Tag Archives: people

Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to Screw the Poor

by RashadPettis352 Posted on October 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Medicaid funding is shared by the states and the federal government. Between 2000 and 2013—the most recent year reported by the CMS actuaries—the share of Medicaid spending shouldered by the states increased by an average of 6.1 percent per year. This is not total spending. It’s just the portion the states themselves paid for.

In 2015, according to a survey by the Kaiser Foundation, spending by states that refused to expand Medicaid grew by 6.9 percent. That’s pretty close to the historical average. However, spending by states that accepted Medicaid expansion grew by only 3.4 percent. Obamacare may have increased total Medicaid enrollment and spending, but the feds picked up most of the tab. At the state level, it actually reined in the rate of growth.

In other words, the states that have refused the expansion are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They’re actually willing to shell out money just to demonstrate their implacable hatred of Obamacare. How much money? Well, the expansion-refusing states spent $61 billion of their own money on Medicaid in 2014. If that had grown at 3.4 percent instead of 6.9 percent, they would have saved about $2 billion this year.

Here’s what this means: the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are denying health care to the needy and paying about $2 billion for the privilege. Try to comprehend the kind of people who do this.

POSTSCRIPT: Actually, there’s more. The residents of every state pay taxes to fund Obamacare, whether they like it or not. Residents of the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are paying about $50 billion in Obamacare taxes each year, and about $20 billion of that is for Medicaid expansion. Instead of flowing back into their states, this money is going straight to Washington DC, never to be seen again.

So they’re willing to let $20 billion go down a black hole and pay $2 billion extra in order to prevent Obamacare from helping the needy. It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it?

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Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to Screw the Poor

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I’d Give Obama’s Syria Policy a B+

by DebbraTiemann Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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“I don’t have a lot of good things to say about the Obama administration’s Syria policy,” says Dan Drezner. He links to Adam Elkus, who calls Obama’s Syria strategy “semi-competent.” At the BBC, Tara McKelvey writes about Robert Ford, former US ambassador to Syria, who was close to the Syrian opposition and wanted to arm them when the Assad regime started to crumble. “People in the intelligence community said the time to arm the rebels was 2012,” she writes. The problem is that officials in Washington were unsure that Ford really knew the opposition well enough. “Most of the rebels, he said, weren’t ‘ideologically pure’, not in the way US officials wanted. ‘In wars like that, there is no black and white,’ he said.”

I’ll agree on a few counts of the indictment against Obama. Now that the mission to arm the rebels has failed, he says he was never really for it in the first place. That’s cringeworthy. The buck stops with him, and once he approved the plan, hesitantly or not, it was his plan. He should take responsibility for its failure. You can also probably make a case that we should have done more to arm the Kurds, who have shown considerable competence fighting both ISIS and Assad.

But those are relative nits, and I’d be curious to hear more from Drezner about this. He basically agrees that arming rebels hasn’t worked well in the Middle East, and there’s little chance it would have worked well in Syria. “There is a strong and bipartisan 21st-century record of U.S. administrations applying military force in the Middle East with the most noble of intentions,” he says, “and then making the extant situation much, much worse.” He also agrees that Obama’s big-picture view of Syria is correct. “The president has determined that Syria is not a core American interest and therefore does not warrant greater investments of American resources. It’s a cold, calculating, semi-competent strategy. But it has the virtue of being better than the suggested hawkish alternatives.” He agrees that those “hawkish alternatives” are basically nuts.

So why exactly is Obama’s record in Syria “semi-competent”? Why does Drezner not have much good to say about it? My only serious criticism is that Obama did too much: he never should have talked about red lines and he never should have agreed to arm and train the opposition at all. But given the real-world pressures on him, it’s impressive that he’s managed to restrict American intervention as much as he has. I doubt anyone else could have done better.

There is something genuinely baffling about American hawks who have presided over failure after failure but are always certain that next time will be different. But why? If anything, Syria is more tangled and chaotic than Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, or any of the other Middle Eastern countries we’ve gotten involved in since 2001. What kind of dreamy naivete—or willful blindness—does it take to think that we could intervene successfully there?

Anyway, that’s my question. Given the real world constraints, and grading on a real-world curve, what has Obama done wrong in Syria?

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I’d Give Obama’s Syria Policy a B+

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After Yesterday’s Shooting, More Americans Are Googling "Gun Control"

by ClaribeVPSZ Posted on October 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of mass shootings, many of Americans turn—where else?—to the internet to look for answers. Google data reflects these searches in the wake of major shootings. Using Google Trends data, the Google News Lab put together a series of maps that show whether people in each state were more likely to search for the phrase “gun control” or “gun shop” in the 24 hours following the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, in June; Moneta, Virginia, in August; and yesterday’s shooting in Oregon.

Over the course of 2015, the majority of searches in most states have been for “gun shop”:

In the day after the Charleston shooting, the map looked much the same:

After the Virginia shooting, the map almost completely flipped:

So far, in the day after the Oregon shooting, the map is almost completely tilted toward searches for “gun control”:

You can see this data another way here:

See the full interactive map below:

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After Yesterday’s Shooting, More Americans Are Googling "Gun Control"

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Is the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsing? These scientists want to go find out

by FerminFish Posted on September 30, 2015

Is the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsing? These scientists want to go find out

By on 30 Sep 2015commentsShare

Let’s play a game. It’s called “Hollywood or Real Life?” The rules are self-explanatory:

In a world where technology is cutting people off from the natural world, scientists are treated like conspiracy theorists, and government officials can’t agree on what to do about climate change, humanity is in danger. A huge swath of the West Antarctic ice sheet nearly 75 miles wide is on the verge of collapse, and if it takes the rest of the ice sheet with it, global sea levels could rise by a catastrophic four feet. To make matters worse, scientists don’t know when or how this doomsday scenario could unfold, and the only way to find out is to travel to a remote and treacherous part of the ice sheet known as Thwaites Glacier, nearly 2,500 miles from McMurdo Station. Will the U.S. government support such a dangerous mission? Will world leaders ever get their act together? Or will Mother Nature just say “F**k it,” and wipe the slate clean?

You guessed it — this is real life. People have been worrying over the imminent collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet ever since researchers published two papers last year warning that glaciers along the Amundsen Sea were not only retreating, but also unlikely to stop due to the “retrograde,” or increasingly downhill, nature of the seabed below them.

But much of what scientists know about this area comes from satellite data. Thwaites and other nearby glaciers are so hard to get to and have such dangerous weather conditions that only a handful of scientists have ever actually made the journey. Now, because of the potentially catastrophic consequences of ice sheet collapse, a group of Antarctic researchers are asking the National Science Foundation to support a more aggressive research approach. Here’s more from The Washington Post:

That means a great deal more research and direct measurements in this extremely remote environment. It isn’t research on the moon or at the ocean’s greatest depths, but in terms of work on or near the surface of Earth, it’s about as tough as it gets.

To understand the difficulty of the scientific task, consider this — one key problem will be figuring out exactly what is going on at the ground level beneath over a mile of ice. A key unknown involves precisely what kind of terrain the base of Thwaites glacier rests upon, and what it is composed of – which will affect just how much resistance there is to the glacier’s movement.

The late climate scientist John Mercer first alerted the scientific community about the instability of the West Antarctic ice sheet back in 1978. At the time, Mercer thought that warming air temperatures would cause the collapse, but scientists now understand that warm water melting the ice from below is the real threat. Still, there are a lot of unanswered questions about how the collapse could play out:

“There has been a pendulum in this community in the last 20 years, from, ‘we’re sure the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is going to collapse,’ to ‘actually we’re not,’ to ‘oh yes we are,’ to ‘oh, it’s happening now,’” says Eric Steig, a University of Washington glaciologist. … “I think that many of the ideas that people came up with for why it won’t collapse have been disproven,” Steig says – although he emphasizes that there is still a great deal of scientific uncertainty about the matter.

Scientists don’t know, for example, how soon a rapid collapse could begin — 900 years? 200 years? Sooner? And they don’t know whether the ice sheet collapsed before during a previous period of warming about 120,000 years ago — something they could find out if they can get ice core samples.

Now, given our short attention span and complete inability to grasp the true existential threat that is climate change, most people will forget about this terrifying drama playing out at the bottom of the Earth within 24 hours, go see The Martian this weekend, and then spend an excessive amount of time pondering the possibility of humans visiting Mars. Which is why, in the interest of getting people to give a shit, someone really should just turn this into a frivolous two-hour blockbuster hit. Picture it:

Lily Tomlin and Danny Trejo play a husband and wife team of Antarctic researchers leading an expedition to Thwaites. They bring along two graduate students — one a wise-cracking source of comic relief played by Jerrod Carmichael, the other a brooding and sarcastic voice of pessimism played by Mae Whitman. A grumbling member of the British Antarctic Survey (Peter Capaldi) joins the expedition, along with his young protege (Parminder Nagra), who’s pretty quiet but vlogs about the whole trip. Roland Emmerich of The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day fame will direct, of course, and the movie will probably be called something minimalist and dramatic like Thwaites.

Source:

Scientists declare an “urgent” mission – study West Antarctica, and fast

, The Washington Post.

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Is the West Antarctic ice sheet collapsing? These scientists want to go find out

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Why Can’t So Many Cancer Patients Get the Surgery They Need?

by JeannaFergusson Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into the development of new procedures and treatments for cancer: We now have more than 100 different drugs for the disease, and nearly 300 surgical procedures. However, these resources are not spread equally around the world. While 95 percent of global cancer spending occurs in the developed world, a majority of cancer cases and deaths occur in the low-to-middle-income countries, like India, Brazil, and nations in Eastern Europe.

A new study released today sheds light on this disparity. The report, published by the renowned British health journal The Lancet, found that while 80 percent of cancer cases require surgery, less than a quarter of people worldwide who need it will actually get safe, affordable, and timely procedures. Less than 5 percent of cancer patients in low-income countries will get it. According to the study, 2015 will see 15.2 million new cancer cases worldwide and 8.8 million cancer deaths—65 percent of those deaths will occur in the developing world, while 35 percent will occur in the developed world. (The authors did not list specific rates of surgery access in high-income countries, though they did note that in the developed world, “data from staffing and cancer outcomes suggest that cancer surgical needs in terms of human resources are mostly being met.”)

“In too many countries, we have found that the inverse care law dominates, whereby the availability of good surgical care for cancer varies inversely with the population need for it,” the study’s authors wrote.

In low-to-middle-income countries, even for those who do have surgery, cancer can still be financially devastating. The study found that a third of people who get procedures will face “financial catastrophe” and a quarter will stop their life-saving treatment because they cannot afford it.

How can we improve access to cancer treatment around the world? The report has several suggestions, from increasing basic surgery training, to investing more in cancer care where resources and infrastructure are lacking, to improving awareness about the importance of surgery to treat cancer (in addition to non-surgical treatments like chemotherapy).

But the biggest impediment to creating more equal access to cancer treatment, the study found, is the lack of universal health care. “Equity, shared responsibility, and quality cancer surgical delivery to patients, irrespective of ability to pay, are the goals of global cancer and global cancer surgery,” the study concluded. “This is only achieved via universal health coverage.”

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Why Can’t So Many Cancer Patients Get the Surgery They Need?

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The Pope Wants America to Learn From Its Horrific Treatment of Native Americans

by NateSqynziclpt Posted on September 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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As expected, Pope Francis implored Congress to protect refugees and other migrants in an address at the Capitol on Thursday. But before he did, he took a step to acknowledge the nation’s (and the church’s) often horrific treatment of American Indians. America, he argued, should demonstrate a sense of compassion it so rarely showed during the colonization of the continent:

In recent centuries, millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom. We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants. Tragically, the rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected. For those peoples and their nations, from the heart of American democracy, I wish to reaffirm my highest esteem and appreciation. Those first contacts were often turbulent and violent, but it is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present. Nonetheless, when the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past. We must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible, as we educate new generations not to turn their back on our “neighbors” and everything around us. Building a nation calls us to recognize that we must constantly relate to others, rejecting a mindset of hostility in order to adopt one of reciprocal subsidiarity, in a constant effort to do our best. I am confident that we can do this.

This language is particularly significant because of what the Pope was up to yesterday—at a service at Catholic University, he formally canonized Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Spanish missionary who played an important role in the conversion of American Indians to Catholicism in California. Serra wasn’t by any stretch the worst European to visit the New World (the bar is very high), but the missions of California were deadly places for American Indians, cursed with high mortality rates (from disease and abuse) and forced labor. The core purpose of Serra’s work was to purge the region of its native culture and install the church in its place. For this reason, some American Indian activists were fiercely opposed to the canonization; Francis didn’t meet with any of them until yesterday afternoon—after he’d made it official. Consider Thursday’s allusion to past transgressions something of an olive branch.

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The Pope Wants America to Learn From Its Horrific Treatment of Native Americans

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It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton Didn’t Have a Cunning Plan to Foil Congressional Investigators

by GiuseppPereira Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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This happened yesterday while I was away from my desk:

The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate’s correspondence eventually could become public. The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail system for official business.

Nobody seems to have made the most obvious observation about this: It pretty strongly suggests that Hillary Clinton was not trying to hide anything when she deleted personal emails from her server.

At the risk of boring my technically-minded readers, files on a computer work sort of like an old-fashioned card catalog in a library. If you “delete” a book by tearing up the index card, the book is still there. It might be harder to find, but with a little detective work you can still dig it up. Eventually, though, the book will truly disappear. Maybe someone steals it and no one cares. Or the library needs more space and gets rid of all the books with no index cards. Etc.

This is how computers work. When you delete a file, you’re just deleting the index card. The file is still there on the hard drive. Eventually, though, the file will truly disappear. Maybe another program writes over the file. Or you run a disk defrag program and whole sections of the disk get written over. Etc. Some files will get permanently deleted within days. Others might stick around for years. It’s just random chance.

Needless to say, things don’t have to happen this way. If you want to make sure that a file is well and truly deleted, it’s easy to do. Anyone with even a smidgen of computer experience either knows how or knows how to find out. Here’s one way, which took me ten seconds to Google. If I were really serious, I’d take the time to read a bit more, and also make inquiries about backups. This is IT 101.

But apparently Hillary didn’t ask about any of this stuff. No one on her staff brought it up. They just pushed the Delete key and the emails disappeared. The IT folks were never involved.

These are not the actions of a staff trying to stonewall FOIA requests or foil a congressional committee. Any bright teenager could have done better on that score. By all the evidence, Hillary is telling the truth. She just told her staff to delete personal emails and turn over the rest to the State Department. There was nothing more to it.

But no one’s reporting it that way. Peculiar, isn’t it?

Originally posted here – 

It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton Didn’t Have a Cunning Plan to Foil Congressional Investigators

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Jeb Bush Has No Clue About Business Regulation

by JosetteOneil Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jeb Bush today in the Wall Street Journal:

To understand what is wrong with the regulatory culture of the U.S. under President Obama, consider this alarming statistic: Today, according to the World Bank—not exactly a right-wing think tank—the U.S. ranks 46th in the world in terms of ease of starting a business. That is unacceptable. Think what the U.S. could be and the prosperity we could have if we rolled back the overregulation that keeps us from ranking in the top 10.

My goodness. That does sound unacceptable. Still, it never hurts to check up on these presidential candidates, does it? So let’s click the link.

Sure enough, the World Bank ranks the United States 46th in ease of starting a business. But there’s an asterisk next to that. Let’s scroll down and see what it says: “The rankings of economies with populations over 100 million are based on data for 2 cities.” Hmmm. It turns out the World Bank is ranking the US based on starting up a business in New York City. That seems to tip the scales a wee bit, no?

But let’s soldier on. New Zealand ranks first in starting a new business, so let’s see how they work their magic. Here’s the World Bank’s comparison:

So it takes half a day in New Zealand and four days in New York City. Really? Half a day to start up a new business? Maybe they’re not using the same definition of “starting” that I am. Let’s check out the details for New York City. Here they are:

Now I get it. This isn’t about getting a business up and running. It’s solely about registering a new business. And it’s got nothing to do with any of Obama’s regulations. It’s all about state and local stuff. The only part that’s federal is getting an EIN number, which is free and takes one day. I’m not sure what Jeb Bush thinks he’s going to do to streamline this.

Bottom line: this is completely meaningless. It’s a measure only of how long it takes to register a business, and it’s only for New York City. And even at that, it takes only four days and costs $750. This is not stifling American entrepreneurship.

But wait! There’s more. The World Bank does have a broader “Ease of Doing Business” rank that takes into account the things you need to do to get up and running: construction permits, electricity, credit, paying taxes, enforcing contracts, etc. As it happens, the bulk of this stuff is still state and local, and has nothing to do with Obama or the federal government. Still, let’s take a look since Jeb chose not to share it with us for some reason. Where does the US rank on this measure?

The World Bank has us in 7th place. We’re already in the top ten that Jeb is aiming for. Mission accomplished!

POSTSCRIPT: Jeb has many other statistics in his piece, and I’d take them with the same grain of salt as his World Bank numbers. He also promises that in his administration every regulation “will have to satisfy a rigorous White House review process, including a cost-benefit analysis.” Apparently he doesn’t realize that this is already the case. As for the outrageous regulations he promises to repeal on Day One, this would mostly just benefit big campaign donors, not the yeoman entrepreneurs he claims to be sticking up for. No big surprise there, I suppose.

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Jeb Bush Has No Clue About Business Regulation

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Capitalism and Machines Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

by KendallTrego824 Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis says that economist Deirdre McCloskey has written “the most powerful defense of market capitalism you will ever read.” It’s based on the chart on the right, which shows the fantastic growth of the world economy since about 1800:

Now, McCloskey does not like the word “capitalism.” She would prefer our economic system be called “technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among all the parties involved.”

Or perhaps “fantastically successful liberalism, in the old European sense, applied to trade and politics, as it was applied also to science and music and painting and literature.”

Or simply “trade-tested progress.”

I am a considerable fan of capitalism by nearly any standard (aside from the current Republican Party one, which essentially holds that you’re a socialist if you believe in any regulation of large corporations at all). So sure: capitalism or free market exchange or whatever you want to call it certainly deserves plenty of credit here.

But was it the main driving force of the post-1800 economy? McCloskey says the Great Expansion wasn’t the result of “coal, thrift, transport, high male wages, low female and child wages, surplus value, human capital, geography, railways, institutions, infrastructure, nationalism, the quickening of commerce, the late medieval run-up, Renaissance individualism, the First Divergence, the Black Death, American silver, the original accumulation of capital, piracy, empire, eugenic improvement, the mathematization of celestial mechanics, technical education, or a perfection of property rights.” Those had existed for a long time. Rather, it’s the fact that European elites “came to accept or even admire the values of trade and betterment.”

But does that seem right? I don’t know much about China or India—and I might be wrong about Europe too—but I’ve always thought that trade and commerce were also relatively free during, say, the height of the Roman Empire. The landed elites made a lot of money in trade, and if merchants weren’t quite pillars of society, they were hardly social lepers either. The legions were routinely used to protect trade routes. Corruption was endemic, but tariffs and regulations on trade were fairly mild. The pursuit of wealth was respectable, and accounting practices were sophisticated.

Is that right? Maybe I’m woefully misinformed. But it seems like the big difference between AD 0 and AD 1800 wasn’t so much attitudes toward trade as it was the obvious thing that McCloskey left off her list: machines. As long as humans and animals were the only source of power, there was a limit to how much wealth could be generated. But if the Romans had invented steam engines and electrification, we’d all be speaking Latin today and arguing about what made Roman culture so special.

This is something that’s been a subject of academic study for a long time, and I hardly expect to break any new ground here. But while a respect for fairly free trade might be a prerequisite for exponential economic growth, the example of Rome suggests that more than that is needed. The truly interesting question, then, is: why did 18th century Europeans invent machine power but 1st century Europeans didn’t?

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Capitalism and Machines Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

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Raw Data: Here’s How Black Kids Are Really Doing in School

by PhilippSweetappl Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby is pretty ticked off at the way our “journalistic elites” cover black kids. In particular, he’s ticked off at liberals who seem to care only about black kids getting shot, and conservatives who care only about promoting scare stories that make our public schools look as horrible as possible:

You will never see those people ask how black kids are doing in school. The reason for that seems abundantly clear:

None of those people care!

Just for the record, this is what score gains in math look like over the past twenty years. You’ll see these data nowhere else.

Twenty years?!? How about 40 years? I’ve got that for you right here, courtesy of the NAEP long-term assessment, which has used a similar test for over four decades precisely so that it’s possible to make reasonable long-term comparisons. On the math test, black kids have improved their performance significantly: by 36 points at age nine, 36 points at age thirteen and 18 points at age seventeen. If we use the usual rule of thumb that ten points equals one grade level, that looks pretty good. And the gap between white scores and black scores has shrunk as well.

So maybe our schools are doing pretty well, after all? Maybe so. But at the risk of being a wet blanket, I’ll point out one thing that makes all these score gains a little less uplifting: Since 1990, 17-year-old black kids have made no gains in math at all—and the story is the same in reading. Over the past 25 years, younger black kids have improved by one or two grade levels, but those gains are completely washed out by age 17. There may be good explanations for this. School reforms haven’t hit high schools yet. A lower dropout rate means there are more mediocre kids still in school at age 17. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But one way or another, nothing matters unless our kids are doing better by the time they finish school. Until we figure out how to keep high school from being the black pit that it apparently is, none of the score gains in lower grades really matter much.

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Raw Data: Here’s How Black Kids Are Really Doing in School

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