Tag Archives: market

So How Are Millennial Men Doing?

by Allison05T Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis has a pair of posts up today that reignite a longstanding question: What’s the right way to measure inflation? And what does that mean about earnings and income mobility over time?

These are both complicated questions, but we can start with a very simple chart. If we want to compare, say, 30-year-old men to their fathers, and their fathers to their fathers, we can do it pretty easily. The Census Bureau collects data on median cash earnings (i.e., not counting health care, employment perks, or government benefits) and then all we have to do is adjust for inflation. But which measure of inflation?

The CPI story is grim: In the previous generation, young men earned about 8 percent more than their fathers. That’s not great, but it’s better than nothing. However, in this generation, millennial men earn 10 percent less than their fathers.

The PCE story is different. In the previous generation, young men earned 22 percent more than their fathers. That’s pretty good. In the current generation, millennial men earn about the same amount as their fathers. Stagnation like that is bad news, but at least millennials aren’t literally losing ground.

So which should we believe? There are arguments for both, and it’s a political hot potato too since inflation measures show up in all sorts of benefit calculations. It would be nice if the economic community could thrash out agreement on an overall best measure, and then make it available as a standard series going back 70 years, but if it turns out that the new measure leads to (for example) lower cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security benefits, you can expect a massive pushback. Republicans have shown a particularly aggressive form of this kind of political hackery in the past, approving of new inflation measures that would decrease benefits, but opposing the same measures if they meant that people might pay higher taxes.

All that conceded, we really should be able to agree on a good, general-purpose inflation measure. We can still have lots of different measures for specialized purposes, but the headline inflation rate should be something that, say, 90 percent of economists can agree about. (There will always be a few outliers.)

In a way, though, this doesn’t matter too much for the question of how millennial men are doing. On one measure, their market earnings have dropped from 124 percent of per-capita GDP to 72 percent. On the other measure they’ve dropped from 108 percent to 72 percent. That’s pretty grim either way.

For more on this, Pethokoukis points us, first, to a new study by Bruce Sacerdote, which suggests that consumption has increased substantially over the past several decades, once you adjust for inflation bias and include the growth of government benefits. On a less happy note, he also points us to a study by Scott Winship about income mobility. Winship concludes that although there’s still a fair amount of income mobility within the broad middle class, there’s very little at either end. Poor kids stay poor, and rich kids stay rich.

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So How Are Millennial Men Doing?

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Insurers Have Remained Mysteriously Quiet About Obamacare Repeal

by ShawnaKinsela Posted on March 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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A reader emails with a question:

The repeal-Obamacare mania has been on for years, but I have NEVER read anything about what the insurance industry is thinking or doing about it.

Neither have I! And it’s damn mysterious. Obviously the insurance industry was heavily involved in lobbying for Obamacare back in 2009, and just as obviously there are parts of Obamacare they don’t like. The patient pools have turned out to be sicker than they projected and insurance companies have struggled to make money on Obamacare policies. This year, however, they’re finally there—or close to it. The market has shaken out, premiums have risen to CBO-projected levels, and Obamacare is probably a break-even or better prospect for the insurers who have gutted through the first three years.

What’s more, like it or not, they’ve spent years adapting the way they do business. Everything from computer systems to physician compensation now follows Obamacare’s rules. This has cost tens of millions of dollars, but now it’s done. The last thing they need is to rip it all out and start from scratch.

And yet insurance companies have been surprisingly silent about the Republican plan to kill Obamacare. Do they prefer getting rid of it even if there’s an upfront cost? Have they given up, and assume that repeal is a foregone conclusion that’s not worth fighting? Is all their lobbying behind the scenes? It’s not clear. Insurers are pretty unanimous about wanting some certainty in the rules, but aside from that, this eight-week-old story from the New York Times still describes things pretty well:

Far from reflecting the magnitude of the moment, the most prominent message from lobbyists that lawmakers saw in their first week back at work was a narrowly focused advertisement from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce….Health care professionals are not totally silent, but industries that were integral to the creation of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 are keeping their voices down as Republicans rush to dismantle it.

….Some lobbyists have tacitly accepted the likelihood that major provisions of the health law will be repealed, setting their sights instead on shaping its replacement. They fear that if they come out strongly in opposition to repealing the law, they will lose their seats at the table as congressional Republicans and the Trump administration negotiate a replacement.

Insurers spent $150 million lobbying in support of Obamacare in 2009. So far they’ve spent virtually nothing in 2017. I continue to be mystified by this.

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Insurers Have Remained Mysteriously Quiet About Obamacare Repeal

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ERP Blogstorm Part 3: Banking

by GrantBramlett Posted on December 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Part three of our series of charts from the Economic Report of the President is all about banking. Mostly, it’s a trip down memory lane. Here’s a look at the worldwide market in derivatives over the past couple of decades:

The volume of derivatives went from $10 trillion to $35 trillion in two years starting right before the market crashed. Here’s another perspective on that:

In 1990, shadow banking was about the same size as the traditional banking sector. By 2007 it was more than twice as big. Just before the crash, shadow banking comprised two-thirds of the entire banking industry and it was almost entirely unregulated. This is why I was happy that Hillary Clinton at least mentioned shadow banking during the campaign.

Here’s how all this affected tradition banks:

In 2007, losses from trading amounted to about $30 billion. By 2009 that had skyrocketed to about $100 billion—and that’s in addition to about $40 billion in traditional loan losses. This is what happens when you start with a housing market that’s already in bubble territory and then egg it on with insane levels of rocket science derivatives, most of them unregulated bastard offspring of the shadow banking sector.

So what’s happened since then? We had a huge crash, the Fed instituted higher capital ratios for “systemically important financial institutions,” and we passed the Dodd-Frank reforms. Here’s what banks look like now:

Before the Great Recession, the biggest banks (green line) had Tier 1 equity ratios of about 7 percent. That’s why they couldn’t weather the crash. Today they’re above 12 percent. Is that enough? Maybe not. But it’s a helluva lot better than it used to be.

Finally, here’s an intriguing chart that shows one of the specific consequences of Dodd-Frank:

Most single-name derivatives are now cleared through a central clearinghouse, which makes it easy for traders to cancel out mirror-image positions they hold. This is called “compression,” and it reduces the total volume of derivatives and increases the safety of the financial system. Today, derivatives worth $200 trillion (notional) are compressed out of existence each year.

Needless to say, Republicans are hellbent on repealing Dodd-Frank. Sure, it makes the banking system safer and helps protect consumers, but big banks don’t like it, so that’s that. The party of Donald Trump, the working man’s president, will do whatever Wall Street tells them to do. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Continued: 

ERP Blogstorm Part 3: Banking

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How to Compost at Home

by MarcusKnudsen Posted on December 9, 2016

In the old Brothers Grimm tale Rumpelstiltskin, a miller swears to the king that his daughter can spin straw into golda bold-faced lie.With the help of the eponymous imp and his magical powers, the daughter was eventually able to spew gold from her very fingers. But, she had to promise her firstborn child to him in order to receive the special talent.

In the real world there is one way to turn straw into gold, so to speak, that doesnt require any special powers or bargaining with a frightful creatureits known as composting. Creating organic fertilizer from food scraps happens to be much easier than most people think. Heres everything you need to know:

Photo Credit: Paul Delmont

WHAT IS COMPOSTING?

In basic terms, composting means recycling plant scraps from the kitchenincluding carrot tops, potato peels, herb stems, celery fronds, eggshells, coffee grounds, used tea bagsall in the effort to minimize waste and to make garden fertilizer. The process transforms such food scraps, which would have normally ended up in the garbage, into a nutrient-rich mulch that can be added to soil and help you grow even more fruits and vegetables, thereby perpetuating the cycle. Now thatssustainability at its finest.

How it works

As organic materials decompose, they break down into nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassiumthe same compounds plants need to thrive. Brown matter, like dead leaves and branches, provide carbon while green matter, like vegetables and fruits, provide nitrogen. Compost piles and bins ideally consist ofthree parts brown matter to one part green matter.

When these organic materials are exposed to air and water, microorganisms likebacteria, actinobacteria, fungi, protozoa, and earthwormsstart to break them down into compost. Carbon gives these microbes energy, and nitrogen facilitatesprotein synthesisa biological process where individual cells build up their specific proteins..

After these microorganisms break down the plant matter, what youre left with is a substance calledhumus(no, not hummus) which basically looks, smells, and feels like dark, moist soil. Spread a thick layer of it on top of the soil in your garden and watch your plants flourish! (Well get to more specifics below.)

COMPOSTING BENEFITS

Reduces and recycles kitchen and yard waste

One of the greatest benefits of composting is giving food scraps and yard waste another life. Instead of going straight to a landfillwhere40 percent of all food produced in the U.S. ends uptheyll serve a new purpose and nourish your garden naturally and even help you to cultivate more food.

Good for the environment

Compost can serve as a natural alternative to chemical fertilizers, which oftenseep into groundwater and end up polluting waterways.

Conditions and fertilizes soil

Compost helps give soil a softer, looser texture, which allows water and nutrients to reach the plants roots more efficiently. Its all thanks to those beneficial microorganisms, which can evenkill pathogensand prevent plant disease, according to theEnvironmental Protection Agency.

Photo Credit: Paul Delmont

WHAT TO COMPOST

Heres what can (and cant) go into your compost heap,according to the EPAandRodales Organic Life.

Brown matter

These are generally dry ingredients that are rich in carbon:

Cardboard
Corn husks
Cotton
Dead leaves
Hay
Nutshells
Paper
Pine needles
Sawdust
Shredded newspaper
Straw
Twigs
Wood ashes
Wood chips
Wool

Green matter

These tend to be wet and are rich in nitrogen:

Algae
Bread
Coffee grounds and filters
Dead plants
Eggshells
Freshwater aquarium water
Fruits
Fur
Grains (cooked, plain)
Grass clippings
Hair
Seaweed
Tea bags
Vegetables

WHATNOTTO COMPOST

These materials may be harmful to the health of your compost:

Black walnut tree leaves and twigs
Charcoal
Dairy products
Diseased plants
Dryer or vacuum lint from synthetic fabrics
Fats or oils
Glossy paper (especially with color printing)
Meat or fish scraps or bones
Pet waste

HOW TO COMPOST

Its easy to start composting at home. Whether you have a big backyard or live in an apartment with minimal outdoor space, heres how to do it.

Composting in a backyard

1. Pick a spot

The first step is to pick a dry, sunlit area outdoors and near a water source (like a garden hose). Since compost tends to be smelly, be mindful and choose a spot where the appearance or smell wont bother your neighbors. Its best to keep it far away from anywhere you eat or entertain, too. You should also avoid placing it near the house or any other wooden structures, as the decomposing materials can rot wood.

2. Dig a hole or buy a compost bin

If you dont mind letting your compost heap sit exposed, its a good idea to dig a hole in the ground to make it easier to manage. Make sure the hole measures at least 3 x 3 x 3.

You can buy a holding unit or bin at Thrive Market, likethis one here. Or you can get crafty and check out how tomake a DIY version. A closed bin with a lid also worksjust drill holes into the lid to allow air in, and add your own worms (you can pick those up at home and garden stores, too).

3. Start adding organic materials

Add compostable materials in alternating layers, starting with brown matter, then green matter, and some brown again. Try to maintain a ratio of three parts carbon (brown) to one part nitrogen (green). Too much carbon can slow down the decomposition, while too much nitrogen can make the pile slimy, smelly, and difficult to aerate.

4. Turn and add water

If you arent continually adding new matter, let it sit for five weeks. Then, turn it with a pitchfork or rake to oxygenate the mixture, and add enough water to dampen the pile. (Excess moisture hinders airflow, and too little prevents the microorganisms you need to start decomposition from thriving.) Leave it for three or four months longeritll turn into dark, moist soil, which is your key to know its ready to use.

Most people, however, tend to add new materials throughout the year. In this case, whenever you add new food waste or kitchen scraps, bury it to incorporate. Turn and moisten the pile at least every four to five weeks, but keep in mind that turning more often can really speed up the decomposition process.

Composting indoors or in an apartment

No backyard? No problem. You can make your own small-scale composting system indoorsand you dont even need worms. Heres how:

What you need

Small trash bin with a lid
Tray that fits underneath trash bin
Soil
Newspaper

Instructions

Choose a space to keep your compost bin. (Under the sink works well.)
Poke or drill a few holes on the bottom and around the rim of the bin.
Cover tray with newspaper and place the bin in the tray.
Add a layer of soil, a few inches deep, into the bin.
Add a layer of shredded newspaper into the bin.
Start adding your food scraps (green matter as listed above), along with a handful of newspaper or other brown matter as you go. (If it starts to smell bad, add more brown matter.)
Once a week, mix the pile and add a handful of fresh soil.

Youll know the compost is ready when its broken down into dark, moist soil. Use it as a top layer for potted plants or donate whatever you cant use to a neighborhood garden.

Photo Credit: Paul Delmont

TOP COMPOSTING TIPS

Here are some important things to know before getting started to make your composting a success.

Start your compost in summer:The process works best in heata compost pile that maintains an internal temperature of 130 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit breaks down faster.
Keep a small compost bin in the kitchen:Its a convenient way to collect food scraps without having to run out to the compost pile every time you have something to add. Once your indoor bin is filled, you can throw it all into the pile at once.
Always keep a healthy balance of of carbon to nitrogen (brown to green):Remember its three parts brown to one part green. Too much or too little of either can slow things down.
The smaller the materials, the better:Before adding things into the compost, cut them down to smaller chunks to help them decompose faster.
Dont pack too much waste in:The pile needs air to breathe.
The more green matter you use, the less water you need:Remember that too much water keeps the air from flowing freely through the mixture.
Do not compost pet waste:It can contain parasites.
Do not compost meat, meat scraps, fats or oils:Otherwise pests will come crawling and potentially spread disease through the compost.
Wormsare your friends:When these guys show up, leave them be and let them do their thing. Theyll feed on your food waste and help turn it into the beautiful compost youve been waiting for.
You can compost weeds:Just make sure they dont have seeds, or else you may get some pesky plants cropping up in your garden.
Turn your pile frequently:Aerating the compost as often as every two weeks can really speed up the process.
Keep two separate compost piles:Got a lot of organic material and extra space? Starting a second pile is handy so you can let the original one break down faster while continuing your composting habit.
Add compost to the garden two to four weeks before planting:This allows time for it to meld with the soil. Once youve got it all ready to go, its time to plant theseeds. When beautiful, bright-orange carrots grow in, youll be pretty happy you didnt trash those old peels.

Written by Emily Murphy, and reposted with permission fromThrive Market.

More From Thrive Market
Avocado Oil Vs. Olive Oil
The Benefits of Raw Garlic
How to Cook Salmon

Photo Credit: Lindsay/Flickr

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How to Compost at Home

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Trump Should Think Twice Before Flying Off the Handle About China

by FrederiBoatman Posted on November 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump—or someone speaking for him, anyway—says that he plans to label China a currency manipulator on “day one” of his presidency. Fair enough. China does intervene in currency markets to manipulate the value of the yuan. Unfortunately, Trump might not like what would happen if China decides to call his bluff:

The simple act of calling out China for manipulating the value of its currency to gain an export advantage shouldn’t roil Beijing to the point of retaliation, said Derek Scissors, a China economy expert at the American Enterprise Institute….But slapping retaliatory tariffs on Chinese goods would be more difficult because it would require congressional approval — a problem given that Republican leaders have been opposed to legislation to punish Chinese currency devaluation with duties, Scissors said.

There’s also the question of whether China is actually devaluing its currency. Most economists agree Beijing intervenes heavily in its currency markets, but in recent years has actually been propping up the value of the renminbi rather than lowering it.

Hmmm. Here is Brad Setser:

The monthly data suggest China has not bought foreign exchange in the market to keep the yuan from appreciating in the past 6 quarters or so, only sold. Its intervention in the market has worked to prevent exchange rate moves that would have the effect of widening China’s current account surplus over time. Every indicator of intervention that I track is telling the same story.

….If China stopped all management (“e.g. manipulation”) and let the yuan float against the dollar, China’s currency would drop. Possibly precipitously. China’s export machine would get a new boost. And rising exports would take pressure off China’s governments to make the difficult reforms needed to create a stronger domestic consumer base.

In other words, right now China’s currency is overvalued. If they weren’t manipulating it, it would most likely have fallen even more than it has—something along the lines of the chart on the right. This would mean Chinese imports get even cheaper, American exports get more expensive, and the trade deficit increases. This is exactly the opposite of what Trump wants.

Demonizing foreigners as the cause of all our problems is apparently a good campaign tactic. Dealing with the real world is a little different. Hopefully Trump will talk to a few actual economists and trade experts before he makes good on this particular promise.

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Trump Should Think Twice Before Flying Off the Handle About China

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Correction: Obamacare Premiums Are Going Up About 0% For Most People

by JinaGirardi Posted on October 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Data! You want data! Sure, Obamacare premiums are going up and so are the subsidies. But how much are the subsidies going up? The chart below—which I want everyone to look at because it was a pain in the ass to create—shows this for the 15 states with the highest premium increases:

As you can see, subsidies are increasing more than premiums in every state—and by quite a bit. This comparison data is for a 27-year-old with an income of $25,000, and comes from Tables 6 and 12 here. (Arizona is literally off the chart: premiums increased 116 percent and subsidies increased 428 percent.) Here’s the same chart for the 15 states with the smallest premium increases:

There are plenty of caveats here. Premiums and subsidies will be different for different kinds of households. Upper middle-class families don’t get any subsidies at all. And this doesn’t tell us what the average net increase is, once subsidies are accounted for.

However, it gives us a pretty good idea that for a substantial majority of Obamacare users, the net amount they pay for health insurance in 2017 isn’t going to be much more than it was this year. For many, in fact, it will be the same. For those who shop around, it’s quite likely to be less.

Bottom line: if your income is low enough to qualify for a subsidy, there’s no need to panic over the Obamacare premium news. The higher premiums will help stabilize the market, and the cost will be covered almost entirely by Uncle Sam. Your pocketbook is safe.

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Correction: Obamacare Premiums Are Going Up About 0% For Most People

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Obamacare Is a Market. Markets Aren’t Perfect.

by KatrinaSxn Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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The withdrawal of Aetna from many of its Obamacare markets has unleashed a torrent of commentary about how Obamacare is now well and truly doomed. From Republicans, this is the usual hot air. From Democrats, it’s a little different. It’s also way overblown, and I’m happy to see Jonathan Chait make the case for Obamacare’s basic solvency here. Go read it.

For myself, I just want to focus on one of Chait’s points: The reason Aetna withdrew is that they weren’t making money. The reason they weren’t making money is because their premiums were too low. The reason their premiums were too low is because they were competing with other insurers for business. In other words, competing on a level playing field, they couldn’t succeed. That’s life in a free market.

So what happened? For some reason, insurers underpriced their policies substantially when Obamacare was introduced. It’s possible that their actuaries all badly miscalculated the makeup of the market. Or it’s possible that they were underpricing deliberately as a way of building market share. Or maybe a combination of both.

My own guess is that the underpricing was mostly deliberate. After all, even the Congressional Budget Office had a pretty good idea of what average premiums ought to be, and it’s hard to believe that a bunch of experienced insurance companies couldn’t do the same math as the CBO. Either way, though, this is, once again, life in a free market. Some vendors make mistakes and fail. Some can’t compete and fail. Some just decide to focus on other markets.

The flip side of this is that free markets usually stabilize eventually. In the case of Obamacare, this means premiums have to go up. Sorry. However, as that happens, new insurers are likely to enter. Eventually supply will more or less equal demand, and the market will find an equilibrium. This is why I’m much less panicked over Obamacare’s immediate problems than most people.

Obamacare is an artificial market in many ways, but that’s true of health care in general, which is highly regulated and has well-known eccentricities. Nonetheless, Obamacare is a market, and right now it’s operating like one. Prices are looking for an equilibrium, consumers are deciding whether to participate, and vendors are jockeying for position. That’s not painless, but then, nobody ever said capitalism was painless.

Of course, if you do want painless, we know how to do that too: true national health care funded through taxes. Dozens of countries do this, and it works fine.

Short of that, we could still reduce the pain considerably. Is Obamacare too expensive for many people? Yes. That could be fixed by increasing subsidies. Are insurers losing money in the early years? Yes. That could be largely fixed by funding the risk corridors. Are the poor still underserved? Yes. That could be addressed by adopting the Medicaid expansion in all states. Are there plenty of details here and there that ought to be cleaned up? Yes. That could be fixed via legislation.

If Republicans actually cared about providing health care to people, all of this would be trivial. But they don’t. To the extent that Obamacare has problems, this is why. There’s nothing inherent in the design that prevents it from operating successfully. In fact, as the chart on the right shows, even now, with all its problems, Obamacare is operating more successfully than anybody thought it would when it was first passed. 20 million newly insured people is nothing to sniff at.

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Obamacare Is a Market. Markets Aren’t Perfect.

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Obamacare’s Latest Problem is Real, But Not Fatal

by VeroniqKimball Posted on August 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s a funny thing. Conservatives have spent the past five years pointing to a long litany of alleged problems with Obamacare and gleefully predicting that each of them would lead to its downfall. They never did, either because the problems weren’t even problems, or because they were pretty small beer and didn’t really have any effect. Nonetheless, every month or two brought yet another harbinger of doom for Obamacare.

So you’d think they’d be over the moon at the moment, now that Obamacare really does appear to be facing a serious problem. Even liberals are worried about large insurers like Aetna and United Healthcare abandoning the exchanges, leaving some regions with only a single monopoly insurer. But conservatives aren’t really saying much about this. It’s kind of odd.

Maybe it’s because they’re all too freaked out by Donald Trump. I don’t know. Still, there are some who are noticing the problem and predicting the eventual demise of Obamacare. Here’s Megan McArdle:

Unfortunately, while basically everyone in the country thought that the U.S. health care system was as messed up as a party-school group house on graduation day, most people actually liked whatever coverage they had. That created a political bind: No reform could pass if it seemed to shrink any of the existing major markets in any significant way. Expanding everything would cost a boatload of money and make taxpayers freak out, so the architects of Obamacare finessed this problem with a combination of:

Opaque rules.
Disingenuously optimistic promises such as, “If you like your plan you can keep it.”
Weak versions of unpopular measures needed to make the law work, such as paltry penalties for failing to buy health insurance.
Not touching the wildly inefficient profusion of programs.

All that stuff is what has left Obamacare where it is. The dishonesty was exposed. The weak versions of European measures failed to encourage the behavior changes needed to make the system work. And the fact that every other program was left in existence, largely untouched, created new ways for patients and consumers to game the rules to get maximum reimbursements for minimum expenditure.

None of these are actually operational problems with Obamacare except for the third one. But here’s the thing: last year was the first time people actually got hit in the face with the prospect of a penalty for not having insurance. And McArdle is right: it was too small to motivate people to change their behavior—especially all those young healthy folks that insurers want. $325 for a single adult just wasn’t enough.

But this year the penalty was $695. Next year, it will be either $695 (plus a bit for inflation) or 2.5 percent of your income. For someone making, say, $30,000, that’s $750.

Is that enough? Hard to say. If your income is low, it’s more than the cost of insurance, so you might as well just get the insurance. If your income is a little higher, then it’s true that you can save money by just paying the penalty. But the net cost of insurance is probably only about $1,000 more than the penalty. Once this starts to sink in, a lot of young folks are probably going to conclude that for a hundred bucks a month they might as well sign up.

It will be a few years before we know for sure. In the meantime, it’s clear that insurers screwed up pretty badly in their initial estimates of how much it would cost to insure the typical Obamacare pool. They shoulda listened to the CBO. Still, here’s the thing I don’t get: the obvious response to insurers losing money is twofold. First, some insurers will abandon the market. Second, the surviving insurers will probably raise their prices. This is how competitive markets work. It’s messy and inconvenient, but in the end it all settles down.

The only thing that would prevent this is some kind of death spiral, as rising prices cause even more healthy people to stop buying insurance and instead just pay the penalty. This isn’t impossible. But prices won’t rise at all for low-income buyers, and are capped at 9.5 percent of income for most others. So there’s a limit to just how far this can go, even in theory.

Maybe I’m letting partisan views blind me to the scope of this problem. But I think this is a problem that Obamacare will survive. Prices will go up over the next couple of years. My guess is a rise of around 20-25 percent or so. As the penalties sink in, more young people will sign up. The most efficient insurers will remain in the market and become profitable. And yes, there will probably be individual counties here and there that have only one insurer, or even no insurers in a handful of cases.

In other words, it won’t be health care nirvana. But it will work. The end is still not nigh.

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Obamacare’s Latest Problem is Real, But Not Fatal

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Monsanto Just Made a Massive Mistake

by LeanneMeehan Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it had gotten an “unusually high number of reports of crop damage that appear related to misuse of herbicides containing the active ingredient dicamba.” Complaints of drooping and often dead crops appeared in no fewer than 10 states, the EPA reports. In Missouri alone, the agency says it has gotten 117 complaints “alleging misuse of pesticide products containing dicamba,” affecting more than 42,000 acres of crops, including peaches, tomatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, rice, peas, peanuts, alfalfa, cotton, and soybeans.

The state’s largest peach farm, which lies near soybean-and-cotton country, has suffered massive and potentially permanent damage this year—and suspects dicamba drift as the culprit, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

What gives?

The trouble appears to stem from decisions made by the Missouri-based seed and pesticide giant Monsanto. Back in April, the company bet big on dicamba, announcing a $975 million expansion of its production facility in Luling, Louisiana. The chemical is the reason the company launched its new Roundup Ready Xtend soybean and cotton seeds, genetically engineered to withstand both dicamba and Monsanto’s old flagship herbicide, glyphosate (brand name: Roundup). Within a decade, the company wrote, the new GM crops will proliferate from the US Midwest all the way to Brazil and points south, covering as much as 250 million acres of farmland (a combined land mass equal to about two and a half times the acreage of California)—and moving lots of dicamba.

The plan is off to a rough start—which brings us back to those drooping crops in soybean and cotton country. The company elected to release Roundup Ready Xtend soybean and cotton seeds this spring, even though the EPA has not yet signed off on a new herbicide product that combines glyphosate and a new dicamba formulation. That was a momentous decision, because the dicamba products currently on the market are highly volatile—that is, they have a well-documented tendency to vaporize in the air and drift far away from the land they’re applied on, killing other crops. Monsanto’s new dicamba, tweaked with what the company calls “VaporGrip” technology, is supposedly much less volatile.

The trouble is that farmers have been planting glyphosate-tolerant cotton and soybeans for years, and as a result, are dealing with a mounting tide of weeds that have evolved to resist that ubiquitous weed killer. So they jumped at the new seeds, and evidently began dousing crops with old dicamba formulations as a way to knock out those glyphosate-tolerant weeds. Oops.

For its part, Monsanto says it expects the EPA to approve the new, improved dicamba formulation in time for the 2017 growing season, and that it never expected farmers to use old dicamba formulations on the dicamba-tolerant crops it released this year. If the VaporGrip formulation does indeed control volatization as promised, the drift incidents of 2016 will likely soon just be a painful memory for affected farmers. If not, they portend yet more trouble ahead for the PR-challenged ag giant.

Link:

Monsanto Just Made a Massive Mistake

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

by LannyIsabel51 Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Do the birds get what they want?” Perdue executive Bruce Stewart-Brown asked. We were surrounded by 20,000 squawking chickens in a vast indoor facility in Maryland. I was in the midst of reporting a Mother Jones deep-dive on the meat industry’s over-use of antibiotics crucial to human medicine, and how Perdue had moved decisively away from that practice.

At the time, Stewart-Brown’s rhetorical question sounded a bit silly, coming from a company that slaughters and packs 650 million chickens per year, making it the nation’s fourth-largest poultry company. Yet as I found during my reporting, Perdue isn’t just any chicken producer. Unlike all of the other industry giants, the company had quietly begun to move away from antibiotics around a decade ago.

Now Perdue has announced an animal welfare program that seems as ambitious as its move away from drugs. The company has committed itself to following the Farm Animal Welfare Council’s “five freedoms” for farm livestock, the most notable of which are the “freedom from discomfort,” “freedom to express (most) normal behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind,” and “freedom from fear and distress.”

“Our goal is to double the rate of play/activity by our chickens in the next three years,” the company states in a newly released “Commitment to Animal Welfare.” Moreover, acknowledging that modern chickens have been bred to grow rapidly, causing leg injuries and making it very difficult to walk late in their lives, Perdue says it’s considering moving to “breeds of birds that grow slower.”

In concrete terms, the facilities that house Perdue’s birds will eventually be outfitted with windows, giving them access to sunlight, and be less densely stocked, giving the birds more room. The company so far hasn’t released details on how much more space birds will get (the current industry standard is eight-tenths of a square foot per bird). As for the windows, the company plans to install windows in 200 of the 6,000 existing poultry houses that supply it. They’ll be used as a kind of controlled experiment, to “compare bird health and activity to enclosed housing.” If the windows prove effective in increasing activity among the flock, “we will establish annual targets for retrofitting houses with windows,” Perdue states. All new chicken houses will be required to have windows.

New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom got a look at one of the the window-equipped chicken houses, run by an operation that contracts for Perdue:

Sunlight floods the floor at one end of the chicken house here at Ash-O-Ley Acres, and spry little Cornish game hens flap their wings and chase one another. At the other end of the barn, where the windows are covered as part of a compare-and-contrast demonstration, the flock is largely somnolent and slow to move.

In addition to responding to long-simmering animal-welfare complaints about factory-scale farming, Perdue is also openly discussing another highly controversial topic: Big Poultry’s reliance on nominally independent farmers to grow their chickens, under contract terms that largely favor giant processing companies like Perdue. (See my piece on a particularly presumptuous contract term that Perdue quickly nixed when I exposed it.)

Normally, when a big chicken company decides it wants to change something about the enormous barns where its birds are grown, it merely changes the terms of its contracts, forcing farmers to upgrade their facilities or risk losing their market. In this case, Perdue will pick up the cost of retro-fitting the 200 pilot houses, a company spokeswoman told me. As the windows program expands, the company says it will continue to pick up at least part of the cost. “We’ll determine how it will get paid for,” the spokeswoman said, “whether we will pay for it directly or compensate the grower through a premium for upgraded housing or…a cost-share or financing approach.”

And the company’s “Commitment to Animal Welfare” document even includes a pledge to “do a better job listening to farmers and communicating with them.” Rather than set pay solely based on factors like efficiency and output, contracts will include incentives for “care of the birds and welfare performance,” the document states. A Perdue spokeswoman added that the company is consulting with farmers to figure out the best way to compensate them for making the birds’ lives better.

Of course, as with all voluntary corporate initiatives, Perdue sets the terms of the program and controls the information that emerges from it. As Maryn McKenna notes on the National Geographic website, “For most of its initiatives, the company has not disclosed a timeline.” But as I discovered in my reporting, Perdue’s anti-antibiotics effort proved to be the real deal, and it has pulled the bulk of the poultry industry in the same direction. Perhaps its animal-welfare reforms will do the same.

Leah Garces, executive director of Compassion in World Farming, which released a video in 2014 exposing harsh welfare conditions on a Perdue-contracted farm, thinks they just might. “Just as Perdue led the way on antibiotics, they are laying out the inevitable direction of the market,” she said. “I’m confident every poultry company today is thinking hard about steps they also need to take to improve the lives of chickens in order to keep up.”

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

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