Tag Archives: summer

Republicans Love Obamacare!

by LorrieWolford Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s an additional tidbit from that recent Commonwealth Fund survey about Obamacare:

That’s a lot of Republicans who are satisfied with their Obamacare coverage. They might not realize it’s Obamacare—perhaps they know it as Kynect or Covered California—but they like it. And if you take it away, they’re going to be unhappy. That’s several million potentially unhappy Republicans if the national GOP continues its anti-Obamacare jihad. Just saying.

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Republicans Love Obamacare!

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Who’s Afraid of an Itsy Bitsy Bit of Inflation, Anyway?

by LydaMcCorkindal Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Why are so many people obsessed with “hard money”? Why the endless hysterics about the prospect of inflation getting higher than 2 percent? Paul Krugman, like many others, thinks it’s basically a class issue. If you have a lot of debt, inflation is a good thing because it lowers the real value of your debt. But if you’re rich and you have lots of assets, the opposite is true. Here’s Krugman using data from the Census Bureau’s SIPP database:

Only the top end have more financial assets (as opposed to real assets like housing) than they have nominal debt; so they’re much more likely to be hurt by mild inflation and be helped by deflation than the rest.

Now, it’s true that some of these financial assets are stocks, which are claims on real assets. If we only look at interest-bearing assets, even the top group has more liabilities than assets.

But the SIPP top isn’t very high; in 2007 you needed a net worth of more than $8 million just to be in the top 1 percent. And since the ratio of interest-bearing assets to debt is clearly rising with wealth, we can be sure that the truly wealthy are indeed in the category where they have more to lose than to gain by a rise in the price level.

Brad DeLong isn’t buying it:

It is true that the rich do have more nominal assets than liabilities….But it is also true that America’s rich have a lot of real assets whose value depends on a strong and growing economy.

I find it implausible to claim that the net gain is positive when we net out the (slight) real gain to the rich from lower inflation with the (large) real loss to rich from lower capital utilization. It’s not a material interest in low inflation that we are dealing with here…

I don’t think I buy Krugman’s claim either. He’s basically saying that hard money hysteria is driven by the material interests of the top 0.1 percent, but even if you grant them the clout to get the entire country on their side, do the super rich really love low inflation in the first place? Do they own a lot of long-term, fixed-interest assets that decline in value when inflation increases? Fifty years ago, sure. But today? Not so much. This is precisely the group with the most sophisticated investment strategies, highly diversified and hedged against things like simple inflation risks.

Plus there’s DeLong’s point: even if they do own a lot of assets that are sensitive to inflation, they own even more assets that are sensitive to lousy economic growth. If higher inflation also helped produce higher growth, they’d almost certainly come out ahead.

So what’s the deal? I’d guess that it’s a few things. First, the sad truth is that virtually no one believes that high inflation helps economic growth when the economy is weak. I believe it. Krugman believes it. DeLong believes it. But among those who don’t follow the minutiae of economic research—i.e., nearly everyone—it sounds crazy. That goes for the top 0.1 percent as well as it does for everyone else. If they truly believed that higher inflation would get the economy roaring again, they might support it. (Might!) But they don’t.

Second, there’s the legitimate fear of accelerating inflation once you let your foot off the brake. This fear isn’t very legitimate, since if there’s one thing the Fed knows how to do, it’s stomp on inflation if it gets out of control. Nonetheless, there are plenty of people with a defensible belief that a credible commitment to low inflation does more good than harm in the long run. After all, stomping on inflation is pretty painful.

Third, there’s the very sensible fear among the middle class that high inflation is just a sneaky way to erode real wages. This is sensible because it’s true. There are several avenues by which higher inflation helps weak economies that are trapped at the zero bound, and one of them is by allowing wages to stealthily decline until employment reaches a new equilibrium. I think that lots of people understand this instinctively.

Fourth, there’s fear of the 70s, which apparently won’t go away until everyone who was alive during the 70s is dead. Which is going to be a while.

It’s worth noting that hard money convictions are the norm virtually everywhere in the developed world, even in places that are a lot more egalitarian than the United States. Inflationary fears may be irrational, especially under our current economic conditions, but ancient fears are hard to deal with. As it happens, the erosion of assets during the 70s was unique to the conditions of the 70s, which included a lot more than just a few years of high inflation. But inflation is what people remember, so inflation is still what they fear.

Bottom line: Even among non-hysterics, I’d say that hardly anyone really, truly believes in their hearts that high inflation would be good for economic growth. It’s the kind of thing that you have to convince yourself of by sheer mental effort, and even at that you’re probably still a little wobbly about the whole idea. It just seems so crazy. Until that changes, fear of inflation isn’t going anywhere.

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Who’s Afraid of an Itsy Bitsy Bit of Inflation, Anyway?

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Murder Is Down 63% in San Francisco. Lead Probably Isn’t the Reason.

by DrusillJnb Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Every time a city reports a big drop in crime, someone sends me a link to a story about it. San Francisco is the latest:

During the first half of the year, the city saw 14 killings — a 36 percent drop from the 22 recorded at the midpoint last year and a 63 percent decrease from the 38 in 2012.

….”The best guess one can make is that they’re associated with a national trend of lowered homicide rates over the last 20 years,” said Robert Weisberg, a law professor who co-directs the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. “They have settled a bit, but they have gone down in some places.”

Weisberg said one big factor in the national drop in killings is “just smarter policing, which requires more police and smarter police, and that includes the use of technology, the targeting of hot spots and CompStat-style policing and gang intervention.”

I know what you’re wondering: is it lead, Kevin? What about this “smarter policing” stuff? Here are a few things that should help you think about this stuff:

The long-term trend in San Francisco is pretty familiar, and pretty similar to other mid-size cities. Over the past 20 years, a big part of San Francisco’s drop in violent crime is probably due to the phaseout of leaded gasoline between 1975 and 1995.
However, lead isn’t responsible for short-term changes. It has nothing to do with the 63 percent drop in homicides since 2012.
Generally speaking, you have to be careful with homicide numbers. Overall violent crime statistics are based on a large number of incidents, so they’re fairly reliable. But even big cities don’t have that many murders, which means the numbers can bounce around a lot from year to year just by random chance.
A drop in crime can create a virtuous circle, because it allows police to spend more time on the crime that remains. So lead might well have acted as a sort of tailwind here, producing a drop in violent crime that allowed systems like CompStat to be more effective, thus producing further drops even after the impact of lead has flattened out.

The phaseout of leaded gasoline did its job in San Francisco, but at this point any further drops will most likely have to come from other sources. More effective policing strategies are certainly one of the things that can make a difference.

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Murder Is Down 63% in San Francisco. Lead Probably Isn’t the Reason.

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The NSA Said Edward Snowden Had No Access to Surveillance Intercepts. They Lied.

by CarmellBainton Posted on July 6, 2014

Mother Jones

For more than a year, NSA officials have insisted that although Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, he didn’t have access to the actual surveillance intercepts themselves. It turns out they were lying.1 In fact, he provided the Washington Post with a cache of 22,000 intercept reports containing 160,000 individual intercepts. The Post has spend months reviewing these files and estimates that 11 percent of the intercepted accounts belonged to NSA targets and the remaining 89 percent were “incidental” collections from bystanders.

So was all of this worth it? The Post’s review illustrates just how hard it is to make that judgment:

Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

….If Snowden’s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 “transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year’s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden’s sample, the office’s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.

The whole story is worth a read in order to get a more detailed description of what these intercepts looked like and who they ended up targeting. In some ways, the Snowden intercepts show that the NSA is fairly fastidious about minimizing data on US persons. In other ways, however, they stretch to the limit—and probably beyond—the rules for defining who is and isn’t a US person. Click the link for more.

1Naturally the NSA has an explanation:

Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about “raw” intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.

“We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic…” Litt said. “Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden was able to circumvent that in any way.”

Silly intelligence committee members. They should have specifically asked about access to processed content.

Jesus. If someone in Congress isn’t seriously pissed off about this obvious evasion, they might as well just hang up their oversight spurs and disband.

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The NSA Said Edward Snowden Had No Access to Surveillance Intercepts. They Lied.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 4 July 2014

by SusannaGriffie Posted on July 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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I think it’s time to stop pretending there’s going to be anything to blog about this morning, and just get straight to catblogging. I was hoping for something patriotically themed, but that was a no-go. Domino is just not a dress-up kind of cat. So then I thought I’d get her to lounge in front of all the various goodies for tonight’s picnic. She wasn’t having any of that either. The best I could do was this tableau, which lasted about a second or two before Domino scampered away as if the Peeps were going to leap up and attack her. It’s just hard to get her in the proper spirit.

For the rest of you, though, have a lovely 238th birthday party.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 4 July 2014

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Liberal Comedy, Conservative Outrage. But Why?

by MorrisLapointe Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Conservative publisher Adam Bellow thinks conservatives need to produce more popular art: beach fiction, TV shows, comedy routines, etc. Paul Waldman thinks he’s got an uphill battle:

As I’ve noted before, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report work as well as they do because they’re not shows written and performed by professional liberals who happen to be comedians, attempting to use humor to score political points; rather, they’re shows written and performed by professional comedians who happen to be liberals, using politics to produce comedy. It’s a really important distinction.

The same distinction applies to other mediums. If you set out to write an explicitly conservative novel, it’s likely to suck. If you set out to write a novel, and it has a conservative worldview because you happen to be a conservative, it will probably do a lot better. Unfortunately for conservatives, if you take this approach you’re likely to end up writing little more than an establishment-friendly novel, not an overtly pointed takedown of liberalism.

That said, conservatives could produce perfectly good books and TV shows if they took Waldman’s advice. But comedy is a special problem. Conservative comedy just doesn’t seem to work very well, and I’d guess there are two big reasons why:

The material: Liberals are, generally speaking, opposed to the establishment. Poking fun at the establishment is easy to do, so liberals have lots of ready-made material. Conversely, poking fun at the little guys just seems mean. It’s not impossible to get good comedy out of, say, the more ridiculous aspects of the Occupy Wall Street folks at Zuccotti Park, but it’s a lot harder and the material is a lot thinner.

The audience: I’ve never quite understood this, but liberals just seem to like political comedy more than conservatives. Conservatives simply don’t consider this stuff a laughing matter. Especially recently, they’re convinced, deep in their marrow, that liberals are literally out to destroy America, and how do you find the yuks in that? By contrast, mocking conservatives is a popular liberal pastime. Is this because liberals accept conservatives as an inevitable part of the scenery, to be fought but not really hated? That doesn’t seem quite right. Still, it’s true that the establishment, by definition, is always with us, and always working in its usual way to preserve itself. You might think it’s a malign force, but you don’t think of it as something new that’s suddenly emerged to wreck the country.

I dunno. I’m just guessing here. Age probably has something to do with this too. In any case, conservatives are great at outrage, while liberals who try to emulate them almost always fail. Liberals are great at comedy, and conservatives who try to emulate that fail as well. In the middle ground of books and movies, I imagine both sides could do well, but since most artists are liberals, there’s just more to choose from along the liberal spectrum.

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Liberal Comedy, Conservative Outrage. But Why?

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There’s a Pitched Battle Being Fought Over the Phrase “Added Sugars”

by HarrietCooke Posted on July 2, 2014

Mother Jones

What do the following organizations have in common?

American Bakers Association
American Beverage Association
American Frozen Foods Institute
Corn Refiners Association
National Confectioners Association
American Frozen Food Institute
Sugar Association
International Dairy Foods Association

Answer: they are all furiously opposed to an FDA proposal that would add a line to the standard nutrition facts label for “Added Sugars.” Big surprise, eh? Roberto Ferdman explains here why it’s probably a good idea anyway.

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There’s a Pitched Battle Being Fought Over the Phrase “Added Sugars”

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The EU’s “Right to be Forgotten” Starts to Take Concrete Shape

by JustinYQON Posted on July 2, 2014

Mother Jones

A few days ago, Google announced that it was beavering away on the 41,000 requests it had gotten from people demanding that it remove links to unflattering articles about themselves. So just what kind of people are making these requests? Brad DeLong directs me to the BBC’s Robert Peston, who gives us a clue:

This morning the BBC received the following notification from Google:

Notice of removal from Google Search: we regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/robertpeston/2007/10/merrills_mess.html

What it means is that a blog I wrote in 2007 will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe….Now in my blog, only one individual is named. He is Stan O’Neal, the former boss of the investment bank Merrill Lynch.

My column describes how O’Neal was forced out of Merrill after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made.

Is the data in it “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”?

Hmmm.

I wonder if there’s a way to make this backfire? How hard would it be to create an automated process that figures out which articles Google is being forced to stuff down the memory hole? Probably not too hard, I imagine. And how hard would it then be to repost those articles in enough different places that they all zoomed back toward the top of Google’s search algorithm? Again, probably not too hard for a group of people motivated to do some mischief.

Maybe someone is already working on this. It wouldn’t surprise me. And I wonder if Google’s surprisingly quick response to the EU decision isn’t designed to spur exactly this kind of backlash. That wouldn’t really surprise me either.

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The EU’s “Right to be Forgotten” Starts to Take Concrete Shape

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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

by MarilynFortney Posted on July 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Noam Scheiber has a piece in the current issue of the New Republic about Hillary Clinton’s imminent takeover of the Democratic Party, and today Ezra Klein interviewed him about it. Klein was especially interested in the argument that Obama’s 2008 supporters were so disillusioned by Obama’s failure to change Washington that they’re now eager to support an old-school politico like Hillary. Here’s Scheiber:

Back in 2008, Hillary Clinton made this kind of snide, but in retrospect apt, critique of Obama where she said that Obama thinks he’ll get to Washington and the heavens will part and the Republicans will cooperate, but that just won’t happen. So I asked some of these Obama supporters if she was right. And a lot of these people remembered those comments and being annoyed by them. But they all said she was actually a bit right. We were a bit naive then, they said. People used the word naive a lot in these conversations.

I’m not sure I’ve ever fully fessed up to this, so this is as good a time as any. For years, I really didn’t believe the conservative snark about how Obama supporters all thought he would descend on Washington like a god-king and miraculously turn us into a post-racial, post-partisan, post-political country. Kumbaya! The reason I didn’t believe it was that it never struck me as even remotely plausible. Did Obama give soaring speeches? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to change the way Washington works? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to pass historic legislation in dozens of different areas? Sure, he’s a politician.

It just never occurred to me that anyone took this stuff seriously. It’s a presidential campaign! Of course he’s promising a chicken in every pot. That’s what presidential candidates do. I believed then, and still believe now, that Obama is basically a mainstream Democrat who’s cautious, pragmatic, technocratic, and incremental. In fact, that seemed so obvious to me that I never really credited the idea that anyone could seriously see him any differently.

Well, I guess that was naive on my part. By now, the evidence is clear that millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric. Naturally, then, they’re bitterly disappointed at the real-world Obama. Well, I’m disappointed in some ways too—mostly in the areas of foreign policy and national security—but I continue to think he’s a pretty good president because my expectations were tempered to begin with.

Nor do I think Hillary would have done any better. Probably worse, I’d say. After all, once he was in office, it’s not as if Obama acted like he believed his campaign-trail rhetoric. He hired a bunch of pretty ordinary staffers and got to work passing pretty ordinary legislation. Is the theory here that Hillary would have figured out some magical points of leverage that Obama didn’t? That she would have done better because Republicans like her more than Obama? Please.

I have pretty mixed feelings about a Hillary Clinton candidacy. On the one hand, I’ve long admired her obviously sincere dedication to public service in the face of abuse that would destroy a weaker person. On the other hand, another Clinton? This is no fault of hers, but I’m not sure I’m any more excited about that than I am about the prospect of another Bush. Maybe it’s time to move on.

Either way, though, I sure hope all those folks who are disappointed by Obama don’t think that Hillary is some sort of silver bullet either. If she runs and wins, she’ll be dealing with exactly the same kind of Republican obstructionism as Obama—and she’ll have just as much trouble getting anything done.

If disappointed Dems really want to change things, they have only one option: figure out a way to take back Congress in 2016. That’s it. Until and unless that happens, George Washington himself wouldn’t be any more effective than Obama has been.

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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

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Why This Summer Could Be the Arab Summer

by MadgePiddington Posted on June 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Three and a half years ago, the world was riveted by the massive crowds of youths mobilizing in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand an end to Egypt’s dreary police state. We stared in horror as, at one point, the Interior Ministry mobilized camel drivers to attack the demonstrators. We watched transfixed as the protests spread from one part of Egypt to another and then from country to country across the region. Before it was over, four presidents-for-life would be toppled and others besieged in their palaces.

Some 42 months later, in most of the Middle East and North Africa, the bright hopes for more personal liberties and an end to political and economic stagnation championed by those young people have been dashed. Instead, a number of Arab countries have seen counter-revolutions, while others are engulfed in internecine conflicts and civil wars, creating Mad Max-like scenes of post-apocalyptic horror. But keep one thing in mind: the rebellions of the past three years were led by Arab millennials, twentysomethings who have decades left to come into their own. Don’t count them out yet. They have only begun the work of transforming the region.

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Why This Summer Could Be the Arab Summer

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