Tag Archives: frank

Greece Caves In

by DenisBolt94 Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Our story so far: On June 22nd, Greece proposed an austerity package of spending cuts and tax increases worth about €8 billion over two years. European leaders called it a credible proposal, the first they had ever seen from Greece. By June 24th, they had changed their tune. They were roughly OK with the €8 billion figure, but didn’t like the Greek tax and spending plans for getting there. Later in the day, the Europeans responded by making substantial changes to the Greek proposal and sending back a heavily red-lined revision.

The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, was apoplectic, arguing that what mattered was meeting the deficit target, not meeting it in specific ways. “This odd stance seems to indicate that either there is no interest in an agreement or that special interests are being backed,” he said. Two days later he abandoned the talks and called a referendum on the European proposal. Last Sunday the Greek population overwhelmingly rejected the European plan 61-38 percent.

So how did that work out for Greece? Not so well:

Under a 10-page blueprint completed late Thursday, the country said it would undertake austerity measures worth between 12 billion and 13 billion euros ($13 billion to $14 billion), including raising taxes on cafes, bars and restaurants.

The amount is significantly higher than the package of cuts that Greek voters rejected in a hastily called referendum on the bailout Sunday. But nearly two weeks of a banking shutdown that has brought the economy to a virtual standstill have left this Mediterranean nation with few other options to avoid sliding into bankruptcy.

The Greek blueprint for pension cuts and VAT increases is essentially copied word-for-word from the June 24 European proposal. There may still be sticking points elsewhere (I haven’t done an exhaustive line-by-line comparison of the two documents), but VAT and pensions were always the key areas of difference. Combine those concessions with the higher deficit target in the new blueprint and Greece hasn’t just caved in to the Europeans, it’s all but prostrated itself and begged not to be kicked out of the eurozone.

Or so it seems. There’s always the possibility of gotchas hidden away in a stray word or two. But at a first glance, it looks like total capitulation. Two weeks of bank closings and import stoppages has given the Greeks a vivid taste of what life would be like if Europe forced it to abandon the euro—as it seemed they were all too willing to do—and that short taste was quite enough, thank you very much. Viewed through that lens, apparently another few years of German-enforced austerity didn’t look so bad after all.

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Greece Caves In

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Quiz of the Day: What Is This Map?

by JuanBoettcher Posted on July 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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This map was released today as part of a 14-page research report. What is it?

Here are your choices:

  1. Donald Trump’s claim of how many states Republicans will win if they nominate him for president.
  2. The creeping spread of socialism in Barack Obama’s America.
  3. Other than white, the predominant color in each state’s flag.
  4. Which states make it easy to look up health care prices.

Yeah, the answer is #4. Red means your state got a letter grade of F. In other words, 45 out of 50 states do exactly nothing to make health care pricing transparent for their residents. Here’s how this plays out in real life:

If any single fact illuminates why reining in health care spending is going to be easier said than done, it might be this: we don’t even really know why a typical, low-risk childbirth costs $1,200 at some hospitals and $12,000 at others.

….In Massachusetts, a state that passed a law in 2012 to make health care costs more transparent but still gets a grade of F anyway. –ed., a research team trying to track down the price of a simple left knee MRI without a contrast dye found themselves transferred to six or seven departments and playing phone tag for days. Among 22 hospitals in a survey by Barbara Anthony, a senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute, a free market public policy think tank, it took anywhere from 10 minutes to nearly a week and a half to get an answer. If it’s that difficult to figure out how much it will cost to get a short scan to look at your knee, good luck trying to pin down the cost of the miracle of life.

Is there any other significant area of life where it’s virtually impossible to find out how much something will cost before you decide to buy it? I sure can’t think of one.

The full report is here, but it warns that “you will find little progress since last year and, in some cases, regression.” Sounds like a fun read.

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Quiz of the Day: What Is This Map?

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The Point of Democracy Is to Keep Powerful Elites From Becoming Complete Jackasses

by AlbertinaHollins Posted on June 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Daniel Bell has written a new book making the case that “Chinese-style meritocracy is, in important respects, a better system of governance than western liberal democracy.” That’s possible, I suppose. Tyler Cowen noodles over the arguments and tosses out a few thoughts. Here’s one:

4. Most humans in history seem to have favored meritocratic rule over democracy, and before the 19th century democracy was rare, even in the limited form of male-dominated or property owner-dominated republics. It is possible that the current advantage of democracy is rooted in technology, or some other time-specific factor, which ultimately may prove temporary. That said, I still observe plenty of democracies producing relatively well-run countries, so I don’t see significant evidence that a turning point against democracy has been reached.

I know Cowen is just throwing out some ideas to be provocative, not seriously backing any of them. Still, I think you have to take a pretty blinkered view of “most humans” to throw this one out at all. It’s true that humans are hairless primates who naturally gravitate to a hierarchical society, but there’s little evidence that “most humans” prefer non-democratic societies. There’s loads of evidence that powerful elites prefer elite-driven societies, and have gone to great lengths throughout history to maintain them against the masses. Whether the masses themselves ever thought this was a good arrangement is pretty much impossible to say.

Of course, once the technologies of communication, transportation, and weaponry became cheaper and more democratized, it turned out the masses were surprisingly hostile to elite rule and weren’t afraid to show it. So perhaps it’s not so impossible to say after all. In fact, most humans throughout history probably haven’t favored “meritocratic” rule, but mostly had no practical way to show it except in small, usually failed rebellions. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, and suddenly the toiling masses had the technology to make a decent showing against their overlords. Given a real option, it turned out they nearly all preferred some form of democracy after all.

Which brings us to the real purpose of democracy: to rein in the rich and powerful. Without democracy, societies very quickly turn into the Stanford Prison Experiment. With it, that mostly doesn’t happen. That’s a huge benefit, even without counting free speech, fair trials, and all the other gewgaws of democracy. It is, so far, the only known social construct that reliably keeps powerful elites from becoming complete jackasses. That’s pretty handy.

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The Point of Democracy Is to Keep Powerful Elites From Becoming Complete Jackasses

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Resentment and Outrage Are All That Matter in Europe Now

by DanaOFerrall Posted on June 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Larry Summers thinks it will be a catastrophe if Greece repudiates its debt and “financially separates from Europe.” Greece will become a failed state; Europe will face a refugee crisis; and both Europe and the IMF will face huge defaults on their loans. Oh, this might not cause financial contagion throughout all of Europe, but then again, that’s what everyone said about Long-Term Capital Management, subprime mortgages, and the fall of Lehman Brothers. And look what happened there.

So what does Summers think should happen? Here’s his prescription:

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras needs to do what is necessary to make reaching an agreement politically feasible for his fellow Europeans….He needs to be clear that he will accept further value-added tax and pension reforms to achieve primary surplus targets this year and next, but that he expects a clear recognition that if Greece does its part, debt will be written off on a large scale.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European authorities must do what is necessary to make policy adjustments politically tenable in Greece. That means acknowledging that the vast majority of the financial support given to Greece has gone to pay back banks rather than to support the Greek budget. They must agree on debt relief and recognize the degree of adjustment in Greek spending that has taken place: with nearly 30 percent of government workers laid off. It also means announcing their intention to accelerate economic growth throughout Europe.

In case that wasn’t clear, here’s a translation: the leaders of Europe are idiots. Everyone with a room temperature IQ has known for years that something like this is the deal that needs to be made. It’s been discussed endlessly in meeting rooms, op-eds, scholarly papers, and conferences. Not only is it not a secret—or rocket science—it’s been the obvious solution forever. But Europe vs. Greece is now like the Hatfields vs. the McCoys. Nobody cares anymore how it started, whose fault any of it was, or what the catastrophic results of continued obstinacy will be. They don’t even care much about inflicting pain on their own people as long they also inflict pain on the other side.

They are idiots. Not stupid, mind you, but idiots all the same. They know what needs to be done. They’re just too committed to their own resentment and outrage to do it.

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Resentment and Outrage Are All That Matter in Europe Now

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No Matter How You Slice It, Obamacare Reduces the Federal Deficit

by MackMarsden Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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We now live in the blessed era of dynamic scoring, something that Republicans have lusted over for decades. When the Congressional Budget Office makes economic projections, it can no longer just look at spending and taxes and subtract one from the other to get deficits. No siree. First they have to pay homage to the Laffer Curve and acknowledge that lower taxes will supercharge the economy and higher taxes will tank the economy. Then they recompute how much tax revenue they’re really going to get.

Anyway, CBO is now required to do this, so here’s their projection about how Obamacare will affect the federal deficit. Under the old-fashioned method, it will lower the deficit by $118 billion in 2025. But using the sleek new dynamic scoring system insisted on by Republicans, the truth becomes evident and Democratic evasions are exposed for all the world to see. Obamacare will, um, still reduce the deficit. But only by $98 billion.

In truth, this stuff is so open to interpretation and assumptions (and future congressional action) that neither number means much. Still, if you want to know if Obamacare pays for itself using our best estimates, it does. Even using dynamic scoring, it pays for itself. That’s more than Republicans ever do with their programs.

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No Matter How You Slice It, Obamacare Reduces the Federal Deficit

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Mirror, Mirror On the Wall, Who’s the Most Reactionary of Them All?

by FaithAEHxvuqw Posted on June 17, 2015

Mother Jones

Over at Wonkblog, Pablo Barberá uses Twitter to rank all the presidential candidates from most liberal to most conservative. I’ll leave it up to the experts to debate whether his methodology is sound, since, you know, Twitter. Anyway, here it is:

What I liked about this ranking was that Barberá included a handful of media outlets in order to provide some landmarks for comparison, and he had the good taste to include Mother Jones as one of them. It turns out we rank in between Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee, and right smack in the ideological middle of the congressional Democratic caucus.

Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But I figured everyone would want to know.

POSTSCRIPT: Also, note where Scott Walker is. The guy is really conservative.

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Mirror, Mirror On the Wall, Who’s the Most Reactionary of Them All?

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Hillary Clinton Does Not Like the Daily Mail

by Tyree1784qgtrvr Posted on June 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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From the LA Times:

Clinton campaign gets into another scuffle with the press corps

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s long-frosty relationship with the media hit another icy patch in New Hampshire on Monday when campaign officials told major news organizations that certain reporters were not welcome at the candidate’s events.

….The campaign early on asked the press corps to establish and run a pool system in which a small group of reporters would cover such events and file reports that all reporters could share. The pool duty rotates among a group of roughly 14 news organizations that have committed to send a reporter when their turn comes.

Monday, that turn fell to the Daily Mail. The campaign did not approve. Campaign aides told the paper’s reporter, David Martosko, that he would not be allowed into the day’s pooled events….To many reporters, the campaign was crossing a line….The pool arrangement is designed to keep campaign officials out of the business of deciding which reporters can represent the media at what events.

The HRC campaign says the problem is that the Mail is a foreign news outlet, but it’s hard to take that excuse at face value since they’ve had no problem with allowing other foreign news organizations in the pool. They also apparently gave no warning that Martosko wouldn’t be allowed his turn. (Martosko’s version is here.) So what’s going on?

Whenever I read stuff like this, I can’t figure out what to think. On the one hand, the press is what it is. It’s part of the campaign landscape. Even if they act badly, what’s the point in deliberately pissing them off, especially in dumb little ways that don’t really accomplish anything?

On the other hand, maybe the Clinton folks have decided that the traditional press simply doesn’t matter anymore. So the hell with it. She doesn’t like the way they treat her, so she’s going to screw with them without worrying about it.

I dunno. I really can’t make sense out of it.

NOTE: I’m not asking whether the press treats Clinton badly. I think the answer is pretty obvious, but that’s not what this post is about. I just want to know what motivates an obvious professional like HRC to keep giving them reasons not to like her.

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Hillary Clinton Does Not Like the Daily Mail

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Are We Really In Control of Our Own Outrage? The Case of Social Media and Tim Hunt.

by WayneKarpinski Posted on June 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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British scientist Tim Hunt. We all know his story by now, don’t we? Here’s a quick refresher:

  1. In 2001 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
  2. In 2015, speaking in Korea, he decided to make a Sheldonian1 joke about women in the lab. “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.”
  3. Social media immediately erupted into a firestorm. Within days he was fired by University College London and the European Research Council and had essentially been exiled from the scientific community in Britain.

There’s no disagreement about either the inappropriateness of Hunt’s remark or the insufficiency of his “explanation” the next day. What I’m more interested in, however, is the binary nature of the punishment for this kind of thing. As recently as 20 years ago, nothing would have happened because there would have been no real mechanism for reporting Hunt’s joke. At most, some of the women in the audience might have gotten together later for lunch, rolled their eyes, and wondered just how much longer they were going to have to put up with this crap. And that would have been that.

Today, remarks like this end up on social media within minutes and mushroom into a firestorm of outrage within hours. Institutions panic. The hordes must be appeased. Heads are made to roll and careers ended. Then something else happens to engage the outrage centers of our brains and it’s all forgotten.

Neither of these strikes me as the best possible response to something essentially trivial like this. Ignoring it presumes acceptance, while digital torches and pitchforks teach a lesson that’s far too harsh and ruinous, especially for a first-time offense.

The fact that media outlets had limited space and were unlikely to report stuff like this hardly made it right to ignore it in 1995. Likewise, the fact that social media has evolved into an almost tailor-made outrage machine for every offensive remark ever uttered doesn’t make it right to insist on the death penalty every time someone says something obnoxious.

I’m whistling into the wind here, but why do we allow the current state of the art in technology to drive our responses to things like this? Hunt deserved a reprimand. He deserved to be mocked on Twitter. That’s probably about it. He didn’t deserve the guillotine. One of these days we’re going to have to figure out how to properly handle affairs like this based on their actual impact and importance, not their ability to act as clickbait on Facebook. We all have some growing up to do.

1Sheldonian (Shell • doe’ • nee • un) adj. TVE < OE sheldon, valley with steep sides 1. awkward, socially inept behavior, esp. among male scientists toward women.

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Are We Really In Control of Our Own Outrage? The Case of Social Media and Tim Hunt.

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Chuck Schumer Is Not Working the Refs Very Well

by MairaSiler Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

This is kind of fascinating:

After almost six months in the minority, Charles E. Schumer says Senate Democrats aren’t afraid to be obstructionists, detailing a strategy of blocking appropriations bills and other Republican agenda items until they get what they want….Schumer (D-N.Y.) said they are joining with President Barack Obama behind a plan to try to force Republicans to the negotiating table over everything from domestic and defense spending to highway funding and international tax reform.

….The White House-backed plan to get Republicans to support more spending for domestic programs by blocking floor consideration of appropriations bills was developed in a series of closed-door meetings held over the course of several weeks.

….To maintain their leverage, Democrats have decided to block all spending bills starting with the defense appropriations measure headed to the floor next week. Durbin told reporters on Tuesday that there is also no ruling out a blockade of program authorizations, like upcoming votes on highway funding.

It’s not the substance of Schumer’s comments that’s fascinating. By now, even the checkout clerks at the local Safeway know that Democrats plan to obstruct everything and anything. It’s time for Republicans to get a taste of their own dog food.

No, what’s fascinating is that Schumer is so open about it. As I recall, ever since 2009 Republicans have adamantly refused to ever publicly admit that this was their strategy.1 And there was sound thinking behind that. The rules of objective journalism prevent reporters from just flatly attributing something to a party unless they have a party leader on the record fessing up to it. So instead they have to tiptoe around the subject, or quote liberal activists accusing Republicans of obstructionism, or something like that. This leaves things a little fuzzy or “controversial” in a lot of people’s minds, which means they never really accept the whole obstructionism story. Hey, maybe each individual filibuster really is a matter of principle.

But if a party leader just comes out and admits it, then that’s that. No one will ever believe that Democrats are being principled because Schumer has already given the game away. Republicans were obstructionist, so we’re going to be too.

That’s a mistake. It may seem dumb to keep up a pretense that everyone knows is baloney, but there really is a reason for it. It won’t fool all the people all the time, but who cares? It will handcuff the press, and thereby fool some of the people some of the time. That’s worth a lot.

1This is why President Obama keeps talking about “working” with Republicans and “finding common ground” even though he knows perfectly well by now that this isn’t going to happen. He knows the press has to report it regardless of whether they think he really believes it. This means people see it on the news, and some of them will continue to believe that this is what he’s trying to do.2

2Which, admittedly, he is trying to do in a few special cases. But not many.

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Chuck Schumer Is Not Working the Refs Very Well

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“Streamlining” Government Is a Dubious Campaign Message, Especially For Democrats

by CooperGuajardo Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

A few days ago I criticized a policy analysis from Stan Greenberg that, among other things, recommended that Democrats run on a commitment to streamlining government. But exactly what concrete proposals would that entail? Today, Mark Schmitt takes a crack at answering:

“Streamlining” government does not have to involve only cutting costs, though that might be a part of it. The tax code, for example, is now as complex for low- and middle-income taxpayers as for the wealthy, littered with credits and deductions, some refundable and some not. Streamlining government could include a strong commitment to making the tax code simpler at the low end and shifting resources to fight fraud at the top end. It could include, for example, efforts to create a single, simple portal to government services ranging from health insurance under the Affordable Care Act to small business assistance—similar to the “no wrong door” initiatives in several states.

Above all, it should include a positive vision of reform of the political process, and the role of money, that does more than reimpose limits on the political influence of the very wealthy, but empowers citizens as donors and participants. And, the most difficult challenge of all, there has to be an effort to restore to the public face of government, the legislative process, a sense of compromise and shared commitment to the public good, despite deep disagreements.

Simplifying the tax code for the middle class is fine, I suppose, though nearly half the population already files either 1040 EZ or short forms. But that single portal sounds to me like something that’s way, way, way harder than it sounds. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But in order to make a difference, not only does this portal have to be a work of genius, so do all the things it leads to. It doesn’t do any good to make it easy to find Obamacare if it’s still a pain in the ass to sign up for it. Honestly—and I say this from at least a little experience—this is the kind of thing that sounds good until you have to put together the interagency committee to actually create it.

I don’t mean to just pooh pooh other people’s ideas. But I think it’s telling that Schmitt had only two or three proposals, and most of them are either really hard or probably not that effective.

Look: the US government is really big. There’s no way around that. And as every large corporation in the world knows, there’s just a limit to how easy you can make things when a bureaucracy gets really big. There’s no magic wand. That said, here’s what I’d like to see: some detailed polling work that digs below the surface of “streamlining” and asks people just what it is about the government that really burns them up. I suspect (but don’t know!) that you’d discover a few things:

A lot of complaints—probably the majority—would be about state and local issues. (Business licenses, building inspections, traffic tickets, etc. etc.)
A lot of the complaints would be unrelated to government complexity: taxes are too high, guns should be unregulated, abortions should be outlawed, and so forth.
When we finally got to the complaints that are (a) about the federal government and (b) truly about the difficulty of getting something done, the griping would be all over the map. The truth is that it’s mostly businesses—especially large ones—that engage frequently with federal regulations. Aside from taxes and Medicare/Social Security, most individuals don’t very often. But when they do, they’re naturally going to believe that their particular circumstance should have been way easier to handle. In some cases they’re right. In most cases, they simply don’t know how many different circumstances the agency in question has to handle.

I’m not saying nothing can be done. I just have a suspicion that complaints about the “incompetence” or “red tape” of the federal government are mostly smokescreens for other things. Those other things are laws that people just don’t like, or fees they just don’t want to pay, or stuff they’ve merely heard from friends or the media.

This isn’t to say that streamlining government is a bad idea. It’s not. It’s a good idea! But I want details backed up by actual research, and even then, I suspect there’s less we can do than we think. As a platform for a campaign, I’m even more skeptical. Maybe a proposal to streamline some specific program that lots of people use and lots of people hate would work. But “streamlining government” as a generic pitch? I doubt it—especially for Democrats. It would be like Republicans wanting to “streamline” taxes for the rich. Would you believe them?

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“Streamlining” Government Is a Dubious Campaign Message, Especially For Democrats

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