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Ted Cruz Is Not Going to Eliminate the IRS

by AlannahVKGC Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ted Cruz wants to eliminate the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and HUD. Big deal. Even if he could do it, all it means is that all their functions would get divvied up among other departments. Wake me up when Cruz tells us what actual programs he’d eliminate.

But Cruz also thinks he can eliminate the IRS. Or, in any case, “the IRS as we know it.” Has anyone asked him just why he thinks this? His tax plan still has a 10 percent income tax. It has a standard deduction. It has a child tax credit. It has an EITC. It includes a charitable deduction. It includes a home mortgage deduction. And there’s a business VAT to replace the corporate income tax. So who’s going to oversee and collect and audit all this stuff? Tax fairies?

And while we’re at it, I’m still waiting to hear more about Carly Fiorina’s three-page tax code. Can’t we at least see a rough draft?

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Ted Cruz Is Not Going to Eliminate the IRS

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Here’s Why Other Candidates Are Giving Ben Carson a Pass

by LupitaPrior Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Why didn’t any of the other candidates go after Ben Carson last night? He’s a frontrunner, isn’t he?

Yeah, he is. Here’s my guess: when you see a guy digging himself into a hole, why get in the way? More and more, as the stress of the campaign gets to him, Carson is freely exposing himself as an honest-to-God crackpot. Not just a hardcore conservative like Ted Cruz or an ego-driven windbag like Donald Trump, but a true Glenn Beck/Michele Bachmann/Alex Jones type who really and truly believes in fever swamp conspiracy theories. Criticize his past and he goes full frontal on every bit of listserv crankery about Barack Obama—and he does it pretty fluently, too. He obviously knows this stuff cold. Push him on his odd world view and he starts spouting off about how “secular progressives” are destroying America and probably trying to kill him. Ask him about his theory that the pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain, and he doesn’t blink. Sure he still believes that. Put him in a friendly setting and he’ll give you the full nine yards about how political correctness is responsible for everything from drug addiction to persecution of Christians to Marxist tyranny and gun confiscation.

This is a guy who’s set to implode all by himself, so why waste energy attacking him? Eventually he’ll suggest that the pope is actually Satan or something, and then he’ll be forced to slink back to the rubber-chicken circuit—with a higher speaking fee to soothe his pain. In the meantime, better to worry about the folks who might actually pose a real threat.

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Here’s Why Other Candidates Are Giving Ben Carson a Pass

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Here’s the Latest in the GOP Horserace

by FranCarranza Posted on November 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Apropos of nothing in particular, here’s the latest Pollster aggregate for the Republican nomination. It looks to me like Trump is finally sliding, while Carson seems to have plateaued around 20 percent or so. Rubio and Cruz are up over the past few weeks, but it’s too soon to tell if this just a blip, or the start of something real. Jeb Bush is declining slightly, but not out of it yet.

So who gets all the Trump and Carson votes when those two inevitably implode? And is it really inevitable? Beats me. This is just the weirdest Republican race ever. Ever since Scott Walker, my early favorite, displayed such awesome ineptitude that he literally dropped to 0 percent in the polls, I’ve been reluctant to utter a peep about who seems likely to win this year. Who knows? Maybe it will all come down to a savage brawl between the two Floridians.

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Here’s the Latest in the GOP Horserace

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The Great Mystery of Commute Time and Income Mobility

by SantoColeman Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s something I ran across accidentally today. In a working paper released a few months ago, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren try to estimate the effect on low-income children of moving to better neighborhoods. In particular, which traits correspond to higher incomes 20 years later?

All the usual suspects have high correlations: segregation, social capital, crime, income inequality, population density, etc. But the very highest correlation—by quite a bit—is for commuting time. Moving to a neighborhood where most people commute less than 15 minutes has a big impact:

Twenty years of exposure to a commuting zone with a 1 standard deviation higher fraction of people with commute times less than 15 minutes increases a child’s income by 7%….These correlations with commute times are unlikely the direct effect of being closer to jobs….It is likely some characteristic of places correlated with commute times that drives the underlying pattern.

In other words, this doesn’t mean that if mom or dad gets a job closer to home, junior will enjoy a higher income when he grows up. It means that if the family moves to a neighborhood that’s close to where its residents work, junior’s income will benefit.

This seems a little unlikely, though it’s not impossible to imagine that neighborhoods where parents are home more of the time have a beneficial effect on kids. Still, the authors are most likely right: commute time is probably standing in for something else. Perhaps neighborhoods that are close to lots of jobs have certain characteristics that are good for kids, and short commutes are just an accidental bonus.

Either way, this sure seems interesting enough to follow up on. Is it really commute time that matters? If not, what is it a proxy for?

NOTE: The chart shows the effect on boys whose parents have incomes in the bottom quarter. The effect is pretty much the same for girls.

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The Great Mystery of Commute Time and Income Mobility

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Obamacare Co-Op Closures: A Headache, Not a Catastrophe

by Amy3756yyoaopho Posted on November 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Six years ago the Obama administration backed away from offering a public option in Obamacare. In its place, we got nonprofit co-ops. Paul Krugman was not impressed:

Let’s be clear: the supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham. That’s not just my opinion; it’s what the market says: stocks of health insurance companies soared on news that the Gang of Six senators trying to negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public plan. Clearly, investors believe that co-ops would offer little real competition to private insurers.

Well, both Krugman and the market were right: co-ops never signed up all that many patients, and now they’re failing. By next year there could well be none left.

This has led to a round of breathless news reports. The failures have “handed Republicans a new weapon in their campaign against the health law.” Patients are “scrambling” to find new coverage. The closures have left behind a trail of “human wreckage.”

Fair enough, I suppose. Co-ops probably were never a good idea, and their bankruptcies really are causing a lot of grief for the people who had signed up with them. Still, in the midst of all this, it’s worth pointing out what we’re talking about:

Roughly 500,000 co-op customers will have to switch insurance plans.
That’s out of 30 million people who already switch insurance plans each year.1
And because of Obamacare, co-op customers can shop for a new plan pretty easily.

It’s not unfair to make political hay out of this, especially if you thought co-ops were a bad idea to begin with. But the bottom line is that instead of 30 million people switching plans, about 30.5 million will switch plans next year—and they’ll be able to do it more easily than they could in the past. It’s a headache, but hardly a catastrophe.

1Mostly against their will. About 68 percent are forced to switch because they changed jobs or their employer decided to change carriers. Another 16 percent switched because their plan was too expensive. Less than 10 percent switched because their new plan offered better service.

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Obamacare Co-Op Closures: A Headache, Not a Catastrophe

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Friday Cat Blogging – 30 October 2015

by TresaTietjen5 Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hopper has been hogging the catblogging show lately, so today you get a double dose of her brother: Hilbert and his shadow. That shadow looks very Halloween-y, doesn’t it? Of course, that means lots of firecrackers tomorrow, which probably means lots of time spent hiding under the bed. On the bright side, we also set our clocks back, so everyone gets to sleep in an extra hour to make up for it. That sounds like a pretty good trade to me. I’m not sure what the cats think of it.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 30 October 2015

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Obamacare Performs Miracle Time Machine Destruction of Past Economy

by Stephanie5550 Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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In Wednesday’s debate, Carly Fiorina said this: “We have 400,000 small businesses forming every year in this country….The bad news is, we have 470,000 going out of business every year. And why? They cite Obamacare.”

Later that night, I spent more time than I’m willing to admit trying to track down that number for business closures. Today, via Steve Benen and the Washington Post, I found it: it’s from a 2014 Brookings study about business dynamism. Annotated chart below. So there we have it. Mystery solved. Small business closures have been rising steadily since Reagan was president, and in 2011 the number hit 470,000. And the reason they closed is because of Obamacare. Who would have guessed?

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Obamacare Performs Miracle Time Machine Destruction of Past Economy

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We Should Stop Helping the Silver Scammers

by ArielMathew9449 Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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We’ve all seen ads like this a million times, but for some reason this one finally caught my attention. It’s the usual pitch: there’s a limited supply of silver bars, and California residents can get them cheap if they act fast! “For the next 2 days residents who find their state listed on the Distribution List above in bold are getting individual State Silver Bars at just the state minimum of $57 set by the Federated Mint.” And if you order ten bars, shipping and handling are free!

The current fixing for an ounce of silver is about $15. So if you pay $1,140 for $150 worth of silver, they’ll throw in shipping gratis. What a deal.

Anyway, I know this is all legal because the fine print says yada yada yada, and there’s no law that prevents selling goods for an astronomical price. But really: are we all so desperate for advertising dollars that we have to sell space to folks like this? I guess the answer is yes, but maybe that ought to change. We all know who gets taken in by these kinds of ads, and it doesn’t speak well of any publication that continues to be complicit in this.

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We Should Stop Helping the Silver Scammers

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A Few Unanswered Questions From Last Night’s Debate

by JinaByles825 Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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After reviewing the transcript of last night’s debate I realized I had a few leftover questions. Nothing hard. Just some simple, easy-peasy stuff:

Carly Fiorina: You say you want to reduce the tax code to three pages using normal 11-point type. I’m tired of paying our CPA every year to prepare our tax returns, so this sounds terrific. It also sounds short enough that you can produce draft legislation for us pretty quickly. How hard can three pages be? When do we get to see it?

Mike Huckabee: You say we can save Medicare by focusing on cures for four big diseases that apparently we’ve been ignoring: cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease. Since I happen to have bone cancer, this sounds like a great idea to me. In fact, I’d be OK with pauperizing the whole country in order to speed up cures for multiple myeloma. So what’s the plan? I checked out your website, but the only mention of cancer I could find was a blog post comparing Iran to cancer. This makes me concerned about how serious you are. Do you have some ideas about research priorities? How much money will you spend on this? Inquiring minds want to know.

Donald Trump: Some of your luxury resorts have policies that ban guests from carrying guns. You said you’d change this, and since you’re the boss I assume you can do it with the stroke of a pen. When are you going to do this?

Marco Rubio: You might have been confused about John Harwood’s tax question last night. I think he agrees that your tax plan is generous to the very poor. But now that we have that straight, why does your plan increase middle-class income by only 15 percent compared to 28 percent for the top earners? As he said, that really does seem kind of backward for a guy who’s so dedicated to average workers like your parents.

Ben Carson: Last night you said that our economy is doing poorly because it’s “tethered down right now with so many regulations.” But then you failed to make the obvious blimp joke. What’s up with that?

Ted Cruz: Carl Quintanilla rudely refused to let you talk about the debt ceiling even though that was what he asked you about. But it sure seemed like you had something you wanted to get off your chest about that. So: what do you think about the debt ceiling? And one other thing: are you serious about returning to the gold standard? Really?

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A Few Unanswered Questions From Last Night’s Debate

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Of Course You Should Go Back in Time and Kill Hitler

by mr2ql Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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For some reason, the New York Times Magazine decided to poll its readers to see if they’d be willing to go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler as a baby. Only 42 percent said yes.

WTF? I assume there are no time travel paradoxes involved here, nor any baroque inventions about how the world actually ends up worse without World War II. Science fiction nerds like me (and lots of you, I assume) love to natter on about stuff like this, but it really doesn’t seem like the NYTM’s thing. Basically, you get transported back to Hitler’s crib in 1889, you shoot him, and a few seconds later you return home. End of story. Would you do it?

I’m not an especially bloodthirsty guy, but hell yes, I’d do it. Sure, maybe World War II would happen anyway, though that’s hardly inevitable. Maybe the Holocaust too. But even a reasonable chance of stopping either one of them would be well worth the life of a baby who would otherwise grow up to be a monster. What am I missing here? I wouldn’t even hesitate.

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Of Course You Should Go Back in Time and Kill Hitler

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