Should-Read: Josh Barro: GOP healthcare bill will poll badly no matter what: “Now I have to call those providers’ offices and get duplicate receipts and upload them and allow seven to 10 days for processing… http://www.businessinsider.com/gop-healthcare-bill-polls-bad-changes-2017-6

…Until I do that, I have been cut off from access to the money in the account—my own money—that got in the account only because Congress chose to offer a tax preference that I could get only by using such an account.

Who wants to deal with this crap?

Nobody wants to deal with this crap, that’s who

Officially, the Republican healthcare vision involves even more of this—tracking your healthcare funds in a special account, paying at the point of delivery for care you receive, and shopping around for your surgery as if it’s a dream vacation. For the past seven years, Republicans haven’t been saying the problem with Obamacare was too little out-of-pocket spending. They’ve been saying the opposite… that Obamacare plans have deductibles… coinsurance payments are too high. That insurance under Obamacare isn’t good insurance because people have to pay so much after they’ve already paid premiums. This was an effective political argument because this is, in fact, one of the things people hate about Obamacare….

The problem is, fixing that problem would have cost money. So Republicans lied. They said they would give people insurance with lower deductibles. But then they wrote a law that would result in eye-wateringly high deductibles—for example, a deductible of about $6,000 for somebody with a family income of $16,000. Of course that’s unpopular. (News flash: Someone with an income of $16,000 doesn’t have $6,000 to pay toward a deductible.) But it’s what you have to do if you want the bill to cut a trillion dollars in government spending on healthcare without actually doing anything to make healthcare cheaper. But then, this bill was never about improving healthcare or making healthcare consumers happy. It was about repealing the tax increases that Obamacare imposed. Both the House and Senate bills would indeed do that. And as long as that’s the core goal, there’s no way to restructure the law to make people not hate it…

Should-Read: Dan Diamond: On Twitter: Many GOP senators, home for recess, woke up today to front-page stories about the local damage their health bill would cause… https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/881613460014063623

…Sen. @BillCassidy (R-La.) and the New Orleans Advocate. Sen. @TedCruz (R-Texas) and the Houston Chronicle. Sen. @JerryMoran and the Lawrence Journal-World. @SenCapito (R-W.V.) and the Dominion Post. Sen. @LisaMurkowski (R-Alaska) and the Alaska Dispatch News. Sen. @RandPaul and @SenateMajLdr (R-Ky.) and the Lexington Herald-Leader. There’s been a lot of focus on what the media is, and isn’t, covering. Credit to local press for using platform to spotlight real issues…

Should-Read: Patrick Iber: On Twitter: “.@davidsess has a phenomenal review/essay of @dandrezner’s The Ideas Industry in the latest @NewRepublic… https://twitter.com/PatrickIber/status/874438806287659008

…Whatever comes next, I think there’s a good chance people will use this essay for years to describe our era’s climate for intellectual work… https://newrepublic.com/article/143004

David Sessions**: The Rise of the Thought Leader: “Daniel W. Drezner… argues that… the evaporation of public trust… the polarization of American society, and growing economic inequality… the last of these as the most important… https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-how-superrich-funded-new-class-intellectual

…have… empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.”… While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.”… The case against thought leaders, The Ideas Industry shows, is damning… some of the marquee names in thought leadership are distinguished by their facile thinking and transparent servility to the wealthy… Thomas Friedman…. Parag and Ayesha Khanna… Khanna’s Connectography… “globaloney”… “a TED talk on a recursive loop.” Drezner traces how the pursuit of money in the new corporate ideas industry—through television shows, high-dollar speeches, and lavish book advances—pushes thought leaders to bloat their expertise and hustle in so many markets that they end up selling fakes….

Despite Drezner’s impatience with the delusions of thought leaders, he shrinks from the darker implications of his evidence. When it comes time to render a verdict on whether the Ideas Industry is “working,” he conjures an economic metaphor: “For good and ill, the modern marketplace of ideas strongly resembles modern financial markets. Usually, the system works. On occasion, however, there can be asset bubbles.”… The evidence in Drezner’s book contributes to a startling picture of a country in which the superrich actively seek to sabotage institutions that have formed the backbone of consensus and public trust for a large part of the twentieth century…. Surveying this new landscape, it is clear that the true role of the thought leader is to serve as the organic intellectual of the one percent—the figure who, as Gramsci put it, gives the emerging class “an awareness of its own function” in society. The purpose of the thought leader is to mirror, systematize, and popularize the delusions of the superrich: that they have earned their fortunes on merit, that social protections need to be further eviscerated to make everyone more flexible for “the future,” and that local attachments and alternative ways of living should be replaced by an aspirational consumerism….

An opening—albeit a very slim one—for a different kind of organic intellectual. The one percent’s attempts to disrupt the media and universities have had the unintended consequence of radicalizing a generation of young writers and academics on the left—those recently dubbed “the new public intellectuals” in The Chronicle for Higher Education…. Already these new intellectuals on the left have begun to emerge as editors, authors, organizers, and gadflies in the new social media ecosystem. They have a greater presence in the public sphere than at any point in the last half century, and have shown themselves willing to expose the prattle of thought leaders, to attack the rhetorical smoke screens of the liberal center, and to defend working-class voters against accusations of incurable racism and mindless populism…. We are finally getting clear about who its enemies are.

Should-Read: Paul Krugman (2015): When Values Disappear: “Back in the 60s and 70s… there was much talk about the disintegration of… African-American values… https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/when-values-disappear/

…and how that was the root cause of America’s poverty…. The social dysfunction was clearly real. But was it cause or effect? William Julius Wilson, in When Work Disappears, famously argued that it was a symptom: good jobs in inner cities, where African-American men could take them, went away, and the cultural changes followed. So, how could you test that hypothesis? Well, here’s an experiment: change the structure of the economy in such a way that a large class of white men—say, white men without a college degree—similarly lose access to good jobs. If Wilson was right, we’d expect to see a sharp decline in stable marriages, a rise in unwed births, growing drug use, and other forms of social disruption. And that is, in fact, exactly what happened: William Julius Wilson was right.

Which makes it remarkable to see people look at that very evidence and say that it shows that the real problem isn’t money, it’s values…

Must-Read: James Hamilton: Are we in a new inflation regime?: “I’m not saying the Phillips Curve has no basis in facts… http://econbrowser.com/archives/2017/07/are-we-in-a-new-inflation-regime

…I agree that the Phillips Curve is the correct framework for thinking about these questions. But I also agree with President Evans that other factors seem to be more important than the unemployment rate right now in determining inflation.

Because they always have been.

And I also agree with President Evans’s conclusion. Given that inflation has stayed so low for so long, it makes sense to wait to see stronger evidence that inflation is really picking up before we put the brakes on the economy…

Must-Read: Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca: Kansas or California?: “Donald Trump and congressional Republicans[‘]… claims are baseless… https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/increase-earned-income-credit-and-minimum-wage-by-laura-tyson-and-lenny-mendonca-2017-07

…Countless international, national, and state comparisons have demonstrated overwhelmingly that trickle-down economics is a regressive fantasy. The latest evidence of this comes from Kansas, where tax cuts signed by Governor Sam Brownback in 2012 have utterly failed to deliver growth…. Trump should take a lesson from California–a progressive state that he loves to hate. California raised taxes for top earners in 2012 and has since enjoyed one of the strongest growth rates in the country. And now, California is significantly expanding its earned income tax credit, CalEITC, building on the proven record of the federal earned income tax credit (EITC)… originally based on the negative income tax proposed by Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman. The EITC… it was enacted under President Gerald Ford, and has been expanded under Republican and Democratic presidents alike: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama….

California is also one of 21 states that raised its minimum wage this year. By 2022, its statewide minimum wage will be $15 per hour–the highest in the country. Kansas, by contrast, is one of a handful of states that still adheres to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour… 20% lower than… during the Reagan presidency…. The EITC and the minimum wage are complementary policies that bring about better outcomes when used in tandem. Because the EITC expands the supply of low-income workers, it can exert downward pressure on wages. But with a higher minimum wage, that “leakage” effect is mitigated. Accordingly, California plans to increase its CalEITC income-eligibility threshold as it phases in its higher minimum wage….

Trump… should take a lesson from progressive states like California… unlike the supply-side embarrassment that Kansas has become…

Must-Read: I must say: many—most?— of those who made their careers at the Old New Republic—advancing in the world by catering to the prejudices and bigotries of Marty Peretz—acquired some very bad habits of rhetoric and argument thereby, which still poison what they say and think.

Indeed, in many cases I think that they can no longer think honestly and accurately.

Give me a ticket-punching card-carrying member of the Juicebox Mafia any day.

Dylan Matthews on Peter Beinart

Dylan Matthews: What’s the point of an anti-immigrant left?: “Beinart’s policy argument is… mistaken… https://www.vox.com/2017/7/2/15847840/beinart-atlantic-left-immigration

…Beinart gives readers a totally false sense of the state of research… the overwhelming academic consensus that the other 92.4 percent are held harmless or benefit from immigration, and that Americans gain overall. Nor does he note that immigration appears to increase high school graduation rates among natives…. Beinart portrays a National Academy of Sciences study on immigration as showing major costs to native workers, when the study actually concluded, “the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small”….

Beinart’s political argument is disconnected from this narrative of immigration battering the working classes. He… argue[s] that Democrats… “must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion” and “dust off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.” The idea that the US has gotten worse at assimilating new immigrants, though, is unfounded…. “They’re integrating as well as, or even faster, than immigrants who came from Europe in the last century”…. Beinart’s concern about public opinion more generally is also odd, given that Americans have become more pro-immigration, not less, in recent decades….

This is the point where you have to ask yourself what Beinart actually thinks the Democratic party is for. Personally, I think any center-left party worth its salt has to be deeply committed to egalitarianism… fighting for LGBT rights against bathroom bills, fighting mass incarceration and police violence victimizing black Americans… working for more domestic redistribution to address poverty and hardship, including through universal health care… treating people born outside the US as equals… generously funding foreign aid for health programs that have saved hundreds of thousands, even millions of lives. And it means a strong presumption in favor of open immigration. Not only does migration help native workers overall, it enables a massive increase in the welfare of people abroad, typically people much poorer than even poor Americans, who come here…