Things to Read at Lunchtime on April 18, 2014

April 18, 2014

Must-Reads:

  1. German Lopez: White House: 8 million people signed up for Obamacare: “Eight million people signed up for Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces between October and April 15, President Barack Obama announced Thursday. The number comes in higher than the 7 million enrollees budget forecasters had predicted and after HealthCare.gov’s botched rollout, which led to few sign-ups during the first couple months. The White House reported a surge of signups toward the end of March, as the March 31 deadline for open enrollment loomed. The surge apparently continued until April 15, the extended deadline for those who ran into technical problems signing up by the end of March 31…”

  2. John Aziz: The World’s Dumbest Idea: Taxing Solar Energy: “In a setback for the renewable energy movement the state House in Oklahoma this week passed a bill that would levy a new fee on those who generate their own energy through solar equipment or wind turbines on their property. The measure, which sailed to passage on a near unanimous vote after no debate, is likely to be signed into law by Republican Gov. Mary Fallin…. Now utility firms in Oklahoma say they just want to be compensated for use of their infrastructure. But renewable energy fed back into the grid is ultimately doing utility companies a service. Solar generates in the daytime, when demand for electricity is highest, thereby alleviating pressure during peak demand. Oklahoma is not alone. Last year, Arizona enacted a similar law. Legislators in Spain tried to do the same thing. The pushback against renewable energy, it seems, is already here…

  3. NewImage Dean Baker: Will the Wall Street Journal Give Ed Lazear Space to Correct His Piece About Falling Work Hours?: “Last month the WSJ ran a column by Ed Lazear, a Stanford economics professor and former chief economist to President Bush, which noted the decline in the length of the average workweek between the fall and the most recent data from February. The piece noted that if labor demand was measured in hours, we had lost the equivalent of 100,000 jobs over the prior six months. He discussed possible causes for this decline and highlighted the incentives created by the Affordable Care Act. While some of us at the time questioned the plausibility of this story and noted the likely effect of the weather on reducing workweeks in January and February, we got the question resolved when the March data was released this month. The entire decline in average hours was reversed. The question is whether the WSJ will allow Mr. Lazear a follow-up piece to point out that his earlier concerns about the Affordable Care Act leading to a reduction in the length of the average workweek had apparently been wrong.”

  4. Thomas Piketty: Extreme Inequality Is Useless for Growth: http://www.youtube.com/nxJvw5HlDs8

Should-Reads:

  1. Kevin Drum: LBJ Was Great. LBJ Was Horrible. Deal With It: “There’s no need to rate LBJ or any other president on a scale from 1 to 10. He was a great president in some areas and a terrible one in others. That’s it. You can’t put those two things in a blender and come to a single, homogenized conclusion, no matter how badly you want to. This isn’t like Mussolini making the trains run on time, or Hitler building the autobahn, trivial achievements that simply don’t bear on either man’s place in history. LBJ’s domestic achievements were gigantic. His foreign policy failures were equally gigantic. That’s it. That’s what happened, and that’s who he is. We just have to live with it…”

  2. John Aziz: Janet Yellen’s 3 Questions for the Economy: “Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen delivered a speech on the economy and monetary policy at the Economic Club of New York…. Yellen laid out the three questions that Fed policy-makers will consider as they decide when to unwind the central bank’s emergency programs: 1. Is there still significant slack in the labor market?… 2. Is inflation moving toward 2 percent?… 3. What factors may push the recovery off track?…”

Should Be Aware of:

  1. Jared Bernstein: A Profile that Paints a Far Too Benign Picture of the Republicans’ Proposed SNAP Changes: “[Eli Saslow] of the Washington Post today published a profile of Florida Republican Rep. Steve Southerland, focusing on his attack on the SNAP–formerly food stamps–program…. Unfortunately, the piece suffers from such mammoth omissions that it is ultimately quite misleading. While it’s easy to portray Rep. Southerland and the SNAP bill the House just passed as waging an ideological war not just on the poor but on the nutritionally deprived poor, he seems truly motivated by the belief that people ought to work to improve their well-being and that of their family…. So, if you’re a member of Congress and that’s where your heart and your head are, it should lead you to craft legislation that helps create workplace opportunities for able-bodied, adult SNAP recipients (most SNAP recips, btw, are elderly or kids; of those able to work, the majority are quite connected to the job market)…. Insisting SNAP recipients find jobs or lose their benefits cannot legitimately be labeled a ‘work requirement’ if all it does is cut people off when they can’t find a job…. SNAP isn’t broken. What’s not working right now is the low-wage job market, and punishing the victims of that underperforming sector with these harsh, radical changes to the SNAP program will only deepen their poverty.”

  2. Ben Casselman: The Biggest Predictor of How Long You’ll Be Unemployed Is When You Lose Your Job | FiveThirtyEight: “A one-point increase in the unemployment rate increased an individual’s odds of remaining unemployed for at least a year by about 35 percent. No other characteristic — age, sex, race, marital status, education or occupation, among others — had even close to that big an effect. Americans who had the misfortune of losing their jobs during the height of the most recent recession in 2009 were more than four times as likely to end up out of work for a year or longer than those who lost their jobs during the comparatively good economy of 2007.”

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April 18, 2014

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