Jared Bernstein: Paul Ryan’s New Budget: Orwell Would Blush: “It’s a lot like his old ones,
as you’d expect, with a few new wrinkles…. Here’s pretty much all you need to know: his cuts to Pell grants–college tuition assistance for students from low-income families–comes under the section called ‘Expanding Opportunity’. ‘Strengthening the safety net’ is actually block granting SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid. ‘Ending cronyism’ is repealing Dodd-Frank. Orwell would blush.
Kevin Drum: Senate Report: Torture Didn’t Work and the CIA Lied About It: “The Washington Post…. It’s impossible to say if these sources are characterizing the report accurately, and their summary descriptions of the report make it very hard to judge how fair the report’s conclusions are. But with those caveats and cautions out of the way, what does the report say? This…. ‘Its most troubling sections deal… with discrepancies between the statements of senior CIA officials in Washington and the details revealed in the written communications of lower-level employees directly involved…. The CIA’s ability to obtain the most valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda–including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011–had little, if anything, to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”… “The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program”’…. However, for those of us who think that detainee abuse is, in fact, as important as the lies that were told about it, there’s this: ‘Classified files reviewed by committee investigators reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, officials said, including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there. The report also cites cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give. The report describes previously undisclosed cases….’ So the torture was even worse than we thought; it produced very little in the way of actionable intelligence; and the CIA lied about this in order to preserve their ability to torture prisoners. Anybody who isn’t sickened by this needs to take very long, very deep look into their souls. For myself, I think I’ll go take a shower now.”
“@nicholas_bagley: Dream of entrepreneurship but fear losing health coverage? @afrakt's : http://t.co/DLjpKm5n5O” pic.twitter.com/Utqant3s4G
— Pat Bagley (@Patbagley) March 31, 2014
Eric Rauchway: Going off gold and the basis for Bretton Woods: “Experience is teaching us a counterintuitive lesson: the way to control leads away from stability. Aim at growth – moderate growth in safer quarters, even if it means a bit of inflation and debt – and we will achieve stability. It is a lesson that our predecessors learned in the Great Depression, and which led them to establish the Bretton Woods system for precisely those purposes. The essential feature of Bretton Woods was a conditional commitment to exchange stability – with conditionality as essential as stability. The commitment was predicated on the Depression-begotten recognition that monetary stability took a back seat to the promotion of widespread prosperity. When we talk about Bretton Woods, quite often we emphasize the conflict before and at the conference between the UK and the US, and generally between the persons of John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White… [who] won out – not because [his plan] was intellectually superior, but because the United States had more money and power and US congressmen wanted to see a plan that looked like it was more sparing of American resources. The White plan did not survive – in 1947, the international monetary system became more Keynesian, with the Marshall Plan, and in 1969 more Keynesian still, with the introduction of Special Drawing Rights as a reserve asset. Despite this early and lasting convergence on a Keynesian consensus, scholarly discussion of Bretton Woods generally focuses on the initial conflict and its detrimental impact specifically on Britain. Focusing on this conflict is misleading and I believe impoverishes our understanding of the fundamental, shared ideas underlying Bretton Woods…”
Continue reading “Things to Read on the Afternoon of April 1, 2014”
I think the only complaint anyone reasonable could have with Kerry Emmanuel’s assessment of Nate Silver’s new 538 is that Emmanuel does not present enough graphs and charts: more data visuals would be very helpful…
Kerry Emmanuel: MIT Climate Scientist Responds on Disaster Costs And Climate Change: “I’m not comfortable with Pielke’s assertion that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages from natural hazards…
…I don’t see how the data he cites support such a confident assertion…. It’s not necessarily appropriate to normalize damages by gross domestic product…. Wealthier countries can better afford to build stronger structures and to protect assets…. A grass hut will be completely destroyed by a hurricane, but a modern steel office building will only be partially damaged; damage does not scale linearly with the value of the asset….
It is worth noting, and reiterating, and reiterating again that, as Paul Krugman says, the RomneyCare exchanges are the conservative way to “universal” health insurance. If you want to preserve a robust private-sector health insurance market and if you want insurance to be affordable for all, then you need some forms of: (a) community rating, (b) subsidies, and (c) a coverage mandate. The other options are all some form of single-payer, or something that leaves a great many people unable to afford going to the doctor.
Maybe you want to disguise the single-payer nature of the program–John Kerry’s proposal by which the federal government would be the single payer for expenditures above… was it $50,000/year?… was such a disguise. But that plan met with no greater Republican enthusiasm than RomneyCare.
And if the marketplace-exchanges do turn out not to work, and if we retain the goal of affordable coverage for all, then single-payer will be our only remaining option.
Continue reading “End-of-Marketplace-Open-Enrollment ObamaCare Watch: Tuesday Focus: April 1, 2014”
…to add to the twelve I already collected: Ryan Avent, Doug Henwood, Edward Lambert, Dean Baker, Kathleen Geier, John Cassidy, Paul Krugman, Ed Kilgore, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Lawrence Summers, Tim Noah, and Heather Boushey…
Continue reading “Two More Worthwhile Reviews of Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century””
…to add to the twelve I already collected: Ryan Avent, Doug Henwood, Edward Lambert, Dean Baker, Kathleen Geier, John Cassidy, Paul Krugman, Ed Kilgore, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Lawrence Summers, Tim Noah, and Heather Boushey…