Tag Archives: year

Here’s Who the Money Men Are Backing So Far in the Republican Field

by fuirpycf Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wesley Lowery takes a look today at who all of Mitt Romney’s donors are supporting these days. As Lowery says, this shouldn’t really be taken as a look at “Romney money.” It’s more a look at who’s getting some love from wealthy mainstream Republicans. The answer, it turns out, is unsurprising:

  1. Jeb Bush
  2. Scott Walker
  3. Paul Ryan

This makes sense to me. If I had to pick a top three, this would be it, with the order depending a lot on who decides to get serious about running. I think Paul Ryan would be very formidable, with strong appeal to both tea party types and mainstream types, but it’s unclear if he has any interest in 2016. Jeb Bush is a classic candidate who, again, has some appeal in both camps, but has to decide if he thinks he can overcome the obvious baggage of being a Bush. Scott Walker has to win reelection this year—and show that he can do it handily—before he takes any further steps.

As for the rest of the field, I continue to think that (a) Chris Christie is toast, (b) Rand Paul is a vanity candidate, and (c) the rest of them are going to tear each other limb from limb fighting for the title of king of the wingnuts. Naturally I reserve the right to change my mind later and pretend that I never wrote this.

STANDARD CAVEAT: Yes, it’s ridiculous to be talking about this so far ahead of the election. I apologize. But my excuse is that this is invisible primary stuff, and that really does matter this far out. Besides, talking about the “invisible primary” marks you as a sophisticate, and I wanted an opportunity to do that.

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Here’s Who the Money Men Are Backing So Far in the Republican Field

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The Fed Cares About Inflation 10 Times More Than It Cares About Unemployment

by 4ko9dra Posted on February 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ryan Avent, having exhausted his conventional analysis of the Fed’s 2008 transcripts, turns today to a more analytical approach: counting words. I think others have already made this point without numbers, but Avent’s most powerful finding is that the Fed cares way more about inflation than it does about unemployment:

There is only one winner in the dual mandate. The word “inflation” (or variants thereof, such as “inflationary”) was mentioned a cool 2,664 times in 2008; “unemployment” pops up just 275 times.

I’m assuming he played fair and also looked for variants of “unemployment,” like “employment” or “jobs.” In any case, I don’t think this comes as much of a surprise to anyone, since it’s been obvious for decades that the Fed not only doesn’t care about unemployment, but gets positively worried when too many people have jobs. That would mean the labor market is tight and workers might get paid more, you see, and that could be inflationary. Still, it’s nice to see this verified quantitatively.

Avent also found that there were fewer mentions of “recession” as the year went on, which seems odd but might not be. Early on, when it was still unclear if the economy was in recession, I suppose they argued about this a lot. By June, when there was no longer any question about it, they all took it for granted and no longer even needed to mention it.

As for the finding that laughter increased later in the year, I guess I can’t blame them. There’s only so much globe-destroying financial panic you can take without cracking a few jokes.

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The Fed Cares About Inflation 10 Times More Than It Cares About Unemployment

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Chained CPI Was Never Going to Happen, And Now It’s Still Never Going to Happen

by SheilaGellert Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Chained CPI is the dog that didn’t bark. President Obama’s latest budget proposal doesn’t include a switch to chained CPI, and this absence has put chained CPI back in the news. Does that make sense?

Probably not. In any case, you probably don’t care much about what chained CPI really is. I’m sure I’ve written up a technical explanation in the past, but I’m too lazy to—oh hell. Hold on. Here it is if you’re interested. Or you can just google it. Long story short, it slightly reduces the way we calculate inflation. And since Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation, it would slightly reduce future Social Security payouts.

Obama has proposed in the past that we adopt chained CPI. On its own, this is a terrible idea. However, under certain circumstances, it might be a good thing. At a minimum, those circumstances are threefold: (1) There would be some kind of adjustment to prevent low-income retirees from taking a hit. (2) It’s part of some broader deal on Social Security. (3) It’s adopted everywhere, including in the tax code, where it would raise taxes slightly by slowing down the inflation indexing of tax brackets. Hey, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander. Chained CPI is either more accurate or it’s not, and if it is, then we should use it everywhere.

If these circumstances were met, I’d have a certain amount of sympathy for switching to chained CPI beyond the purely wonkish consensus that it’s a more accurate measure. One reason is that it forces everyone to put their money where their mouths are. And by “everyone” I mean today’s retirees. You see, one of the things that pisses me off about discussions of Social Security is that it’s always future retirees who are supposed to take one for the team. We’re supposed to believe that Social Security is in crisis mode, a true threat to the republic, and therefore we have to cut benefits. But look. If this is really such a huge crisis, then we should all pitch in to save Social Security, including current retirees. If current retirees think their existing benefits are too generous, then they should support cutting them. If they don’t think that, then why should they get to keep their current benefits but cut them for future retirees?

They shouldn’t. Either benefits are too high or they aren’t. And one of the features of chained CPI is that it would have a small but immediate effect on benefits, cutting future COLA increases slightly every year. If that’s acceptable to current retirees, then I figure I can accept a cut too. If not, then I want the same benefits they’re getting. Deal?

In any case, none of this matters, because Republicans have never shown the slightest willingness to cut a broader deal. They want chained CPI, but they want it only for future retirees and they want it only for Social Security. They are willing to make precisely zero concessions in return for this. So as Jonathan Chait points out, it really doesn’t matter if Obama includes chained CPI in his budget proposal:

In reality, the fundamentals of the situation have not changed at all. Last year, Obama was willing to adopt C-CPI in return for concessions Republicans would never, ever make. This year, Obama is still willing to adopt C-CPI in return for concessions Republicans would never, ever make. Putting the compromise in his budget was merely Obama’s way of locating the blame for the reality that Republicans in Congress will never, ever, ever strike a fiscal deal with him. The disappointed deficit scolds sitting just to Obama’s right, and the joyous progressives just to his left, are committing the same fallacy. They are mistaking a step premised on an impossibility for a semblance of reality.

One thing I’m curious about in an academic sort of way is whether Obama ever really truly supported chained CPI. He’s enough of a wonk that he might have. Or, it might merely have been a bargaining chip that he knew would never go anywhere. We’ll probably never know.

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Chained CPI Was Never Going to Happen, And Now It’s Still Never Going to Happen

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Go Green on Saint Patrick’s Day

by aerjbnvzij Posted on February 20, 2014

Green glass bottles with lights for party decorations. Photo: flickr/rubberdragon

According to Use-less-stuff.com, Americans throw away 25% more trash during the Thanksgiving to New Year’s holiday period than any other time of year.  Even if your environmental footprint is the size of a leprechaun’s, it’s likely that you donated more than usual to the landfill.  So for this St. Patrick’s Day, why not turn over a new leaf, or four-leaf-clover?

Here are some simple ways to be truly green on St. Patty’s Day:

Green your home

Decorate for the holiday by making a wreath made out of old green t-shirts, denim, tablecloths, tea towels, curtains and any other upcycled material that’s taking up space.   You’ll need a wire wreath frame, which you can recycle later, fabric shears and your collection of fabric.  Cut the fabric into small strips and tie onto the wire until it covers every inch.  Once you’ve pre-cut the fabric, this project becomes kid-friendly and parent-friendly since no glue or messy paint are required.

Consider using green beverage bottles and add lights to create fun ambiance or swap out your vases for green ones by spray-painting old bottles to add pops of green color in every room.  Don’t forget to use an eco-friendly spray paint that’s free of CFCs!

Green your food

Dedicate your meals to your city by only cooking with locally-grown produce.  By doing so you’ll donate your dollars to the local economy and enjoy fresher food that hasn’t been shipped from thousands of miles away – saving the atmosphere from more pollution.

Make it a fun project for the kids and dye your food green using natural ingredients.  By following these instructions, you can make a green dye at home using matcha powder, spirulina, powder, parsley juice, wheat grass juice, spinach juice, spinach powder or parsley powder.

Green your beer

No kids allowed for this one.  Pledge to drink locally-brewed beer while celebrating the holiday.  Again, you’ll be a hometown hero for contributing to your local economy while sipping on a cold one.  Take it a step further by drinking draught beer instead of bottles since not all bars and restaurants recycle glass.  Cheers!

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Go Green on Saint Patrick’s Day

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Girl Scout Cookie Boxes Take a Green Trial Run

by JohnieRhyne Posted on February 7, 2014

Girl Scouts offer more cookie varieties in low-waste packaging. Photo: Shutterstock

Today marks the start of National Girl Scout Cookie Weekend, and we don’t know about you, but we’re pretty stoked. And this year, we have more to look forward to than the cookies.

What could be better than shoveling an entire sleeve of Girl Scout cookies down your pie hole in one fell swoop? Knowing that those cookies came from eco-friendly packaging, of course!

Instead of a paperboard box covering, three cookie varieties will come packaged in a thin film shaped like a box (the little plastic tray that keeps the cookies nice and organized also helps the film hold a box shape). The new packaging cuts 150 tons of paperboard and allows more cookies to fit on a truck, saving fuel.

The Girl Scouts have been tinkering with the new lower-waste design for several years, but this year the packaging will be found on more varieties. The Lemonades, Thanks-A-Lot and Cranberry Citrus Crisps will be wrapped in the low-waste packaging.

Also, while not touted as eco-friendly, the Girl Scouts’ Cookie Finder app will help you locate the cookie booth sales closest to you, saving you time and fuel. The app covers all zip codes in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

Another good thing about Girl Scout cookies? You never have to worry about what to do with leftovers.

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Let’s Blame Obamacare For Everything!

by ELMIrishxpc Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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AOL has decided to change the way it handles 401(k) retirement accounts. Instead of matching employee contributions monthly, it will make one lump-sum match at the end of the year. This screws employees and makes more money for AOL in two ways. First, they no longer contribute any matching funds at all for people who leave in the middle of the year. Second, employees don’t earn interest on their matching funds throughout the year.

So what’s behind this Scrooge-like nickel and diming? Can you guess? Can you? Here’s CEO Tim Armstrong:

In the CEO chair, let me give you an example of the decisions we have to make as a company: Obamacare is an additional $7.1 million expense for us as a company….As a CEO and Management Team, we had to decide “Do we pass the $7.1 million of Obamacare costs to our employees or do we try to eat as much of that as possible and cut other benefits?”

It’s Obamacare’s fault! The all-purpose punching bag gets the blame again. AOL’s health care expenses went up this year, just as they have every year since the company was founded, but this time it’s Obamacare’s fault. Why? Well, why not? It’s a mighty handy excuse, isn’t it? And it certainly distracts everyone from the fact that AOL is shafting its employees even though it just announced its best results in a decade.

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Let’s Blame Obamacare For Everything!

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Why Are Republicans Shooting Themselves in the Foot With a Health Care Bill?

by Lavon5225vx Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore points me to The Hill today, which reports that House Republicans plan to draft a genuine Obamacare replacement bill later this year:

For years, Republicans have promised a “repeal and replace” strategy on ObamaCare, but have never coalesced behind one plan. President Obama has repeatedly mocked the GOP for not delivering an alternative.

Eric Cantor intends to move a repeal-and-replace bill before the midterm elections in November, according to a source familiar with the situation. He broached the issue at the House GOP retreat in Cambridge, Md., late last week.

“I think it is very likely that we’re going to have it before the election, we’re going to give the people — or at least we are going to try to give the people — a clear distinction of who we are versus who the Democrats are,” Florida Rep. Tom Rooney (R) said.

I’m genuinely baffled by this. Why bother? Republicans have spent years screaming “Repeal and Replace!” without ever offering up a replacement, and it’s worked fine. Sure, it invites mockery from folks like me, but has that ever done them any harm? Not that I can see.

On the flip side, any actual bill will be divisive within their own caucus and provide a rich target for Democrats at the same time. When it’s all just hazy smoke, Dems have nothing to get a handle on. Once there’s actual legislative language, all they have to do is find the least popular bits, twist them into granny-killing death panels, and go to town.

If there were an actual chance of passing this bill, it might be worth it. But there’s not, and as near as I can tell, it’s literally 100 percent downside and no upside. What on earth is the point?

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Why Are Republicans Shooting Themselves in the Foot With a Health Care Bill?

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Frackers banned from New York for at least another year

by dfdedtcf Posted on January 30, 2014

Frackers banned from New York for at least another year

By

CREDO

Good news, New Yorkers. Your state has staved off the creepy advances of environment-trashing frackers for at least another year.

While neighboring states have allowed oil and gas companies to frack freely in their Marcellus shale deposits, the Empire State declared a statewide moratorium in 2008, saying it needed time to study the impacts to water supplies and human health. The ban has attracted lawsuits from the energy industry, but fracking is so unpopular in New York that dozens of local governments have put their own bans in place, just in case the state’s is lifted.

That doesn’t seem likely, at least not before April of next year. Here’s Bloomberg with Wednesday’s news:

Joe Martens, who heads the Environmental Conservation Department, told lawmakers in Albany today that [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo’s proposed $137 billion budget doesn’t have any funding for oversight of high-volume hydraulic fracturing.

Asked if he’ll end the more than five-year wait for fracking rules, Martens said, “We have absolutely no plans to do so” in the next fiscal year, which begins April 1.

Needless to say, the news triggered a fresh burst of histrionics from the energy sector. “The human cost in New York, due to arbitrary delays on this matter, is real,” a New York State Petroleum Council official told Bloomberg.

Human cost? We’re not sure exactly what that means. But we’re hoping it doesn’t mean frustrated frackers have begun human sacrifices to avenge the uncertainty they face over whether they will be allowed to plunder the state’s environment.


Source
New York Decision on Fracking Regulations Delayed, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Chart of the Day: An Awful Lot of People Think Obamacare is Hurting Them

by Dave Max Posted on January 30, 2014

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Kaiser has released its monthly tracking poll on Obamacare, and there’s really no way to put lip gloss on this pig. Public perception of the law has been worsening for the past nine months, and it gapped out sharply after the rollout debacle in October. There’s now a 16-point delta between unfavorable and favorable views of the law, 50-34 percent. With the exception of one or two monthly anomolies that are probably polling artifacts, this is by far the worst it’s been since the law was passed.

You can see the effect this has in the chart on the right: 27 percent now say that Obamacare has “negatively affected” someone in their family. That’s crazy. Even if you subtract the baseline of 18-19 percent who have been saying this all along, that’s an increase of nearly ten points over the course of 2013. Unless you take an absurdly expansive view of “affected,” this is all but impossible. Obamacare simply doesn’t have that kind of reach.

But we’ve been though a recent period in which every co-pay increase, every premium increase, and every narrowing of benefits has been blamed on Obamacare. These things have happened every year like clockwork for the past couple of decades, but this year it was convenient to blame them on Obamacare. Combine that with the PR disaster from the website rollout, and a whole lot of people now believe that Obamacare is hurting them.

Unfortunately, this is fertile ground for Republicans. If they really have the discipline to avoid shooting themselves in the foot this year over idiotic confrontations with the president, running their midterm campaign solely on opposition to Obamacare might be a winner.

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Chart of the Day: An Awful Lot of People Think Obamacare is Hurting Them

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Older trees best at fighting climate change

by RobinLeflore Posted on January 16, 2014

Older trees best at fighting climate change

By

mindgrow

As humans age, we tend to pass more gas. As trees age, they tend to suck more of it up.

A new paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature has blown away old misconceptions about the roles that the most mature trees in forests play in combating climate change.

It has long been believed that younger trees are better than their older neighbors at absorbing carbon dioxide. But the new research suggests that the opposite is true. It turns out that big trees just keep on growing, at fast rates, and the growth depends on carbon that the trees draw from the air around them.

“In whatever forest you look at, be it old or new growth, it is the largest trees that are the greater carbon sinks,” William Morris, a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, told Grist. “Not the smaller, younger trees, as was previously thought.”

Morris and dozens of other scientists studied data related to 673,046 trees belonging to 403 tree species in managed and wild forests across the world. For 96.8 percent of species studied, they found that each tree drew more carbon dioxide out the air each year than it did the year before. The carbon is used to produce leaves, roots, and wood. From the paper:

In absolute terms, trees 100 cm in trunk diameter typically add from 10 kg to 200 kg of aboveground dry mass each year (depending on species), averaging 103 kg per year. This is nearly three times the rate for trees of the same species at 50 cm in diameter, and is the mass equivalent to adding an entirely new tree of 10–20 cm in diameter to the forest each year.

The findings don’t contradict the prevailing notion that young forests are better overall at sucking up CO2 than are old-growth forests. That’s because younger forests contain so many more trees.

That said, it’s still best for the climate that we leave those aging stands in place because cutting them down would unleash the carbon they spent their lifetimes absorbing. “One must take into account the amount of carbon the forests are storing as well as how much they are fixing,” Morris said.


Source
Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size, Nature

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Older trees best at fighting climate change

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