Things to Read on the Afternoon on January 13, 2014

January 13, 2014

Must-Reads:

  1. Jared Bernstein: Will the Real Unemployment Rate Please Stand Up?: “Let’s be conservative and say that 2/3 of the decline in the labor force [participation] rate is “fixable”…. Then the unemployment gap is: 6.7 + (2/3 x 3.4) – 5.5 or about 3.5 ppts (that 3.4 is the drop in the labor force rate using quarterly data since its pre-recession peak)…. I wouldn’t be so quick to plug 5.5 [as the natural rate of unemployment] into all those equations above…. If you use, say, 4.5 instead that’s another percentage point of slack. Fed chair Janet Yellen (still getting used to writing that!) knows this stuff but it’s still worth making a lot of noise about…. We’re not going 60… we’re going 40.  So keep that foot off the brake…”

  2. Steve M.: Paul Krugman has responded to an article by National Review’s Kevin Williamson about poverty in Appalachia “‘Williamson’s piece… has a moral: the big problem… is… government aid creates dependency…. But the underlying story of Appalachia is in fact one of declining opportunity…’ Williamson thinks the proper response… is self-righteous smugness… class warfare…. ‘Professor Krugman and those who share his orientation see the bottom half… as passive participants… not people who do things but people to whom things are done, the direct object in Lenin’s summary of politics: ‘Who? Whom?’ And from the point of view of the policymaking class… something like dogs exhibiting various degrees of ruliness while waiting for table scraps…’

    “Or what, Kevin? What are people in coal country supposed to do if their job searches don’t result in… jobs?… Plenty are voting with their feet by getting the hell out…. As for the rest, many of whom might not be able to afford to leave (no cash, underwater homes) — what are they supposed to do? Become new-media entrepreneurs? Load up the truck and head to Silicon Valley for some venture capital? This… right-wing arrogance… Michelle Malkin…. ‘Romney types, of course, are the ones who sign the front of the paycheck, and the Obama types are the one who have spent their entire lives signing the back of them’: the right simply believes that it’s disgraceful to be an ordinary worker…. If you’re not a capitalist, you’re scum…. If you’re arguing, that is, that benefits are the only reason people don’t have jobs–then that should have been just as true in 2006, say, as it is now, becuse just as many lazer takers should have been getting all those horrible benefits, just ’cause they like living that way. Is the decrease in labor-force participation since Wall Street crashed the economy really just a coincidence? Scummy liberal elitist minds want to know.”

  3. Mike Konczal: No, we don’t spend $1 trillion on welfare each year: “If you’ve read any conservative commentary on the war on poverty in the past week, you’ve likely seen this talking point: ‘We spend $1 trillion each year on welfare and there’s been no reduction in poverty.’ That’s crazy! Then, a sentence later, you’ll probably see a line like this: ‘It’s true. According to a recent report, we spend a trillion dollars on means-test programs each year, yet the official census numbers show no reduction in poverty.’… If you are reading that second line quickly, you probably think it bolsters the credibility of the first line…. The second sentence is… an escape hatch…. We don’t spend anywhere near a trillion dollars on welfare… and we do reduce poverty…. Dylan Matthews has already dissected the claim that poverty hasn’t declined…. It’s just that the ‘official’ poverty rate doesn’t factor in the earned-income tax credit or food stamps in its calculations…. The claim about $1 trillion on ‘welfare’ is more interesting and complicated. It shows up in this recent report from the Cato Institute…. The federal government spends just $212 billion per year on what we could reasonably call ‘welfare’…. We can’t have a productive conversation unless we make it clear what the government is, and is not, doing. And it is spending a lot less on welfare than conservatives claim, and getting fantastic results for what it does spend.”

  4. You re All Losers NYTimes com Paul Krugman: You’re All Losers: “The other day someone… asked an interesting question: when did it become so common to disparage anyone who hasn’t made it big, hasn’t gotten rich, as a ‘loser’? Well, that’s actually a question we can answer, using Google Ngrams… I think this word usage reflects something real — a growing contempt for the little people… not limited to Republican politicians. Still, it’s striking how unable they are to show any empathy…. The most famous example, of course, is Mitt Romney, who didn’t just disparage 47 percent of the nation; he urged everyone to borrow money from their parents and start a business. I still think the most revealing example to date was Eric Cantor, who marked Labor Day by tweeting: ‘Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.’ But Marco Rubio’s latest speech deserves at least honorable mention, for the airy way he dismissed the idea of raising the minimum wage: ‘Raising the minimum wage may poll well, but having a job that pays $10 an hour is not the American dream.’…

    “OK, I know what the answer will be: conservative policies will lead to economic growth, and that will raise all boats, the way it did in the days of Saint Ronald. Except, you know, it didn’t…. So what is the GOP agenda to help people who aren’t going to build businesses and get rich? There isn’t one — partly because they really can’t reconcile any real agenda with their overall ideology, but also because, deep in their hearts, they consider ordinary people trying hard to get by a bunch of losers.”

Should-Reads:

  1. Jud Lounsbury: Doh! Doctor Who Ron Johnson Wants to Shield From Obamacare, Wants Obamacare: “Ron Johnson has an extraordinarily compelling story about why he entered politics:   Nearly 30 years ago, his newborn daughter was saved by a talented surgeon named John Foker, who reconfigured her heart with a new procedure that he helped to develop. Johnson has said repeatedly that he believes that if Obamacare had been around at the time, John Foker would have never been around to save his daughter, because Obamacare would have scared Foker and the rest of our best and brightest into other fields of work…. Invoking Foker’s name at every turn,  Johnson maintains in no uncertain terms that if Obamacare had been around thirty years ago, his daughter wouldn’t be alive today– and that is why we must, must kill Obamacare. So, I decided to get in touch with Doctor Foker.  Via email, Foker said he is not only ‘generally supportive’ of Obamacare, but thinks it didn’t go far enough, saying, ‘Unfortunately, it was written by the insurance and drug companies so not great.   Most of the many flaws of American medical care are still present’.  Foker also suggested that Republicans should be happy with what is a Republican-developed, ‘private-solution’, but they are more interested in obstructionism, saying, ‘they’re never happy’. Not quite, the ‘I never would have gotten into medicine if Obamacare was around way back when!’ that Johnson suggests.”

  2. Dean Baker: Can Thomas Friedman Hyperconnect to His Own Columns?: “That’s what readers everywhere are asking after seeing Thomas Friedman’s column touting the new world in which technology will not only replace less-skilled workers, but will also make workers with considerable skills redundant. This view is 180 degrees at odds with the view often expressed in Thomas Friedman’s columns that we are facing a period of serious scarcity due to the burden of supporting a massive generation of retired baby boomers…. While the prospect of a huge surge in productivity growth described in Friedman’s piece would be great news (we could easily feed and house the world and stop global warming) there is no evidence of it in the data.”

  3. Paul Krugman: The Anti-Scientific Revolution in Macroeconomics: “The debate over extended unemployment benefits… provides a teachable moment…. [The] standard view… [is] enhanced UI actually creates jobs when the economy is depressed… unemployment benefits put money in the hands of people likely to spend it…. But if you follow right-wing talk — by which I mean not Rush Limbaugh but the Wall Street Journal and famous economists like Robert Barro — you see the notion that aid to the unemployed can create jobs dismissed as self-evidently absurd. You think that you can reduce unemployment by paying people not to work? Hahahaha!…

    “If you read Barro’s piece, what you see is a blithe dismissal of the whole notion that economies can ever suffer from an inadequate level of ‘aggregate demand’ — the scare quotes are his, not mine…. But, you see, there are these things we call recessions. And if you believe regular economics is all there is, you should find them very upsetting…. After 2007 the United States and other advanced countries suddenly went into reverse, becoming poorer instead of richer, and for an extended period…. So did plagues kill off part of the work force? Did termites eat part of the capital stock? Did technology retrogress? No, no. no…. The Anti Scientific Revolution in Macroeconomics NYTimes com

    “So what did happen? Keynes offered an answer…. And yes, the theory has made successful predictions — surprising predictions that people who didn’t accept the theory regarded as absurd until they came true…. You claim that the Fed can print vast quantities of money without causing inflation? You claim that the government can run huge deficits without driving up interest rates? Hahahaha. But even better, in a way, is the relationship between government spending and private spending…. Yet a large part of both the political establishment and the economics establishment rejects the whole thing out of hand, because they don’t like the conclusions.

  4. Ed Kilgore: The Real GOP Anti-Poverty Agenda: “Greg Sargent sums up the absurdity of the GOP claim to be interested in a new anti-poverty push in one stunning sentence: ‘The GOP poverty agenda right now includes opposing expanding Medicaid to millions of people; advocating for $40 billion in cuts to food stamps; and near-party-wide opposition to extending unemployment benefits.’ Yes, there are in theory ‘conservative alternatives’ to existing policies benefiting the poor, whether they’re from the Wayback Machine of Jack Kemp urban policy experiments, or something a bit more current. But they never seem quite ready for prime time other than as speech fodder. In the meantime, as Jonathan Chait points out, the default position is to deny the poor cash and food and housing and medical assistance…”

And

Paul Krugman: The Raleigh Experiment | Robert Waldmann: On Brad on Summers, Blanchard and Avent | Igor Volsky: Racism, Sexism, And The 50-Year Campaign To Undermine The War On Poverty | Sarah Kliff: Obamacare’s narrow networks are going to make people furious — but they might control costs | Jared Bernstein: Poverty and Inequality, in Charts | Barry Eichengreen: A decade after external imbalances emerged as a supposed threat to the global economy, the problem has disappeared |

Should Be Aware of:

  1. Jonathan Bernstein: Republicans Aren’t Too Conservative. They’re Too Newt:”Getting back to polarization: As I mentioned earlier today, to the extent governing isn’t working well today I very much agree with Sean Theriault that ‘partisan warfare is the problem’ (see also Ed Kilgore). The trouble with Washington isn’t that the parties are each internally cohesive or that Democrats are too liberal or Republicans too conservative. The problem resides in a Republican Party that too often treats hostility to compromise as an end in itself, and that has come to value destroying opponents more than enacting its public policy preferences. (Theriault properly uses Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas as an example of this mindset.) So how did Republians get that way? It basically comes down to two names: Newt and Rush.”

  2. Grist: Check out this shocking map of California’s drought: Check out this shocking map of California s drought Grist

  3. Anna Clark: Finding safer ground through the Affordable Care Act: “On a warm afternoon in July three years ago, I played in the water at the beach on Belle Isle in Detroit…. I found myself doing a backflip into the water. It was only four feet deep…. A police officer asked if he could call an ambulance. When I said no, he urged us to go to a hospital ourselves. This was my head that we were talking about. ‘The brain, it’s the main computer,” he said, several times. “You don’t want to take any chances.’ He was right. But did I go to a doctor? No. I did not. Instead, I went home. While I laid on my futon, my friend trawled the Internet for articles on how to treat head injuries. He didn’t let me sleep for more than 20 or so minutes at a time…. There was no willful pride in this. No stubborn sense of immunity. I didn’t go to a doctor because I didn’t have health insurance. Medical costs frightened me more than my bleeding, concussed head did.”

  4. Suw Charman-Anderson: I owe my current career to blogging… “…Without it, I would never have developed an interest in how people connect through technology, and never would have met all the people who helped me turn that interest into a job…. What was awesome was how permeable the blogging community was back then. I was just some nobody with no reputation, no real contacts, no network, but yet, everyone treated me as an equal, they respected me based on what I wrote. We really did live by the word. I never felt that I was judged on where I came from or what university I’d gone to or what I looked like…. So it was with some considerable sadness that I began to note the decline in blogging a few years back…. Twitter and now Zite arrived to provide me with random rewards for clicking and swiping, showing me stuff that I had no idea I wanted to read. Instead of following the writings of a small cadre of smart, lovely people whom I am proud to call my friends, I read random crap off the internet that some algorithm thinks I might be interested in, or that is recommended by the people I follow on Twitter. That may or may not be a good thing. We were all aware of the problems of homophily, and the random clickage does help combat that. But the problem with not following people’s blogs closely is that there’s no conversation anymore…. Please keep your fingers crossed for me, and let’s all keep on blogging!”

  5. Tara Culp-Ressler: The Voting Bloc That Spells Doom For Lawmakers Hostile To Reproductive Rights: “More than eight in ten Milliennials of color think that birth control is simply part of basic health care, and should be available through insurance benefits. Non-white Millennials are also likely to believe that women need access to legal abortion. Advocates for Youth points out that while communities of color are typically pegged as more religious than the general population, and therefore assumed to be more conservative on issues of abortion rights, their data doesn’t support that. Two-thirds of Millennials of color agree that regardless of how they personally feel abortion abortion, they believe it should remain legal…”

  6. Wonkette: Bill And Emma Keller Wish You Would Just Shut Up About Your Cancer Already, Lisa Adams: “Here at Wonkette, we are pretty solid on serious illness/end-of-life choices, which is to say you get to deal with those thing any damn way you please. For some people, like Lisa Adams, that has meant blogging and tweeting about her Stage IV breast cancer…. Seriously, in that situation, we are on Team Mos Def Do What The F— You Want. But Bill Keller, former New York Times editor, and his wife, Emma Keller, are so squicked out by this lady talking about her impending death and the things she does to stave off hopelessness that they both had to write columns about it. First up, we have Ms. Keller, who took to the pages of the Guardian to call Adams’s tweets ‘deathbed selfies’ and whine about how the whole thing is just oversharing…. Guess what, Keller? Lisa Adams is not too callow to understand death. She is staring death in the fucking face and being brave, which is more than we can say for wives of former NYT editors who are allowed to write a hateful little spite of a column for no reason we can understand.

    “Apparently the Keller family didn’t feel like they’d piled on enough, because four days after Ms. Keller’s column, husband Bill Keller had to do a separate op-ed in the New York Times to complain about Lisa Adams because being a f—ing monster in human form runs in the Keller family…. Where do we even start? First, we’re not really sure if there’s some sort of public service metric that Bill Keller has developed to determine efficacy here. If even zero people who are not Lisa Adams feel comforted or respected or in any way affected by these tweets, that is plenty of people. Lisa Adams gets to say what Lisa Adams f—ing wants….

    “Keller is also pissy about the cost of all this…. ‘Her relationship with the hospital provides her with intensive, premium medical care, including not just constant maintenance and aggressive treatment but such Sloan-Kettering amenities as the Caring Canines program, in which patients get a playful cuddle with visiting dogs. (Neither Adams nor Sloan-Kettering would tell me what all this costs or whether it is covered by insurance.)’ How dare a hospital not reveal information about a patient’s medical insurance or costs of treatment! This is Bill Keller asking! Do you know who he is? Don’t you know that you should toss privacy laws out the window because Bill Keller wants to bitch about how much a person is spending on dealing with her cancer? With this column, the Kellers have the dubious achievement of sinking to the level of Fishbowl DC, who declared that NPR’s Scott Simon was just blathering on too much about his mom dying and could he shut up already?”

And:

Ed Kilgore: Beyond the Blue Dog Model | Jay Yarrow: Apple Knows Exactly What It’s Doing With Its iPhone Business | Maria Shriver: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink | Bryce Covert: How The Government Could Make Public College Free For All Students | John Reichard: Medicare Spending Growth Moderate Despite Big 2012 Enrollment Jump |

January 13, 2014

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