Category Archives: Politics

Nuts to You, Creep!

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John Boehner represents the 8th congressional district of Ohio. It’s made up of suburbs and farmland and sits along the border with Indiana. The biggest city in the 8th district is Hamilton, with a population of 62,000. Republicans have represented Boehner’s district since 1939. He got elected in 1990 after he challenged the incumbent congressman, who had been convicted of paying a 16-year old girl $40 for sex. Boehner has been elected without significant opposition since then, twice with no opposition at all. 

This creep, who is now Speaker of the House, has decided to shut down much of the federal government in a vain attempt to interfere with implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Senate Democrats have been asking for negotiations on the 2014 budget for six months, but Boehner and his Republican colleagues decided it would make more sense to become extortionists. Go back and renegotiate Obamacare, you Democrats, or else we’ll send 800,000 Federal workers home, force another million to work without pay, close various government facilities and suspend programs like the Special Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children!

There’s common agreement that there are some relatively moderate Republicans who would join Democrats in voting to keep the government open, if Boehner allowed that simple vote to take place. But he hasn’t done that yet. He’s apparently terrified that he’s going to lose the support of the craziest Republicans and not be Speaker of the House anymore. He might even lose his seat in Congress to some Tea Party clown next time the Republicans in the 8th district go to the polls.

If Republicans who don’t represent places like the 8th district of Ohio were allowed to “vote their conscience” (something members of the House might want to do sometimes), this stupid shutdown wouldn’t be happening.

There are two good things about it, however. The Republicans look bad and might even lose some seats next year. And the Democrats are holding firm. If I were Senator Harry Reid or President Obama, my answer to Boehner would be a simple “Fuck you!”, or, a bit more politely, what General McAuliffe told the Germans when they demanded our surrender at the Battle of the Bulge: “Nuts!”

P.S. — For some history regarding the Republican concept of “negotiation”:

The Republican position has been clear for three years: they will refuse to negotiate if negotiation could mean having to give something up. But they will loudly demand a negotiation over something that is not open to compromise, namely a settled law from 2009…

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/the-g-o-p-definition-of-negotiation/?hp

Patience and the Affordable Care Act

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It’s always bothered me that the Obama administration didn’t come up with a catchy name for the health insurance provisions of the Affordable Care Act. We’ve got “Social Security”, “Medicare” and “Medicaid”, so why couldn’t the administration come up with an equally helpful name for this thing, instead of leaving an opening for it to be called “Obamacare”?

I bet if Saint Ronald was still President, one of the first things on his agenda would have been to give his pet program a great name that would help sell it to the American people. But Obama apparently thinks he’s above such things.

Nevertheless, the important thing is that this landmark legislation is going into effect two days from now, regardless of what any misguided, foolish, cowardly and/or evil House Republicans do in the meantime.

I know people (including myself) who will probably be taking advantage of the ACA in the relatively near future, so I’ve been wondering how much it’s going to cost. Unfortunately, there are reports in the media that suggest what “average” premiums will be. There was one such unhelpful article in the New York Times today: “‘Affordable Care’ or a Rip-Off?”.

The problem is that you can’t know what a person’s or a family’s costs will be until you factor in where they live, how old they are and, especially, what their income is. Many or most people in this country, not just the poorest among us, will be eligible for subsidies from the government. In fact, if you’re eligible for a subsidy, you won’t even have to wait for the IRS to send you a check. The subsidy will be applied right up front when you pay your insurance premium (which means that some people won’t have to pay anything at all).

There is good news here. The health insurance premiums being discussed so far are generally cheaper than what people would pay for private health insurance today, and the premiums are going to be lower, often much lower, for many of us after the subsidies are applied.

So maybe everyone who’s interested should wait a couple days and then go to https://www.healthcare.gov/ to see the real numbers (and also see the pretty young woman with a big smile on her face). I’m sure we can all wait a couple more days.

Here’s today’s New York Times editorial on the importance of the ACA and the subsidies:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/dawn-of-a-revolution-in-health-care.html?

If you’re in the mood for even more good news, take a look at this column from Nicholas Kristof. Here’s his conclusion, supported by statistics from the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development:

So let’s acknowledge that there’s plenty of work remaining — and that cycles of poverty in America must be a top priority at home — yet also celebrate a triumph for humanity. The world of extreme poverty and disease that characterized life for most people throughout history may now finally be on its way out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/kristof-a-way-of-life-is-ending-thank-goodness.html?

More Insanity

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I started this blog 14 months ago, a few days after the massacre in Aurora, Colorado (the one in which 12 people were killed and 70 injured during a Batman movie). The title of my first post was “Insanity”.

Now we have another 12 people murdered in Washington, D.C. And their killer shot dead by the police.

According to an article called “Facing the Real Gun Problem” in the New York Review of Books, there have been 1.3 million Americans killed by firearms since 1960, either in suicides, homicides or accidents. The author of the article, David Cole, argues that we should strengthen background checks and improve gun safety in order to reduce the ongoing toll of death and injury. He thinks gun owners would support these kinds of measures if they could be convinced that their right to own guns wasn’t threatened.

For that reason, Cole doesn’t think we should try to ban assault weapons, since relatively few people are killed with assault weapons and gun owners fear that a ban on those guns would eventually lead us down a slippery slope toward banning all kinds of guns. I don’t agree with him about the assault weapon ban, but he makes some good points, including the need to decriminalize certain drugs and reduce our prison population. He believes that guns are here to stay in America, so we should do whatever we can as a nation to limit the carnage.

To get a sense of how guns are used every day to kill and maim, you can check out a blog called “The Gun Report” in the New York Times. One of their columnists, Joe Nocera, uses the blog to discuss gun-related issues, but he also presents a daily list of shootings from around the country. It’s a daily accounting of American insanity.

There are 19 incidents described in today’s entry of “The Gun Report”. Here are a couple, chosen at random:

Lance Wilson, 3, was shot in the head and killed at a mobile home park in Michigan City, Ind., Sunday afternoon. 24-year-old Zachariah L. Grisham, who is romantically involved with the victim’s mother, was charged with reckless homicide. Investigators found that Grisham and the victim had been playing a game, with the boy using his hand to pretend to shoot Grisham. During the game, Grisham took out a handgun and, thinking it was not loaded, pulled the trigger.

A man was shot in the face and critically wounded after a verbal altercation in the Caddo Heights neighborhood of Shreveport, La., Monday afternoon. Police said someone in a car opened fire on the victim, who was in a Toyota Camry. A white SUV was spotted leaving the scene.

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Facing the Real Gun Problem:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/facing-real-gun-problem/

The Gun Report:
http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/

Class Warfare Is a Fact – Part 3

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After some discussion in the comments on Part 2 of what has turned into a brief series, I thought it would be a good idea to post the concluding paragraphs of the underlying paper by Emmanuel Saez (winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, periodically awarded to an outstanding young economist).

Here are his conclusions (my emphasis added):

“Interestingly, the income composition pattern at the very top has
changed considerably over the century. The share of wage and salary income
has increased sharply from the 1920s to the present, and especially since the
1970s. Therefore, a significant fraction of the surge in top incomes since 1970
is due to an explosion of top wages and salaries. Indeed, estimates based
purely on wages and salaries show that the share of total wages and salaries
earned by the top 1 percent wage income earners has jumped from 5.1
percent in 1970 to 12.4 percent in 2007.

(Footnote:  this dramatic increase in top wage incomes has not been mitigated by an increase in mobility at the top of the wage distribution.As Wojciech Kopczuk, myself, and JaeSong have shown in a separate paper,the probability of staying in the top 1 percent wage income group from one year to the next has remained remarkably stable since the 1970s.)

Evidence based on the wealth distribution is consistent with those
facts. Estimates of wealth concentration, measured by the share of total
wealth accruing to top 1 percent wealth holders, constructed by Wojciech
Kopczuk and myself from estate tax returns for the 1916-2000 period in the
United States show a precipitous decline in the first part of the century with
only fairly modest increases in recent decades. The evidence suggests that
top incomes earners today are not “rentiers” deriving their incomes from past
wealth but rather are “working rich,” highly paid employees or new
entrepreneurs who have not yet accumulated fortunes comparable to those
accumulated during the Gilded Age. Such a pattern might not last for very
long. The drastic cuts of the federal tax on large estates could certainly
accelerate the path toward the reconstitution of the great wealth concentration
that existed in the U.S. economy before the Great Depression.
The labor market has been creating much more inequality over the
last thirty years, with the very top earners capturing a large fraction of
macroeconomic productivity gains.

A number of factors may help explain this increase in inequality, not only underlying technological changes but also the retreat of institutions developed during the New Deal and World War II – such as progressive tax policies, powerful unions, corporate provision of health and retirement benefits, and changing social norms regarding pay inequality. We need to decide as a society whether this increase in income inequality is efficient and acceptable and, if not, what mix of institutional and tax reforms should be developed to counter it.“

End quote.

By the way, the latest column by Paul Krugman (winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and one of the most astute op-ed columnists writing today) is called “Rich Man’s Recovery”:

“Whatever is causing the growing concentration of income at the top, the effect of that concentration is to undermine all the values that define America. Year by year, we’re diverging from our ideals. Inherited privilege is crowding out equality of opportunity; the power of money is crowding out effective democracy.

So what can be done? For the moment, the kind of transformation that took place under the New Deal — a transformation that created a middle-class society, not just through government programs, but by greatly increasing workers’ bargaining power — seems politically out of reach. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on smaller steps, initiatives that do at least a bit to level the playing field.”

End quote.

This isn’t a war in the usual sense, but the fact remains that the people in this country who have the most money are using their high incomes and wealth to manipulate the political system and other levers of power in order to increase their advantages still more. It’s not a shooting war, but it’s an assault on America as a prosperous and democratic nation.

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Professor Saez’s relatively short paper:

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf

Professor Krugman’s most recent column:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/opinion/krugman-rich-mans-recovery.html?hp

Class Warfare Is a Fact – Part 2

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Paul Krugman makes the important point that the substantial gains in income for the richest Americans has been concentrated in a very small group. It’s not the top 10% or the top 5% or even the top 1% that has prospered the most — it’s the top tenth of 1% and the top hundredth of 1% who have substantially increased their share of the national income:

Of the gains made by the top 10 percent [since 1979], almost none went to the 90-95 group; in fact, the great bulk went to the top 1 percent. The bulk of the gains of the top 1, in turn, went to the top 0.1; and the bulk of those gains went to the top 0.01. We really are talking about the flourishing of a tiny elite.

In other words, income has only increased for the top 5.0% since 1979, and more than half of that increase went to the top 0.1%. It’s as if the bottom 95.0% of Americans haven’t received a raise in 30 years.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/good-times-at-the-top/