Things to Read at Lunchtime on November 21, 2013

WCEG: Things to Read at Lunchtime on November 21, 2013

Must Reads:

1. Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas: Three reasons filibuster reform might actually happen today: “Could Democrats back out at the last minute, as they have so many times before? Absolutely. But there’ve been three big changes…. (1)… Back in January, the best arguments against filibuster reform had… to do with the rest of the Democrats’ agenda…. But gun control died in the Senate…. Boehner refused to consider the Senate’s immigration legislation…. So in pure ‘getting-things-done’ terms, Democrats are faced with a choice: keep the filibuster and get nothing done. Change the filibuster and get nothing done aside from staffing the federal government and filling a huge number of judicial vacancies with lifetime appointments. (2) Democrats believe Republicans will shred the filibuster as soon as they get a chance…. Senate Democrats just watched Republicans mount a suicide mission to shut down the government. Their confidence that Republicans will treat the upper chamber’s rules with reverence is low, to say the least.
   This has led to some fatalistic thinking about filibuster reform: If Republicans are going to blow the filibuster up anyway, Democrats might as well take the first step and get some judges out of the deal. (3) Senate Democrats feel betrayed by Republicans. It’s hard to overstate the pride senior Senate Democrats took in cutting their January deal…. But then Republicans filibustered more judges and executive-branch nominees. And the pride top Democrats took in their deal to avert filibuster reform has turned to anger that Republicans made them look like trusting fools…”

2. Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz, and John Schmitt: Don’t Blame the Robots: Assessing the Job Polarization Explanation of Growing Wage Inequality | Economic Policy Institute: “The tasks framework that Acemoglu and Autor developed… is a distinct improvement… [but] suffers from its own empirical failings…. The relatively smooth, long-standing nature of job polarization… appears poorly suited to explaining the abrupt rise in inequality at the end of the 1970s or… the sharp change in the path of the 50/10 wage differential after 1986–1987; the failure of the most conventional measure of job polarization… to show… occupational employment polarization in the 2000s, even as wage inequality continued to grow; and, the consistent lack of correspondence across the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s between changes in occupational employment, occupational wages, and the overall wage distribution. Recent research that has focused on the role of typically low-wage service occupations has not rescued the tasks framework from these shortcomings…. Technology may be a factor in widening wage inequality, but, if so, the tasks framework is not the model that captures those dynamics.”

Should-Reads:

1. David Keohane and Izabella Kaminska: Zhou seems a little flustered: “We were going to be slightly snarky in the face of Zhou Xiaochuan, head of the People’s Bank of China… the lack of a timetable and the ambiguity of phrasing making this seem rather similar to what we’ve heard in the past–but then we saw this from Neil Mellor at BoNYM and felt bad: ‘However, although a timetable was absent… this announcement constituted the beginnings of a new era for financial markets and no superlative would overstate its significance.’ Oops. Mellor may well have a point… rowing back a bit on timetable-snark [does] seem sensible…”
   … people are still willing to look for a good deal on the Exchanges…”

2. Yao Yang: Yao Yang breaks down China’s new reforms and considers what’s missing: “This is related to the final document’s most significant lacuna: political reform. In fact, a Singapore-style approach–combining a freewheeling market economy and an authoritarian regime–has clearly emerged from the plenum. It is an approach that awaits the test of time…. Given China’s much greater size and complexity, the Chinese government’s pursuit of the Singaporean model, with its suppression of any and all social disorder, would ultimately undermine economic dynamism. To build the innovative economy envisioned by the third plenum, the CCP’s leadership needs to find a new governance model that fosters a vibrant society. Sooner rather than later, the crucially important economic reforms that have just been unveiled will not be enough.”

3. Austin Frakt: Are Republicans really anti-exchange?: “My view is that Republicans are not generally, ideologically opposed to exchanges. Deep down, I think any pro-market health reformer knows exchanges are sensible. Consequently, at least some of the broad structure of the Affordable Care Act should be appealing to conservatives. To the extent elected officials most sympathetic to right-of-center health policy aren’t behaving accordingly, there would seem to be a disconnect between policy preferences and political tactics.[1] As I tweeted earlier this week: ‘The ACA is a conservative reform not because of its pedigree, but because it is a sound chassis for almost everything conservatives propose’. [1] Just so you don’t have to, I will accuse myself of putting it mildly.”

4. Aaron Carroll: A pickle for conservative states refusing the Medicaid expansion: “The ACA covers most Americans making less than 138% of the poverty line through the Medicaid expansion. Because everyone thought the expansion would happen nationwide, they only wrote in subsidies for people making more than 100% of the poverty line…. Now there’s a problem–people making too little in states that refuse the expansion may not get subsidies, and therefore they may not be able to get insurance in the exchanges…. Things are different for legal immigrants…. In order to make sure that all legal residents were covered, the ACA instead provides subsidies for legal immigrants to go get inurance in the exchanges, no matter how little they make. So we’re going to have a potential situation next year where poor non-immigrants will get nothing in states that refuse the Medicaid expansion, but poor immigrants will get subsidies to buy private insurance…. It’s hard to see this playing out well politically…”

5. David Glasner: The Internal Contradiction of Quantitative Easing: “I can’t help observing… that the two main arguments made by critics… do not exactly coexist harmoniously…. QE is ineffective… dangerous…. The tension might at least have given a moment’s pause…. Nor… does the faux populism of the attack on a rising stock market and… crocodile tears for helpless retirees living off… interest… coexist harmoniously with… the same characters… (e.g., Freedomworks, CATO, the Heritage Foundation, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page) for privatizing social security…. I am also waiting for an explanation of why abused pensioners… can’t cash in the CDs…. In which charter… does one find it written that a perfectly secure real rate of interest of not less than 2% on any debt instrument issued by the US government shall always be guaranteed?”

Should Be Aware of:

Jonathan Cohn: I Just Lost My Insurance Because of Obamacare. What Do I Do? A step-by-step guide to replacing your health insurance | David Dollar et al.: Growth still is good for the poor | Stephanie Paige Ogburn: Missing Data from Arctic One Cause of “Pause” in Temperature Rise | Q4 GDP Tracking: 1.4%/Yr |