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The Trade Deficit Is Down, But There’s a Catch

by John Grit Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal reports on the latest trade deficit numbers:

The U.S. current-account deficit sank to the lowest level in more than 14 years at the end of 2013, reflecting a smaller trade gap and better returns on assets Americans own abroad….The gap, which has narrowed 20% from a year earlier, now represents 1.9% of U.S. gross domestic product. That’s the smallest shortfall as a share of the U.S. economy since 1997.

That’s all good, but there’s a caveat: since 2009, the overall trade deficit has been flat while net imports of oil have decreased by about $50 billion per quarter. This means that net imports of all other goods have actually increased. The fracking boom is helping us out, but only temporarily. We still have a fairly chronic trade deficit problem everywhere else. More here on why this was probably inevitable.

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The Trade Deficit Is Down, But There’s a Catch

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

by EstelaPalfreyma Posted on March 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Playing Political Games With Surgeon Generals Is Nothing New

by KaliWallwork Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Vivek Murthy, President Obama’s nominee as surgeon general, supports regulations on gun use. This has earned him fierce opposition from the NRA and seems likely to sink his nomination entirely. Paul Waldman comments:

In the calculations over whether Murthy could get confirmed, it’s notable that everyone assumes, almost certainly correctly, that every Republican in the Senate will, of course, vote against the nomination. George W. Bush appointed only one surgeon general, Richard Carmona. He was confirmed by a vote of 98 to 0. But those days are gone — what do you expect Republicans to do, examine a nominee’s qualifications and vote to confirm if he’d obviously do a fine job? Please. The default used to be that a president will get the nominees he chooses unless there’s something really egregious in their past or what they’re likely to do if confirmed, but when it comes to this president and this Congress, that has been turned upside down. Now the Republican position is that every nominee should be rejected, unless there’s some kind of a deal that allows them to get something in exchange.

I’ve made similar kinds of comments in the past, so I can’t really object to seeing them repeated here. Still, it’s worth remembering a little history. First: although President Obama’s initial choice for surgeon general, Regina Benjamin, ran into some Republican opposition when her nomination came to the floor, she was confirmed unanimously within a few days, just like Richard Carmona, Bush’s first surgeon general. Second: after Carmona’s term expired, Bush’s next nominee for surgeon general, James Holsinger, ran into a buzzsaw of Democratic opposition based on a paper he had written in 1991 which argued that “homosexuality isn’t natural or healthy.” When the Bush White House suggested it might install Holsinger via a recess appointment, Harry Reid kept the Senate in pro forma sessions to prevent it. Eventually Holsinger’s nomination died.

There was more going on with Holsinger, including his refusal to answer written questions, but basically his nomination was killed because of his anti-gay views. He insisted that his 1991 paper no longer represented his current views, but it didn’t matter.

So do Murthy’s problems demonstrate the strength of the NRA? Sure. But Holsinger’s problems demonstrated the strength of liberal LGBT views among Democrats. There’s nothing very new going on here.

In fact, I half wonder if opposition to Murthy is partly payback for Democrats killing Holsinger’s nomination. I’d be curious to hear about this from reporters who cover the conservative movement. Down in the bowels of email lists and Sarah Palin fan clubs, do tea partiers still hold a grudge over Holsinger’s defeat? Or has that long since been forgotten?

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Playing Political Games With Surgeon Generals Is Nothing New

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Let Us Sing a Dirge for "Spit and Image"

by marekso65 Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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Let Us Sing a Dirge for "Spit and Image"

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Short Takes: "The New Black"

by Aale Harry Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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The New Black

PROMISED LAND FILM

The black voters who turned out for Barack Obama in November 2008 also have been blamed for nudging California’s gay-marriage ban—since nullified by the Supreme Court—to victory. To explore changing black perspectives on gay rights, director Yoruba Richen follows Maryland’s 2012 same-sex marriage referendum, introducing us to people like 24-year-old activist Karess Taylor-Hughes and Pastor Derek McCoy, president of the Maryland Family Alliance—thought leaders on opposite sides of the issue. Backed by an outstanding gospel soundtrack, The New Black is a story of passion, conviction, and the evolution of long-held attitudes. It’s likely to move you, whatever your belief.

This review originally appeared in our January/February issue of Mother Jones.

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Short Takes: "The New Black"

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Quick Reads: "The Bosnia List" by Kenan Trebincevic and Susan Shapiro

by ChristeAALZ Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Bosnia List

By Kenan Trebincevic and Susan Shapiro

PENGUIN BOOKS

An estimated 100,000 people died during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, but few Americans grasp the insanity of the conflict. Kenan Trebincevic, a Bosnian Muslim, was 11 when the fighting broke out. He describes how lifelong friends turned on his family, how his brother and father were thrown into detainment camps, and how they eventually fled under nightmarish conditions. He also takes us on a trip home to complete his titular to-do list as he confronts the betrayers and attempts to make sense of the nonsensical.

This review originally appeared in our January/February 2014 issue of Mother Jones.

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Quick Reads: "The Bosnia List" by Kenan Trebincevic and Susan Shapiro

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Reince Priebus is Playing Smart Politics. Maybe Democrats Should Try It Too.

by CharlenLowman Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest from Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus:

At a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast on Tuesday Priebus said Republicans would see massive gains in the 2014 election, especially in the Senate. “I think we’re in for a tsunami election,” Priebus said. “Especially at the Senate level.”

Ed Kilgore thinks Priebus should cut the crap. If Democrats lose five or six Senate seats, that won’t be a tsunami. It will be perfectly normal given the electoral map, the six-year itch, and the usual Democratic turnout problem in midterms.

Maybe so. But that’s pretty obviously not the game Priebus is playing. He’s not analyzing, he’s working the refs. He wants to build momentum and make Republicans look unbeatable. He wants to look like a winner. He wants to get Republicans to turn out in big numbers this November.

Democrats, by contrast, are already acting like whipped curs, moaning about the map and the itch and the turnout. They lose a special election by two percentage points and all is lost. Incumbents start dropping like flies. The press, smelling weakness, piles on. Democratic voters, acting like the normal human beings they are, get discouraged and figure that things are hopeless. So they don’t contribute, they don’t campaign, and they don’t bother voting on Election Day.

Priebus knows this very well. If he could think of a word even bigger than tsunami, he’d use it. He wants his voters to think of themselves as part of a decisive turning of the tide against dissolute liberalism, and if his party wins in November he wants the media to write about it as a historic victory that gives Republicans a conservative mandate. It’s just smart politics.

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Reince Priebus is Playing Smart Politics. Maybe Democrats Should Try It Too.

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Are Corporations Hoarding Cash? It’s Complicated.

by ArdenCulbert Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Are Corporations Hoarding Cash? It’s Complicated.

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

by Prokippxv Posted on March 17, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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US Announces Plan to Give Up Control Over Internet Plumbing

by au87rr Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, this is interesting:

U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move likely to please international critics but alarm many business leaders and others who rely on smooth functioning of the Web.

Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain names that organize the Internet has been building for more than a decade and was supercharged by the backlash to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance last year.

I won’t pretend I’m thrilled about this, even if it was probably inevitable at some point. Whatever else you can say about the United States and the leverage its intelligence community gets from control over internet plumbing, it’s also true that the US has been a pretty competent and reliable administrator of the most revolutionary and potentially subversive network ever invented. Conversely, global organizations don’t have a great track record at technocratic management, and world politics—corrosive at best, illiberal and venal at worst—could kill the goose that laid the golden egg. I certainly understand why the rest of the world chafes at American control, but I nonetheless suspect that it might be the best of a bad bunch of options.

Then again, maybe not. There are also plenty of global standards-setting organizations that do a perfectly good job. Slowly and bureaucratically, maybe, but that’s to be expected. Maybe ICANN will go the same way. We’ll see.

In any case, I think we can expect Republicans to go ballistic over this.

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US Announces Plan to Give Up Control Over Internet Plumbing

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