Things to Read on the Afternoon of January 31, 2014

January 31, 2014

Must-Reads:

  1. Don Taylor: Private Score of Burr, Coburn, Hatch Plan: “The rage machine that has been perfected to argue against the ACA could get plenty cranked up…. Burr, Coburn, Hatch… achieve coverage expansions via an increase in individual based coverage… at the expense of employer sponsored coverage… [via] ‘an influx of consumers enrolling in low-cost narrow network plans.’… On the overall federal budget… the action is achieved by the capping of the tax exclusion of employer sponsored health insurance…. Medicaid changes… yield around $150 Billion in savings over 10 years, and the savings from medical malpractice reform are essentially a rounding error…. Burr and Coburn missed a big opportunity in January 2010…. [With] Snowe… [and] Collins… [they] could have gotten a lot once Scott Brown was elected. Instead they choose full opposition, and gross over-statements in their arguments against the ACA, especially given the proposal they now put forth… create[d] and exacerbate[d] the political culture that will make it so hard for their proposal to be given the subtle, and nuanced listen that it deserves.”

  2. Larry Summers: on The Lead with Jake Tapper: “You got to have some perspective here. Franklin Roosevelt said of the wealthy, ‘They hate me and I welcome their hatred’; top tax rates on the wealthy in this country in the 1950s were 90%; for most of the Reagan administration, they were well above where they are today; President Kennedy sent the FBI to investigate steel executives because he didn’t like a price increase that took place in the steel industry. Forget talking about Andrew Jackson and the like on where the rhetoric in recent days is, compared to where it’s been through much of our history…. We need a much more inclusive prosperity than we’ve had. And it doesn’t work for the country, it doesn’t work for the legitimacy of our institutions when most of the benefits of economic growth, are going to a very small fraction of the population, people like Mr. Perkins. The right concern for any president, the right concern for any political leader, is with the average incomes of those in the vast middle. On that standard, we’ve got to do better.”

  3. Jonathan Cohn: People Who Hate Obamacare Would Hate the Republican Alternative Even More: “‘One of the great liberal conceits of the age is that to extend insurance coverage to the uninsured and make sure the sick do not fall through the cracks requires the centralized political management of the health sector’, says a triumphalist editorial in National Review. ‘The great service that Senators Coburn, Hatch, and Burr have performed is to explode that myth.’ Sound too good to be true? That’s because it is…. Early in the week, Coburn and his advisers suggested their plan included a large reduction in the existing tax break for employer-sponsored insurance. Then, on Wednesday, they announced that the reduction would be much smaller…”

  4. * Neera Tanden:* If at First You Don’t Succeed: “Although it’s been seen as largely quixotic, the ceaseless bid to destroy the Affordable Care Act has nonetheless been marked by an array of strategic approaches—some quite inventive…. For those who may have lost count, here’s a brief review of how House Republicans have gone after the law—which proves, if nothing else, that persistence doesn’t always pay…”

Should-Reads:

  1. Uwe Reinhardt: The Moral Hazard of the All-Volunteer Army: “Economists can wax quite stern when exposing moral hazard in the context of health insurance, environmental pollution or tax-financed bailouts of banks. Amazingly, though, not in connection with decisions to go to war…. Moral hazard crops up when the socioeconomic class empowered to declare war is largely insulated from the lethal risks faced by those sent to the battlefield because neither they nor their offspring are likely to be thrust into harm’s way by the war. Under our system of governance, in which political power is highly correlated with economic power, Professor Landsburg’s ‘low-cost’ people recruited into the military and onto the battlefield are unlikely to have much representation in a decision on whether to go to war. On the other hand, few of those authorized to make that call are likely to have offspring in the fray. Clearly this is a classic case of moral hazard. It raises the probability of a nation going to war, especially if huge profits can be made off a war by those bearing little personal risk in that war but with powerful sway over government.”

  2. Clay Shirky: » The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age: “Interest in using the internet to slash the price of higher education is being driven in part by hope for new methods of teaching, but also by frustration with the existing system…. The 1970s happened…. Golden Age economics ended. Golden Age assumptions did not. For 30 wonderful years, we were unusually flush, and we got used to it, re-designing our institutions to assume unending increases in subsidized demand. This did not happen…. Over the decades, though, we’ve behaved like an embezzler who starts by taking only what he means to replace, but ends up extracting so much that embezzlement becomes the system. There is no longer enough income to support a full-time faculty and provide students a reasonably priced education of acceptable quality at most colleges or universities in this country…. One obvious way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price. This is clearly the ideal, whose principal obstacle is not conceptual but practical: no one knows how.”

  3. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Trees: Daily Kos: When Did the Democratic Party Platform Abandon Full Employment?: “Mentions of ‘full employment’ began in 1944. For the next four decades, full employment was featured as a prominent part of the economic agenda presented by the Democratic Party platform. The first year that the Democrats abandoned discussion of full employment was 1992. The term ‘full employment’ has never been mentioned in a Democratic Party platform since.”

Nick Dunbar: Disruptive Business Models, Uber and Plane Crashes | Christa Case Bryant: Palestinian workers back Scarlett Johansson’s opposition to SodaStream boycott | Dylan Scott: GOP Quietly Alters Its Obamacare Alternative To Scrap Huge Tax Hike | Emiko Terazono: Courted for cashews, west African farmers gain strength

Should Be Aware of:

  1. Jonathan Chait: WSJ: Obama Isn’t Hitler But He’s Pretty Hitler-y: “The Journal’s editorial underscores that the widespread mockery of Perkins, far from piling on a bewildered plutocrat, actually understates the broader problem. Perkins’s letter provided a peek into the fantasy world of the right-wing one percent, in which fantasies of an incipient Hitler-esque terror are just slightly beyond the norm. The Journal editorial defines persecution of the one percent as the existence of public disagreement. Liberals are mocking Perkins, therefore Perkins is basically right. For Perkins to be wrong — for the rich to enjoy the level of deference the Journal deems appropriate — a billionaire could compare his plight to the victims of the Holocaust and nobody would make fun of him at all.”

  2. Matthew Yglesias: GOP can’t govern: “Conservative principles” are no guide to success.: “Zachary Goldfarb has an interesting piece about the mini-perestroika of Republican thinking…. On paragraph nine you get to the key problem…. ‘Republicans are struggling to find policies… without violating core conservative principles by increasing spending or interfering with market forces.’… Many of us in America are struggling to find weight-loss strategies that don’t require us to spend more time at the gym or eat less food. It turns out to be challenging. The GOP cannot govern because they do not believe in government…. A whole bunch of forces are converging to put a larger share of economic growth into the hands of a smaller number of people… if you want to turn that trend around you have to change something. You can rejigger how the market works or you can tax and transfer more or you can do both. The good news… is that a number of Republicans are trying to think of constructive things…. But if today’s conservatives construe ‘core conservative principles’ such that money cannot be spent on any domestic social ill, then they’re going to have a very difficult time putting a constructive agenda together.”

And:

Jared Bernstein: A Few Residual Thoughts on SOTU | Josh Barro: Republicans Are Still Bluffing Over The Debt Ceiling |

January 31, 2014

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