It feels a little hard to believe, but we’re marking another milestone on the site today: 9,000 posts in a little over 4 years.

Many, many, many thanks to my fellow contributors who have written thousands of thoughtful posts. And many, many, many thanks to all of you who read and comment everyday.

Here’s to the next 9000!

Cheers,
Justin

UPDATE:

Soon we’ll be over 9,000!!!!!

Thanks bubbles!

To paraphrase Julie Andrews, “The Blogs are Alive …”, but this time with stolen emails rather than “Music”.

Documents and archived emails were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Center (CRU). The first accounts indicate that 1,072 emails and 72 documents were stolen and then posted anonymously on file servers.

The stolen property appears to be the genuine article, as the CRU director has confirmed them. Less certain is what all this means.

Much has been made about the tone of the emails. Scientists are complaining about those with whom they disagree, insulting them and acting like normal, partisan human beings. There are some “plain English” misunderstandings afoot as well, as evidenced by this quote from an email that is being reproduced in several blogs:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

The blogs typically highlight or bold the word “trick” and the phrase “hide the decline” as evidence of a smoking gun.

The problem is that the email is about a well-known and discussed issue, the “divergence problem.” As I understand the issue, historical proxies, like tree ring, lake sediment and ice core samples, provide a measure of accuracy in the aggregate, but are not as accurate for telling us what the temperature was in the last few decades. It evidently is a common and well-known issue, even though the pro-climate change advocates will tell you there are no problems in the data. The scientists involved debate this issue, and come to an agreement on how to best deal with it; the advocacy groups simply gloss over any difficulties, even if they do not alter the end result. So the average person can be forgiven if finding this issue is shocking; what about the “consensus”? This is the messy stuff that leads to that consensus; like sausage, you sometimes don’t want to know what’s in it.

Now, about the word “trick”. In this context, it is used to indicate there is a difficult task at hand, such as in this statement that might be made to a winter driver:

When you find yourself in a skid on ice, the trick is to keep from making it worse. Steer in the direction of the skid and keep your foot off the brakes.

So the hard part about reconstructing historical temperature records is merging the proxies with the instrument data, and we need to discuss how to do this; that seems like an OK statement.

Less clear is what the phrase “to hide the decline” means; it appears this is either to correct what they truly believe is an error in the data when you combine the proxies and instrument data (most likely in my view), or is the “smoking gun” of a conspiracy to hide warming data (extremely unlikely, at least in my view again).

As to the language of the emails, I am shocked, shocked to find there is emotion in them! As stated in our post Climate: Mistakes or Prevarication, scientists are surprisingly human underneath those white smocks with pocket protectors.

As the popular RealClimate blog explains:

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

Cross-posted to FrankHagan.com

A local newspaper in upstate New York’s 23rd Congressional District, scene of the hard-fought and nationally prominent special election (won — so far anyway — by the Democrat after his Conservative opponent conceded), reports that a computer virus may have “tainted’ the results:  

GOUVERNEUR, NY – The computerized voting machines used by many voters in the 23rd district had a computer virus – tainting the results, not just from those machines known to have been infected, but casting doubt on the accuracy of counts retrieved from any of the machines.

So, after three candidates spent a gazillion dollars tearing each other to pieces and their battle was played out on the national stage by every pundit in the land, the computers may have eaten the votes.  

I hate it when that happens.

Hoffman conceded to Democrat Bill Owens on election night when the reported results had him trailing by more than 5,000 votes, and Owens was quickly sworn in as a member of the House of Representives. Recently, though, Hoffman “unconceded” (odd as that may be) when it turned out that he was behind by only about 3,000 votes with the absentee ballots outstanding.

As of earlier today, Politico declared Hoffman out of the running again, as the counted results showed he could not possibly win. But who knows now what lies inside the “infected” machines?

This should serve as a warning to candidates in close elections: never, ever concede until the votes are actually counted!

Cross-posted from The Purple Center

The deficit explosion under the Obama administration is a common complaint by fiscal conservatives, and is often represented with a graph such as this one, courtesy of the libertarian think-tank, Cato.org:

However, as Cato points out, the fiscal year starts in October of each year, and the budget for 2009 was signed into law by President Bush. So while I tire of the Obama administration lamenting that they inherited most of their problems, on the deficit front at least, they are right:

Profligate spending by Republicans led to losing majorities in 2006, and the subsequent spending under President Bush and a Democratic Congress proved even worse. So while there’s plenty of blame to go around, the one actor currently on stage that can’t be blamed for the deficit is the Obama administration. Next year, maybe, but not this year.

Cross posted to FrankHagan.com

As many of you know, I’ve been a fan of Dobbs. Yes, he has been leading the far right on issues like immigration and border security, but he opposed the Bush tax cuts, wanted to raise the minimum wage, is pro choice and favors gay marriage. Meanwhile, he values fiscally responsibility and has a pro business attitude. Certainly an independent minded guy if I’ve ever seen one.

However, his recent tango with the birthers movement made his ratings take a nose dive and, well, CNN showed him the door as a result.

So that’s why this interview with Jon Stewart isn’t necessarily puzzling, but it is a bit sad. Just 9 short months into this presidency and Dobbs actually thinks that Obama is continuing Bush’s policies? Sure, there are a few things he hasn’t changed, but it’s hard for me to believe that Dobbs doesn’t appreciate that these things aren’t simply going to happen overnight…especially with two wars and a massive economic crisis happening…especially since Dobbs himself says he’s an incrementalist. (ahem!)

In short, where is this paranoia (that must have fueled Dobbs’ birther flirtation) coming from?

In any event, take a gander…

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

I’ll ask the question that Stewart asks in the interview…do independents think that our country and our standing is that fragile? Because if Bush didn’t destroy it in the last 8 years, why do indies all of a sudden think that Obama’s going to do it by passing health care reform and rebuilding our infrastructure?

What say you?

And it’ll achieve 94% coverage.

And it costs $849B.

CNN has more about some of the key points in the new bill…

Among other things, they’ve agreed to subsidize insurance for a family of four making up to roughly $88,000 annually, or 400 percent of the federal poverty level.

They’ve also agreed to expand Medicaid and create health insurance exchanges to make it easier for small businesses, the self-employed and the unemployed to pool resources and purchase less expensive coverage.

They also would limit total out-of-pocket expenses and prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.

Insurers under the Democratic plans would be barred from charging higher premiums based on a person’s gender or medical history.

But can Dems avoid a filibuster?

I think so, and here’s how that could be accomplished…

Reid met Wednesday afternoon with Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, three moderate Democrats who have expressed concerns about the cost and scope of health care reform proposals. [...]

Landrieu said she has concerns relating to the bill’s costs to small businesses and individuals. She also expressed opposition to a public health insurance option “that will undermine the private insurance market.” If that’s included in the measure, she said, “it needs to come out at some point.” [...]

Nelson released a statement Wednesday noting that the likely weekend vote represents an opportunity “to commence debate and an opportunity to make changes” to improve the bill.

So the public option and the cost are the two big sticking points.

What’s new?

One last note…about the Stupak amendment…it’s being changed slightly…

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who supports abortion rights, said Reid’s new provisions would preserve the Hyde amendment while enabling people to buy insurance plans with abortion coverage on the exchange.

More as it develops…

Why oh why oh why oh why?

They gave her an incredibly easy way to ignore the more substantive arguments against her legitimacy as a candidate and focus on their dumb decision to run with the above nonsense.

And this isn’t just coming from her corner. It’s coming from Media Matters and other voices in the liberal blogosphere.

As they put it…

Newsweek offers some interesting analysis of Palin and her appeal in its November 23 issue. Unfortunately, its sexist treatment of Palin’s physical appearance distracts from any legitimate arguments the magazine and its contributors wish to make.

It’s such a stupid decision it boggles the mind. You run a original head shot of her in this situation, not rerun some picture from Runner’s World.

Jon Meachum is calling the shots over there, and his response to all this is inane…

We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do.

We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.

Yeah, so when’s the last time they ran a photo of any other politician wearing shorts?

Good lord…

Michael Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, he proposes a temporary payroll tax reduction as a second try at a stimulus. He starts his argument with consideration of what would have happened with a temporary payroll tax reduction in February of this year:

My Stanford colleague Pete Klenow and Rochester economist Mark Bils estimated that cutting the payroll tax by six percentage points (of the 12.4% Social Security component) would, under standard assumptions, increase employment by three million to four million workers—an amount equal to all the job losses since the stimulus was passed.

The payroll tax cut would have reduced firms’ costs by roughly the same amount as from the entire decline in employment. It would have cost less than half as much as the stimulus bill, gotten far more income into paychecks quickly and, most importantly, greatly reduced incentives for firms to lay off workers. In fact, it would have created incentives to hire.

Instead, we choose a stimulus that critics called “porkapalooza”, and have seen unemployment exceed targets by about 25% (to over 10% instead of the promised maximum of 8.6%).

Boskin’s recommendation is a “partial payroll tax reduction”, cutting the tax in half for a few months. That means the average wage earner would see a 3% raise for those months (and the employer would also see a 3% drop in payroll taxes). On the employer side, that might spur hiring or help employers retain employees slated for layoffs, but I don’t think its enough of an effect for the wage earner.

Boskin also recommends accelerating some spending “that has to be done anyway”, such as replenishment of military stores. I have my own reservations about opening the door to any more government spending. The level of military spending is certainly something open to debate, anyway, and the current administration is more likely to try to cut military spending after huge increases for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In my view, a better idea would have been a three-month payroll tax “holiday”, with workers enjoying an increase in wages equal to 6%, and employers enjoying an immediate 25% reduction in taxes for the first quarter of next year.

Unlike income taxes, payroll taxes are levied disproportionally on the lower and middle income classes, with every dollar of their income taxed. The Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to offset some of that disproportionate burden, but it is reduced and eventually phased out for those earning over $43,279. People in the third and fourth quintile of income pay more of this tax as a percentage of total income than any other class. Because the payroll tax is collected on every dollar up to $106,800 in income, the richest families see payroll tax free income above that level. (All rates are 2009 figures.)

The middle class is the “engine” of consumer spending, and a reliable, defined 6% increase in wages for three months would do much to spur delayed spending on consumer goods. And it would be “kinder” to our budget deficit than “stimulative” spending.

While taxes on the “rich” are often decried by my fellow conservatives, when all taxes and tax credits are added together our system looks moderately progressive and not “confiscatory”. Economists separate household income levels into 5 equally sized groups, or “quintiles”, with income and effective tax rates per quintile, as shown:

Quintile Income Bracket Source: http://www.bls.gov/cex/2006/Standard/quintile.pdf

These are the estimated percentages actually paid in 2006, not what the tax tables state. Note that “the rich” don’t pay 39% on every dollar of income; with lower taxes on the income up to their top level, tax deductions and other credits, they end up paying 25.8% of their income. It would be simpler to incorporate these tax rates into a tax code of a single page instead of the 70,000+ page tax code we now have, but that’s another issue entirely.

The tax percentages above include payroll, income, excise and other federal taxes, minus deductions and credits, as estimated by the Cato Institute. The income levels for the quintiles, from the BLS, are “household” income (two wage earners if filing jointly). Many are shocked to find their family is in the 4th or 5th quintile, but you are in the top 40% of wage earners if your combined income is over $56,222. If you and your spouse earn $89,000 combined, you are “rich”, in the top 5th of all income earners.

Unlike the Making Work Pay tax credit, passed with the 2009 stimulus bill, a payroll tax holiday would not be accompanied by a temporary adjustment in the withholding tables that might “bite” some taxpayers. The $400 per person “Making Work Pay” tax credit was offset by automatic deductions in the withholding tables, providing the average wage earner with a few extra dollars each paycheck. But that affects the total amount withheld, and some tax payers may see a tax bill due instead of a refund at tax time in the spring. That tax surprise will not be pleasant for families already pressed by salary reductions, rising credit card interest and other effects of the recession.

Rep. Louie Gohmert had proposed a payroll tax holiday as an alternative to multi-national corporate bailouts in late 2008, but the proposal went nowhere. It is time to reexamine this proposal, perhaps even on a bi-partisan basis – one can hope – for the first quarter of 2010.

Cross-posted to FrankHagan.com

The administration’s claim of nearly 640,000 jobs created or “saved” by the $787 billion stimulus bill continues to be savaged by traditional media outlets for inaccuracies.

From the Washington Examiner:

More than ten percent of the jobs the Obama administration has claimed were “created or saved” by the $787 billion stimulus package are doubtful or imaginary, according to reports compiled from eleven major newspapers and the Associated Press.

Based only on our analysis of stimulus media coverage in the last two weeks, The Examiner has created this interactive map to document exaggerated stimulus claims. The map, which will be updated as new revelations appear, currently reflects an exaggeration by the Obama administration of about 75,000 jobs, out of the 640,000 jobs supposedly “created or saved.”

From ABC News, a caution about some of the details:

Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.

And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified.

And the Sacramento Bee notes some problems with the statistics from the Golden State:

Up to one-fourth of the 110,000 jobs reported as saved by federal stimulus money in California probably never were in danger, a Bee review has found.

It would be easy to criticize the administration for lacking the critical oversight necessary to get the statistics right. After all, none other than VP “Nobody Messes with Joe” Biden was assigned to be the official watchdog.

But piddling little details like actual real numbers aside, economics is the dismal science. And its very hard to determine exactly what effect a spending program has on the job market.

The Wall Street Journal, usually not considered a bastion of liberal economic thought, observes that:

It’s easy to ridicule the White House’s estimate that 650,000 jobs have so far been “saved or created” by the $150 billion spent so far from their $787 billion stimulus bill. That’s because while it’s possible to measure jobs created by the stimulus (for example, counting the number of construction workers on an infrastructure project funded by the bill), it’s a lot less clear how you measure jobs saved by it.

“One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved’,” said Allan Meltzer, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in a memo to House of Representatives Republican leader John Boehner today. “How can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?”

The disparate estimates come down to the multiplier effect. There are jobs directly created, and then there are jobs that are created or saved because the direct beneficiaries are still employed. For example, the stimulus money may have financed a construction workers’ job, but it also may have saved the job of someone at the grocery store where he shops. There’s also the issue of government jobs saved. Many states were planning layoffs that were either canceled or postponed because of stimulus money. But again, those numbers are difficult to quantify.

The Journal’s panel of 46 economists had predicted a loss of 271,000 jobs per month without the stimulus bill, and a less-catastrophic loss of 183,000 jobs if the bill passed. Reality, as if to prove the “dismal science” label correct, chimed in with a job loss of about 400,000 per month with the stimulus.

That panel’s prediction was the basis for VP Biden’s claim that the stimulus will create or “save” a million jobs, according to the Journal.

There’s an old joke that goes like this: If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t come to the right conclusion.

And that’s the danger in relying on government to solve economic problems. You hope the predictions are right before the biggest entity in the known universe sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

Cross posted to FrankHagan.com

Journalist Ezra Klein has come out in favor of the proposition that a federal health insurance mandate is constitutional, but the question remains a thorny legal problem. If a reform bill is passed with an individual mandate, will it pass constitutional muster? The answer isn’t quite as clear as Klein would have us believe.

PENNumbra, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review’s online effort at “Uniting the Public and Legal Academy”, features a debate between legal scholars on this issue. David Rivkin and Lee Casey hold the position that a mandate to purchase individual health insurance would be found unconstitutional by our current Supreme Court as an over-reach of the Commerce Clause, while Professor Jack Balkin holds that the mandate is simply a tax, without the need for invoking the Commerce Clause.

Some samples, starting with Rivkin and Casey:

Of course, what Congress is contemplating with regard to a health care mandate is even less defensible under a Commerce Clause analysis than what it sought to do in the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 or the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, both of which, after all, purported to regulate non-economic activities that were nevertheless freely engaged in by individuals [Editor's note: both laws were found unconstitutional by the current court]. By contrast, the health care mandate would not regulate any “activity” at all. Rather, it features an affirmative federal command that parties engage in a particular commercial activity—i.e., a purchase of insurance. It is imposed not because an individual engaged in any particular profession or employment, even so much as growing pot in the bathroom. This regulation would apply to every American simply because they exist.

Significantly, even the Congressional Research Service (CRS), an entity that traditionally and institutionally takes the most permissive view of Article I powers, when asked by the Senate Finance Committee to opine on whether the Constitution allows Congress to impose this type of a mandate, came up with the most lukewarm of answers, indicating that “[w]hether such a requirement would be constitutional under the Commerce Clause is perhaps the most challenging question posed by such a proposal, as it is a novel issue whether Congress may use this clause to require an individual to purchase a good or a service.” Cong. Research Serv., Requiring Individuals to Obtain Health Insurance: A Constitutional Analysis 3 (2009), available at http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/R40725_20090724.pdf. While we have never worked for the CRS, we know from experience in the Executive Branch, both at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the White House Counsel’s Office, that when the Office of Legal Counsel, a highly respected DOJ component, in response to the question of whether or not a given approach is constitutional, tells you that it is a novel issue, it sure is not a green light.

Professor Jack Balkin holds that the individual mandate is nothing more than a tax, and therefore permissible regardless of the interpretation of the Commerce Clause:

One might object that Congress lacks the power to tax where the tax is not a genuine device for raising revenue but merely an attempt to regulate conduct that Congress is otherwise forbidden from regulating under the Constitution.

This argument fails for two reasons. First, as noted above, the tax on uninsured persons is a genuine revenue-raising device. It helps to pay some of the costs of comprehensive public health reform that includes an expansion of Medicaid, reform of insurance practices, and an employer mandate.

Second, the Supreme Court has made clear that a tax with regulatory purposes will not be held unconstitutional when the tax on its face seeks to raise revenue:

Every tax is in some measure regulatory. To some extent it interposes an economic impediment to the activity taxed as compared with others not taxed. But a tax is not any the less a tax because it has a regulatory effect, and it has long been established that an Act of Congress which on its face purports to be an exercise of the taxing power is not any the less so because the tax is burdensome or tends to restrict or suppress the thing taxed.

Sonzinsky v. United States, 300 U.S. 506, 513 (1937) (citations omitted). The point was made even more forcefully in United States v. Sanchez:

It is beyond serious question that a tax does not cease to be valid merely because it regulates, discourages, or even definitely deters the activities taxed. The principle applies even though the revenue obtained is obviously negligible, or the revenue purpose of the tax may be secondary. Nor does a tax statute necessarily fall because it touches on activities which Congress might not otherwise regulate.

340 U.S. 42, 44 (1950) (citations omitted). Given long-settled legal principles, House Bill 3296 is clearly constitutional.

The PENNumbra debate provides a reasoned, well thought out introduction to the constitutional issues that will be debated. Even though it is geared toward a general audience, it is still a relatively technical article. But it shows that, pundit assurances aside, the constitutionality of the mandate is still in question.

Cross-posted to FrankHagan.com

Our auto company GM is “repaying” some of the bailout money early! Or so say the headlines.

But the reality is a little bit different.

Some background, in case you don’t remember all the payments you made to own 61% of GM. The government placed $6.7 billion in a “contingency fund” in case things got worse for the auto maker. Things seem like they aren’t getting worse, so GM will not need the money. As the Washington Post’s “Economy Watch” analyst Frank Ahrens notes:

GM actually said it is going to start giving back $6.7 billion the government placed in an escrow account for the automaker as a contingency, in case things got worse.

That’s part of the $52 billion the government has plowed into GM, which went through a government-backed bankruptcy earlier this year.

Well, things didn’t get worse — so GM said it could start “repaying” the $6.7 billion contingency fund with a $1.2 billion “payment” in December, and add additional “payments” until the total amount is “paid off” over the next eight quarters.

It is still good news. Our Uncle Sam and his Canadian cousins loaned the money with the provision that repayment be by July, 2015. So not using the money earlier is better than not using it later.

The news headlines will still read “repayment!” because the neat little accounting trick is hidden far down on the “Non-GAAP Managerial Results” press release today:

GM plans to repay the United States, Canadian and Ontario government loans in quarterly installments from escrowed funds, beginning next month with an initial $1.2 billion payment to be made in December ($1.0 billion to the UST [US Treasury] and $192 million to the EDC [Export Development Canada]), followed by quarterly payments. Any escrowed funds available as of June 30, 2010 would be used to repay the UST and EDC loans unless the escrowed funds were extended one year by the UST. Any balance of funds would be released to GM after the repayment of the UST and EDC loans.

I’m glad our new car company is so clever. They would make Frank Abagnale, Jr. smile.

Cross-posted to FrankHagan.com

So, I read Doug’s take as well as John’s angle and followed it all with Justin’s comments and Jacob’s snark.

The bottom-line (as far as I’m concerned) is that this really is not a big deal. I understand the interest and argument posited by Doug and John, but I think that the answers to their questions are simple.

Did the President bow a little bit lower than was appropriate? It certainly looks like it.

Was he declaring his — and by default our — allegiance to the Emperor of Japan? Absolutely not.

The President bowed to a foreign dignitary, as Presidents do, and he simply limbo’d too low.

As Justin said:

I hope you don’t unsubscribe because of a couple posts rubbed you the wrong way. After all, that’s sort of the point of this site.

That is indeed the point of this site. Where else would you go for reasoned debate (usually) and civil discourse (most of the time)?

=)

Seniors: One super-voting bloc politicians mess with at their peril

For months now, it’s been clear that the road to “deficit neutral” health care reform is a bumpy, maybe even dangerous, one for seniors. Ironically, in their zeal to extend health insurance to the roughly 40 million people who don’t have any, President Obama and many Democrats in Congress appear ready to make deep cuts in Medicare, a program that is on the short list of the signal domestic accomplishments of the Democratic Party over the past 80 years, alongside Social Security, labor rights, and civil rights. What the 45 million seniors and people with disabilities who depend on Medicare are going to think about this remains unclear, although it’s hard to see why they would embrace it with resignation.

A new report from the non-partisan Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid, has now confirmed the $500 billion in cuts in the House health care bill that passed a week ago will reduce Medicare benefits and run a real risk of limiting seniors’ access to care. From the Washington Post:

A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending — one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health-care system — would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.

The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.

Congress could intervene to avoid such an outcome, but “so doing would likely result in significantly smaller actual savings” than is currently projected, according to the analysis by the chief actuary for the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid. That would wipe out a big chunk of the financing for the health-care reform package, which is projected to cost $1.05 trillion over the next decade.

More generally, the report questions whether the country’s network of doctors and hospitals would be able to cope with the effects of a reform package expected to add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the insured, many of them through Medicaid, the public health program for the poor.

In the face of greatly increased demand for services, providers are likely to charge higher fees or take patients with better-paying private insurance over Medicaid recipients, “exacerbating existing access problems” in that program, according to the report from Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

[snip]

In its most recent analysis of the House bill, the CBO noted that Medicare spending per beneficiary would have to grow at roughly half the rate it has over the past two decades to meet the measure’s savings targets, a dramatic reduction that many budget and health policy experts consider unrealistic. [Emphasis added.]

Whatever bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid takes to the Senate floor this week will also have to rely on hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare cuts to pay for it.

Most of the public debate about health care reform has focused on the issue of a public option and the overall cost, with the Medicare cuts usually mentioned only in passing. It wasn’t long ago that more liberal Democrats were the fiercest defenders of of Medicare and Medicaid, as in 2007 when President Bush proposed cuts that were a fraction of those now approved by House Democrats. No more. Democrats want to pass a bill, so they are largely mum on this topic and talk only about generating “efficiencies” and tackling “abuses” in Medicare.

And the Republicans? Some Republicans may take it up as a talking point now and then, but the GOP’s deep-seated objection to “entitlements” like Medicare and Medicaid eliminate them from serious contention as a defender of seniors in this case.

What about the supposed “seniors’ lobby,” AARP? It has thrown its support behind the House bill in a deal that will bring more customers to its lucrative insurance business.

So seniors are on their own. But here’s the thing about that. Seniors — and near-seniors — are handily the most reliable group of voters. They may have to hobble on their canes to get to the polling place, but they do vote.

As early as last July, it was already noteworthy in many polls that opposition to health care reform was higher among seniors. That’s still true — but you ain’t seen nothing yet. Assuming a bill that cuts $400-500 billion from Medicare is signed into law, the issue will no longer be hypothetical, or muddled by a constantly changing and confusing array of proposals, or hidden behind high-minded rhetoric and clever spin. When it becomes clear to seniors that their health insurance benefits actually have been reduced and that it’s going to even harder to find a doctor who accepts Medicare patients (a growing number of physicians have already opted out of Medicare),anyone who voted for it is going to have a hard time convincing constituents over 60 that it’s a good deal.

Anyway, it’s not just about politics. What’s so “progressive” about slashing health care benefits for tens of millions of older Americans — a large majority of whom have low to moderate incomes — to subsidize benefits for younger Americans, many of whom don’t want insurance now and will resent being obligated to take on premium payments? Beats me.

Cross-posted from The Purple Center.

Not surprisingly, The New York Times review of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life isn’t exactly positive:

“Going Rogue,” the title of Sarah Palin’s erratic new memoir, comes from a phrase used by a disgruntled McCain aide to describe her going off-message during the campaign: among other things, for breaking with the campaign over its media strategy and its decision to pull out of Michigan, and for speaking out about reports that the Republican Party had spent more than $150,000 on fancy designer duds for her and her family. In fact, the most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the press, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential nominee and made her one of the most talked about women on the planet — someone who could command a reported $5 million for writing this book.

In what reads like payback for McCain aides’ disparaging comments about her in the wake of the ticket’s loss to Barack Obama, Ms. Palin depicts the McCain campaign as overscripted, defeatist, disorganized and dunder-headed — slow to shift focus from the Iraq war to the cratering economy, insufficiently tough on Mr. Obama and contradictory in its media strategy. She also claims that the campaign billed her nearly $50,000 for “having been vetted.” The vetting, which was widely criticized in the press as being cursory and rushed, was, she insists, “thorough”: they knew “exactly what they’re getting.”

(…)

All in all, Ms. Palin emerges from “Going Rogue” as an eager player in the blame game, thoroughly ungrateful toward the McCain campaign for putting her on the national stage. As for the McCain campaign, it often feels like a desperate and cynical operation, willing to make a risky Hail Mary pass in order to try to score a tactical win, instead of making a considered judgment as to who might be genuinely qualified to sit a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

In “Going Rogue,” Ms. Palin talks perfunctorily about fiscal responsibility and a muscular foreign policy, and more passionately about the importance of energy independence, but she is quite up front about the fact that much of her appeal lies in her just-folks, “hockey Mom” ordinariness. She pretends no particular familiarity with the Middle East, the Iraq war or Islamic politics — “I knew the history of the conflict,” she writes, “to the extent that most Americans did.” And she argues that “there’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.”

Yet, Mr. McCain’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, a town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate and Ms. Palin’s own surprisingly nonchalant reaction to Mr. McCain’s initial phone call about the vice president’s slot (she writes that it felt “like a natural progression”) underscore just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge

Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, calls the tome, “one of the most substantive policy books I’ve read.”

Frankly, I didn’t know Rush had read much more than Dr. Seuss before getting around to this book.

To Charles De Gaulle…

To the wife of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Gronchi…

To Pope John XXIII…

Maybe he just liked to sneak a peek at their shoes?

(h/t: Gaucho Politico & Lawyers, Guns & Money)

Maggie Mahar has an interesting observation in Sunday’s Washington Post:

If you’re a progressive like me, and you’re upset by the Stupak amendment, which bars federally subsidized insurance from covering abortions, consider this: What if we had a single-payer health-care system and someone like Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin were running the country?

The Stupak amendment is often described as an extension of the long-standing Hyde Amendment barring the use of federal funds to directly fund abortion. Since 1976, the Hyde Amendment has enjoyed broad support among the public, including among many pro-choice people. The sentiment seems to be summed up in the statement that “you can have an abortion as long as you don’t ask me to pay for it.”

But the Stupak amendment, part of the recently passed House health bill, the “Affordable Health Care for America” act, HR 3962 (PDF file), actually goes much farther than just banning direct funding of abortion.

HR 3962 sets up an “insurance exchange”, where private insurers would bid on individual coverage. The intent is to give individuals the same buying leverage as a large company. Sounds like a good idea, and pretty close to the “free market” solution many of us would like to see. The insurers would be standard health insurance companies like Kaiser, Aetna and Health South. Because some of the people looking for insurance would get a federal subsidy based on income levels, none of the policies issued, by private companies and paid for by individual citizen’s funds, could cover abortion services.

So if you earn $200,000 a year, and pay for every cent of your insurance policy, the federal government is stepping between you and the insurance company to prohibit coverage of abortion. Yet, many of those policies do currently cover abortion (it is, after all, cheaper than a live birth, and these are insurance companies we’re talking about).

As a pro-life Republican, I’m delighted by this amendment. But I also see the same danger as Mahar, perhaps for a different reason. I see the reach of the federal government into health care decisions as necessarily chipping away at personal freedom. Freedom to do legal things, to have an abortion, smoke a cigar, or be fat.

Mahar provides an example:

With such an administration in power, social conservatives might move to exert pressure on health-care decisions beyond abortion. For example, could women be told that their government insurance won’t cover birth control? In 2001, President George W. Bush proposed eliminating the requirement that all Federal Employees Health Benefits plans include coverage for contraception. At the time, Susan Orr, who would later become Bush’s deputy assistant secretary of health and human services for population affairs, applauded the president’s suggestion, saying: “We’re quite pleased because fertility is not a disease. It’s not a medical necessity that you have [contraception.]”

I’m glad someone on the left has seen that centralizing power necessarily means that freedom is lost, bit by little bit. Trading freedom for security is often a poor bargain, even when the security is “health care for all”.

Cross-posted to FrankHagan.com

In what can only be called an Epic Win, President Obama has turned his back on Superman!

USA rules!

With this daring breach of protocol (at the risk of a super-wedgie) Obama has done what no American President has ever done – disrespected Superman.

I think we can all agree that this is truly a great day to be an American!

Hey all,

I’ve heard quite a bit of back channel chatter about the last two posts on the blog and I wanted to explain how I was responsible for the topic even showing up here in the first place.

Doug and I are friends on Facebook and he feeds his posts through his profile. I saw the bowing post and we had the following conversation…

As far as John’s post, well, I give everybody the same access to post when I invite them to have an account. That means he can come and go as he pleases. And that policy is my responsibility too. (Although I’d prefer the headlines were less sensationalist than what John wrote, and have told him as much.)

So, not that I want this to turn into a prolonged fight over the protocols of bowing, but if you have an account here to blog…tell us what you think.

In any event, hope this clears up any confusion.

Also, I hope you don’t unsubscribe because of a couple posts rubbed you the wrong way. After all, that’s sort of the point of this site.

I found the following numbers from Gallup about government’s role in health care to be, well, eye opening.

Check it out…

Hmmm, what happened in 2008…I can’t really think of anything.

Republicans can not like Obama all the want, but this smacks of “Soreloserism.”

Why, just look at how this drop has effected the overall opinion on this topic…

So in 2007 nearly 70% of the population thought government be responsible for health care, but now that a Democrat is in office we’re sub 50%?

Come on people…don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.