic-specific anxieties on to their kids.

In other words, forget about whether you have math anxieties or not. Don’t help your kids with their math homework, full stop. At worst, you’ll screw them up. At best, you’ll do nothing. Use the time for something more constructive, like cutting your fingernails or watching Judge Judy.

Anyway, while we’re on the subject, here’s a math story from my childhood that backs up the results of this study. I guess this would have been around first or second grade. I must have asked my father some question or another, and the upshot was that he told me about negative numbers and how one arrived at them. Some time later, I was filling out an arithmetic workbook at school, and one of the problems was something like “What is 2 – 3?” I wrote in -1, probably feeling kind of smug, and got marked down. I protested to no effect. I was supposed to say that there was no answer because you can’t subtract a bigger number from a smaller one. Thanks a lot, dad!

Is this story true? I don’t know. I swear I remember it, but it sounds kind of unlikely, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just a trick of memory? Could be, but it’s an odd thing to invent out of whole cloth. In any case, my father is no longer around to protest his innocence, so we’ll never know for sure.

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Achtung! Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Math Homework.

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Three Studies Confirm: Obamacare Isn’t a Job Killer

by DiannaSpooner Posted on August 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Among the many (many, many) catastrophes predicted by opponents of Obamacare was that a lot of workers would find their hours reduced against their wishes. Why? Because Obamacare requires firms to provide health insurance only to employees who work 30 hours or more. So lots of companies would do their best to reduce worker hours to 29 or less in order to avoid having to pay for health coverage.

Unlike a lot of the gloomy scenarios tossed out by Obamacare opponents, this one wasn’t entirely ridiculous. Any employer mandate is going to have a cutoff somewhere, and there really is an incentive for companies to drop as many workers as possible below that cutoff. So it’s something that can only be settled by actual research. The question is: was there an increase between 2013 and 2014 of workers just under the 30-hour threshold? Max Ehrenfreund surveys a few recent studies and says the answer is no:

Analysts at ADP studied the payrolls of the firms’ clients, about 75,000 U.S. firms and organizations. They expected that as businesses prepared for the mandate to take effect, they would adjust their employees’ schedules, limiting them to no more than 30 hours a week. Yet ADP found no overall change in employees’ weekly schedules between 2013 and last year.

According to ADP’s analysis, shifts in scheduling were trivial in every sector of the economy, even in industries that rely heavily on part-time work, such as leisure and hospitality.

….ADP’s findings were confirmed in another study by Aparna Mathur and Sita Nataraj Slavov of George Mason University and Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Their paper, published this month in the journal Applied Economics Letters, uses data from the federal Current Population Survey and finds no statistically significant change in the proportion of part-time workers in the sectors most likely to be affected by Obamacare, such as janitorial and restaurant work.

A third study confirmed these findings, and also found that eligibility for Medicaid didn’t discourage people from holding down a job (since they no longer needed a job in order to get health insurance). The study found no difference between states that expanded Medicaid and those that didn’t.

Why does it turn out that employers didn’t cut their workers’ hours? One possibility is that a year isn’t long enough for a study like this. Maybe over the next few years, as the cost of the mandate becomes clearer, companies will start getting more aggressive about cutting worker hours.

But I’d offer another possibility: the mandate didn’t have a big effect because most companies already do something like this on their own. They offer health insurance as a standard benefit only to full-time workers, and the cutoff for full-time status is usually somewhere between 25 and 35 hours. So when the mandate came along, it just didn’t change anything for most employers.

This is why two of the studies looked specifically at things like hospitality and restaurant work. These are sectors where employers (a) already maintain highly variable schedules and (b) mostly didn’t offer health insurance at all prior to Obamacare. When the mandate came along, these folks were faced with a sudden additional cost, but one that they could reduce pretty easily reduce by limiting schedules to less than 30 hours. And yet, even there the researchers found no change—or at least, no change large enough to measure.

This is not the final word, but it’s the best we have right now. Three research teams, including one not especially sympathetic to Obamacare, have all found the same thing: Obamacare isn’t a job killer. Nor is it even a schedule killer. Life goes on normally, except for the fact that millions of people now have health insurance who didn’t before.

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Three Studies Confirm: Obamacare Isn’t a Job Killer

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The Brownback Crash Continues in Kansas

by ChristeP38 Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Menzie Chinn updates us today on how things are going in Sam Brownback’s Kansas. Answer: not so good. The chart on the right compares Kansas to the rest of the country using coincident indexes, an aggregate measure of economic performance tracked monthly by the Philadelphia Fed. It consists of the following four measures:

Nonfarm payroll employment
Average hours worked in manufacturing
Unemployment rate
Wage and salary disbursements deflated by the consumer price index

The index is set to 100 at the beginning of 2011, when Gov. Brownback took office. Brownback instituted an aggressive program of tax cuts and budget reductions, promising that this supply-side intervention would supercharge the state’s economy. But the reality has been rather different. Kansas has underperformed the US economy ever since Brownback was elected.

Why is that? Is the Fed using the wrong employment data? Chinn says no: “The decline shows up regardless of whether employment is measured using the establishment or household surveys.” Is it the weather? “Drought does not seem to be an explanation to me.” How about the poor performance of the aircraft industry? “Evidence from employment data is not supportive of this thesis.”

So what is it? “I would argue much of the downturn especially post January 2013 is self-inflicted, due to the fiscal policies implemented.” Surprise! I wonder if Kansans will ever figure this out?

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The Brownback Crash Continues in Kansas

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Scott Walker’s Abortion Flimflam Explained! (Maybe.)

by JuliannDiggs Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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I had almost given up on anyone helping me understand what Scott Walker meant when he explained why he opposed abortion exceptions not just for rape and incest, but also to save the life of the mother. “There are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother,” Walker said during Thursday’s debate. “That’s been consistently proven.”

But then a reader came to my rescue, and it turns out that Jonathan Allen had it right in the first place. It really does derive from the Catholic doctrine of intent in medical care. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association provides the nickel explanation:

The reality [] is that an abortion is never necessary to save the life of the mother. This is, quite simply, a choice that a mother and her doctor never have to make, and Ms. Kelly has contributed to the already widespread ignorance on this subject.

The nearest circumstance would be what are called ectopic pregnancies, the anomaly in which the fertilized egg attaches to the Fallopian tube and never implants in the womb of the mother. Removal of the Fallopian tube is necessary to preserve the mother’s life and thus is a procedure that indirectly — not directly — causes the death of an unborn child. This technically is not even an abortion, because the procedure is done for the purpose of removing the Fallopian tube, not killing the baby.

As Lauren Enriquez writes, “The abortion procedure is not — ever — necessary to save the life of a mother…A true abortion — in which the direct intention is to end the life of a human being — is not a treatment for any type of maternal health risk.”

Now this explanation I understand. The key step in this tap dance is to declare that some procedures that terminate a pregnancy aren’t “true” abortions. Even if you know ahead of time that a procedure will abort the fetus, it’s not really an abortion as long as abortion isn’t your intent.

In other words, I just didn’t have my cynicism meter turned up high enough. When Walker said there are always “alternatives” that can protect the life of the mother, he was only talking about true abortions. He wasn’t talking about medical procedures that kill the fetus only as a side effect. Those aren’t true abortions, so they’re not part of the class of procedures for which there are alternatives.

Yeesh. If this is really the explanation, it takes political misdirection to a new level. All that’s left now is to explain what Walker meant by “This has been consistently proven.” That makes it sound very science-y, but this has nothing to do with science. It has to do with the meaning of the word “abortion.” Walker has chosen a specific term-of-art definition that’s quite different from how most people understand the word. This allows him to say something that seems to mean one thing but actually means another.

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Scott Walker’s Abortion Flimflam Explained! (Maybe.)

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China Finally Adopts Market-Based Value for its Currency, But We May Not Like the Results

by AdolphJanzen164 Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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For years the United States has been complaining that China artificially undervalues its currency, which makes their exports cheaper and gives them a trade advantage over American firms. In response, China has gradually let the renminbi rise. By 2015, it had roughly reached fair market value—though not all American politicians agreed about that.

But then the Chinese economy started going sour. Exports were down. The stock market crashed. Growth slowed. What to do? Answer: devalue the renminbi. But instead of doing it by fiat, pretend that you’re merely responding to market forces:

Every morning, Beijing sets a target for the trading of its currency against the U.S. dollar, then allows investors to buy and sell the currency for 2 percent more or less. Tuesday’s change relaxes the government’s control over setting that rate. The midpoint will now be set at the market’s closing rate for the previous day.

….Now, market forces could pressure the currency to depreciate rather than appreciate, making Chinese products comparatively cheaper….In China, the depreciation will be a boon for exporters and heavy industry, but bad news for companies that depend on imported goods. Shares of Chinese airlines plummeted on Tuesday, as analysts predicted that the higher cost of oil in U.S. dollars would weigh on their earnings.

It’s convenient to have a market-based policy as long as that produces a devaluation of the currency. But will Chinese authorities stick to this policy even when it means the renminbi will appreciate? Good question.

So what does it all mean? Here are a few obvious thoughts:

This is yet another vote of no confidence in the Chinese economy. When you put together everything that Chinese authorities have done over the past six months, I’d say they’re close to full-scale panic.
Investors are likely to push the renminbi even lower, and this is going to make life harder on anyone in China with dollar-denominated debt. This includes lots of local governments who have been financing the housing boom, which means this devaluation could hasten the housing bust everyone has been waiting for.
This will be a political issue in the US, but a tricky one. China is manipulating its currency to its own advantage—boo! hiss!—but has also adopted a policy that allows the renminbi’s value to be dictated by market forces—which is what we’ve been demanding all along. It will be interesting to see how all the Republican presidential candidates decide to respond to this.

Generally speaking, I think this should be taken as bad news. The world economy remains fragile, and if the Chinese economy is falling into recession—as the Chinese themselves seem to believe—it will affect all of us. And not in a good way. Stay tuned.

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China Finally Adopts Market-Based Value for its Currency, But We May Not Like the Results

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