Must-Reads:
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Ezra Klein: Let’s Celebrate Medicaid’s Success: “So far, Obamacare’s biggest success is the one that neither Democrats nor Republicans seem to want to talk about. As of Jan. 1, more than 2 million people had signed up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces… less than the 3.3 million the administration had projected…. Meanwhile, in October and November alone, more than 4 million people signed up for Medicaid coverage. This number will be much higher when December’s totals are released…. It’s ‘the biggest ACA success story that has not yet been told’, says Ron Pollack, head of Families USA, a nonpartisan health-care advocacy group…. If expanding Medicaid is so much easier, why was the administration so intent on focusing on the exchanges — and, for that matter, why were exchanges needed in the first place?… It’s a perverse truth of the U.S. health-care debate that the solutions that have worked both here and around the world are the only solutions the political system refuses to consider seriously…. What we’ve seen isn’t that the government has trouble delivering health insurance. It’s that it has trouble setting up multifaceted e-commerce websites that help people verify their eligibility for public subsidies, shop for regulated private products, and then interface with the computer systems run by dozens of insurers. Compared to all that, simply extending health insurance to people through existing programs is easy…”
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Ryan Chittum: The NYT spreads AEI’s Big Lie of the Crisis: “What in the world is The New York Times doing running an op-ed from AEI’s Peter Wallison that perpetuates his thoroughly discredited argument about what caused the housing crisis? It’s the high/middlebrow equivalent of forwarding on to millions of people a chain email your crazy uncle sent—without even clicking over to Snopes.com. The Times lends Wallison the most valuable space in journalism… lets him claim yet again that government policies caused the housing crisis—a line so blatantly false that Barry Ritholtz dubbed it the Big Lie of the Crisis. And that’s seriously problematic.”
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Emily Atkin: Everything You Wanted To Know About The ‘Polar Vortex’: “If climate change is real, then how did it get so cold?… Greg Laden… [says] the Arctic air that usually sits on top of our planet is ‘taking an excursion’ south for a couple of days, leaving the North Pole ‘relatively warm’ and our temperate region not-so-temperate. ‘Go Home Arctic, You’re Drunk’, he titled the explanation: ‘The Polar Vortex, a huge system of moving swirling air that normally contains the polar cold air, has shifted so it is not sitting right on the pole as it usually does…. We are not seeing an expansion of cold, an ice age, or an anti-global warming phenomenon. We are seeing the usual cold polar air taking an excursion…'”
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Matthew Yglesias: Secular stagnation debate: How to understand it: “Start with the idea that there’s a ‘natural rate of unemployment’ such that when the actual unemployment rate is below this rate, you get fast-rising inflation, but when it’s higher, you don’t…. During the pre-crisis years we left achieving that primarily in the hands of the Federal Reserve, which manipulated interest rates to keep joblessness in check. The “equilibrium interest rate” is the interest rate the Fed needs to achieve to push unemployment down to its natural rate. That equilibrium rate is currently very low…. Summers’ contention is that if you keep interest rates that low for a long time—he specifically mentions the idea of interest rates that are lower than the growth rate of the economy—you generate unsustainable credit booms and asset price bubbles…. Summers, coming very much from the political center, seems to have rederived the left-wing ‘post-Keynesian’ view… [a] position [that] has traditionally appealed to left-wing people since it implies that the state rather than the market needs to direct the bulk of investment activity in the economy…”