Month: January 2013

Factoid ‘o the day

by digby

From Wonkblog:

Insurance premium growth has wiped out the last decade of wage growth. Overall, that middle-income family saw its income go up by $23,000, from $76,000 in 1999 to $99,000 in 2009 — not too bad. But rising health-care costs in the form of increased insurance premiums and co-pays, ate up nearly all of that. Factor in that spending, as a recent Health Affairs article did, and the average family only had $95 a month more in available income than it did a decade ago.

The ACA isn’t helping, so far, but there is hope that competition within the exchanges will eventually allow people to shop for cheaper insurance and that the rebate requirement will eventually result in insurance companies being more reasonable in their rates. (Right now, it looks as though they have decided to bill their customers at high rates and keep the money during the year as a low interst loan until they are forced to give it back.) And it’s also hoped that all 50 states will create regulatory agencies with some clout to beat back some of these rate increases.

There’s a lot of hope in all that. If I had to guess it will probably take a couple of decades at a minimum to truly know how this has worked. The political obstacles to improvement are huge. So we shall see. But in the meantime, no more cutting back of health care benefits until we see whether this new program has made things better or worse over the long haul. I think the law of unintended consequences is going to rule for quite some time.

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Haggling over Hagel

by digby

I’m sympathetic to Glenn Greenwald’s take on the Hagel nomination, particularly the fact that among the possible nominees in both parties, Hagel is probably among the most dovish. But that says more about the degradation of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy establishment than it does about Chuck Hagel.

I have to admit that I find all this sort of confusing. The Chuck Hagel I’m most familiar with is a somewhat dull-witted fellow who insisted we send ground troops into Kosovo (over the objections of the likes of Tom DeLay!)and adamantly supported the idiotic Star Wars program — almost to the extent of being a fanatic on the subject. He was much better on Iraq, of course, although he voted for it. (Recall that more than 30 21 Senate Democrats plus Jeffords and Chaffee voted against, so it wasn’t an impossible vote to take.)

Was he worse than many Democrats of the past couple of decades? No. Aggressive militarism combined with convenient dovishness is a bipartisan affair. But he was weird, one of the Senate’s “mavericks” which in his case never seemed to me to be political positioning for higher office, like John McCain, or bitter contrarianism like Joe Lieberman, but rather simple incoherence. He just didn’t appear to have much of a center.

Now there are many who say this impression is nonsense, that Hagel is extremely bright and has a very well-formed, if idiosyncratic, view of the world. I’ll take their word for it. I’m no Hagel expert and frankly haven’t followed his career all that closely. I’m basing my impressions on an accumulation of discrete episodes over the course of a couple of decades in which I happened to pay attention to him. As I said, he’s certainly not the worst person Obama could have chosen from among the Democrats. And he’s much better than 99.9% of Republicans. So, if the WH wants this to be a GOP job, he’s a far better choice than most. (I shudder to think who he might have picked.) But he’s an odd duck, and not always in a good way.

It doesn’t matter though. The Secretary of Defense works for Obama and Obama’s policies will rule the day. I don’t think it will buy him even the smallest bit of “credibility” however. Obviously the Republicans are having one of their patented hissy fits already, which just goes to show that they aren’t about “partisanship” per se, but rather ideology, which should be a lesson to the White House. (The more centrist the WH, the further right the GOP…) And I cannot see how his being a military vet will help him with the Pentagon brass. He was, after all, an enlisted man.

This nomination fight looks as if it will be quite a show, however. According to Politico, opposition to Hagel is really about Bill Kristol’s move to take over the GOP. If that’s the case, then this is just another wingnut circus. Looks like they ain’t done yet.

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Single-subject bill reform needed

by David Atkins

I’ve mentioned before that it’s likely more useful to look at specific rules reform than it is to inveigh against specific politicians. Among the needed reforms I’ve mentioned are an end to gerrymandered congressional districts, dysfunctional filibuster rules, corrupt lobbying and campaign finance laws, electoral college rules, and many others besides.

Add single-subject bills to the list. This dates back to 2011:

Congressman Doug Lamborn (CO-05) introduced a Resolution today along with Jared Polis (CO-02), Cory Gardner (CO-04), and Scott Tipton (CO-03) aimed at limiting all bills to a single subject. Lamborn and Polis introduced similar legislation in the last Congress. The Resolution would ensure that Congress does not pass bills that contain unrelated amendments and items cobbled together. Members of Congress do this many times to avoid hearings on important policy. This practice also has the effect of adding spending costs to bills, thus driving up the budget deficit. The so-called “Single-Subject” rule is already a rule of both Chambers of the Colorado General Assembly.

“This Resolution would ensure that all House bills are transparent. This means lawmakers must put forward bills that address a single issue, not this cobbling together of unrelated items. If something is important enough to warrant legislative action, it deserves to be fully and openly debated and voted on, not shoved into an unrelated bill and pushed through without a separate hearing. The people of Colorado, and the nation as a whole, deserve transparency in what laws are being passed by their elected representatives.” – Congressman Doug Lamborn (CO-05)

“One of the most frustrating things I face in representing the people of Colorado in Congress is voting on enormous “Christmas tree” bills with unrelated measures, some of which I support, some of which I oppose. The Colorado legislature gets their work done in a straight forward and transparent way thanks to the “single-subject rule” which requires each bill have a single legislative intent that is clearly described in its title. It’s time to apply some Colorado common sense to Washington, DC.” – Congressman Jared Polis (CO-02)

Some will immediately complain that Congress is sclerotic and slow-moving enough without forcing it to move even more slowly, and that allowing unrelated items to appear in the same bill allows for better dealmaking.

But we have already seen time and again awful provisions such as huge corporate giveaways included with necessary packages, as well as a range of “gotcha” amendments added to terrible legislation to secure wavering votes from politicians who know better.

While the current ugly system of sausage-making might benefit progressive priorities on occasion, it largely serves to benefit those who are seeking to sneak or force through unpopular legislation. That’s bad for democracy no matter who benefits. And since conservative policy polls overwhelmingly worse than progressive policy, there’s simply no reason for progressives to put up with nonsensical mix-and-match legislation expressly designed to sneak through corporate gifts and conservative policy alongside otherwise popular initiatives.

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The hashtag plot

by digby

So apparently there was a coup plot against Boehner, inspired by some Breitbart kid who came up with a hashtag. Or something.

But this is just hilarious:

Breitbart.com covered the Landry effort extensively, and one Republican member who participated in the larger coup attempt said Breitbart’s coverage of the smaller push actually helped keep their effort hidden because it suggested to Boehner and his allies that talk of a coup wasn’t serious.

Of course it did. If Breitbart’s involved you know it’s a farce. Boehner’s no fool.

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Bipartisanship: never say die

by digby

The change may be gone, but the hope is still there …

“I look forward to working with the new Congress in a bipartisan way.”

In fairness, I think any president has to pretend to be in favor of bipartisanship to some degree and I’d imagine that most of them say stuff like this regardless of the situation. But at this moment in our history, unless he plans to enact the Tea party agenda with no changes and zero compromise, it really just sounds silly.

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And now a word from Bizarroworld

by digby

Where up is down and black is white:

According to Limbaugh, “Obama has a lot of admiration for Reagan” but only in the sense that “Reagan genuinely changed the trajectory of this country.”

Limbaugh says Democrats believe Obama has now proven contrary that to Reagan’s policies, raising taxes actually causes economic growth. But Limbaugh says it actually only causes government growth. He describes a future in which the “only reference” to Reagan in academic text books is one small paragraph about all that Reagan destroyed.

Among Obama’s top 5 objectives, Limbaugh says, “is to erase all vestiges of the Reagan years, to have an entire and total complete revision of the history of the Reagan years.” Democrats are threatened by the Reagan years because they “demonstrated” how “dangerously wrong” Dems were. “That’s why there’s been a constant rewriting of history ever since Reagan was in office and even while he was in office,” Limbaugh says.

Limbaugh also claims there’s not much “opposition” to Obama in government because Republicans are afraid to disagree with him.

We have a lot of problem in our civic life. But this distorted version of reality that’s sold to millions and millions of Americans is right up there at the top.

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The Big Squeeze

by digby
Why Austerity May Be Worse Than We Thought–And Hard To Predict

Taking an axe to a governmental budget can cut off growth in a most troubling way. Indeed, austerity has proved worse for a country than most economists suspected.

That is, in essence, what a new IMF paper says. The conclusion: Recent austerity measures have been followed by lower-than-expected economic growth, and economists really struggle to predict austerity’s effects at the start. By the end of the campaign, they’re better at it, the paper says—yet, most people become better at their jobs after doing the work for several years.

The paper comes after a noticeable change from the IMF, which only recently became an outspoken critic of austerity. The IMF’s top economist, Olivier Blanchard, and another research economist, Daniel Leigh also concluded in the paper that the the IMF should not have supported quick budgetary cuts in the beginning of the financial crisis. Economists had thought that for each euro cut from a budget, the economy would lose about 50 cents in growth. Turns out, it was about triple that, closer to 1.50 euros in growth.

Put another way, cutting a government’s budget, as an economy capsizes, is sort of like if a sailor falls overboard and then his crew members stand safely on deck and expect him to make it back on the ship in about five minutes. He has swam that far, that fast before, and there’s no reason to expect that he can’t do it again. But, oh, there’s also a once-in-a-lifetime storm raging all around.

In a nation, cutting a government’s budget can, in turn, limit consumer spending and confidence—key components of any developed economy. If you’re getting fewer tax breaks and less support, you are likely joining the budget-conscious hoard at Wal-Mart, not perusing the aisles of Kroger or Whole Foods. You’re in the bargain-bin basement, shopping at Sears, not Macy’s. Certainly not at Saks.

Add to that a huge loss in wealth from the stock market and housing crashes and a truly terrible job market and you’ve got yourself a real problem on your hands.

But let’s not have that stop us from going forward with a plan to cut programs from the oldest and the sickest among us, provide no relief for crushing student debt burdensas well as fire public employees, bust unions and basically squeeze everyone who is a member of the middle, working and poor classes allegedly because we might have some problems two decades from now. No need to worry about how that might affect the psychology of the average citizen and their willingness to oh .. start a business or otherwise do anything with their money except hoard it under the mattress. They are, on a daily basis, scaring the living hell out of people about future government debt at a time when people are already scared to death about their shaky personal financial future — which the government is working night and day to make even shakier. If I didn’t know better I’d have to assume that somebody’s consciously trying to stifle growth.

Meanwhile, while it’s really moving to see the IMF admit their “mistake” you cannot help but wonder just where the hell they’ve been on this? As my friend Natasha Chart wrote in an email the other day:

The austerity programs implemented in the US and Europe haven’t been quite as harsh (we continue, for now, to have free K-12, SNAP & LIHEAP, etc.) as the ones enforced by international mandate, regardless of the wishes of local governments, but the effects are in line with effects seen during the 80s and 90s in less wealthy countries. Greece is probably nearest on the continuum to getting the kind of crap sandwich once reserved for countries like Indonesia, and their greater social disintegration and unrest bears that out. But it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that massive protests have sprung up in every country hard hit by austerity fever, which is to say that I somewhat doubt the Arab Spring would have sparked the same global convulsions it did without the parallel prescription of global belt tightening in response to the 2008 crash.

If the IMF employs people who are genuinely unaware that this constellation of results always happens in proportion to the speed and severity of sharp public spending cuts, they must be solely staffed with idiots. But I don’t think that’s the case, they’ve consistently acted as ideologues in hock to the interests of international business. If they’re panicking now, it must be the dawning realization that they’re breaking the markets of last resort, whose customer base keeps the parasitization of third world extractive economies churning along.

The IMF is as close, imo, as we’re likely to come to witnessing an archetypal incarnation of the banality of evil. They’re anti-democratic, perennially unmoved by human suffering and useless at having any consistent success beyond enriching the already wealthy.

And like their brethren on Wall Street they may have just killed their own golden goose.

Oh, and by the way, none of this is stopping any of the Western countries, including the US, from barreling forward. Here’s what’s happening in the UK:

Half a million soldiers, nurses and teachers will have their income slashed under the coalition’s benefits crackdown, according to a new report. The chancellor’s sub-inflation rise in benefits and tax credits over the next three years will hit a whole range of the country’s most trusted professionals.

Up to 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will lose cash, in some cases many hundreds of pounds, according to the Children’s Society. The revelation appears to contradict the government’s stated intention to target shirkers and scroungers, and will raise the temperature of the Commons debate and vote on the plan on Tuesday.

The analysis, which is set to be at the centre of Labour’s attack on the coalition in the Commons, when Ed Miliband’s party will vote against the policy, reveals for the first time the range of professions that will be hit. By 2015 a second lieutenant in the army who has three children, who earns £470 per week and whose wife does not work will lose £552 a year; a lone-parent nurse with two children, earning the profession’s average of £530 a week, will lose £424 a year; and a couple with two children where the sole earner is a primary school teacher, earning £600 a week, will lose £424.

And what about us?

As Krugman pointed out:

Other things equal, you’d expect government employment to grow with population (remember, the typical government employee is a schoolteacher). And here’s what has happened to government employment per capita:

It’s quite a squeeze. Not exactly “shock therapy” but close.

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Well, at least we know we’re free (to be cavity searched on the side of the road.)

by digby

This tale of two Texas citizens being forced to endure a cavity search on a Texas roadside has been around for several weeks and I somehow missed it. It’s shocking, to say the least:

According to NBC News, 38-year-old Angel Dobbs and 24-year-old Ashley Dobbs from Irving, Tex., were driving along Highway 161 on July 13, when they were stopped for allegedly littering by State Trooper David Farrell.

“In the dashcam video released by the women and their attorney, Farrell can be heard telling the women they would both be cited for littering for throwing cigarette butts out of the car,” the news agency reports.

After stopping the women, Farrell — who claims to have “smelled marijuana” in their vehicle — reportedly questioned the women about the drug and searched their car for traces of pot.

The Dobbs’ lawsuit filed on Monday, according to the Dallas Morning News, claims that the state trooper had tried to “morph this situation into a DWI investigation.” The older woman, however, is said to have passed a roadside sobriety test and Farrell did not find any marijuana in the car.

The trooper then returned to his vehicle and called female state trooper Kelley Helleson to the scene. He said he wanted Helleson to search the women because they were “acting weird,” according to the dashcam recording.

Angel and Ashley claim that they were then subjected to a very public and “humiliating” roadside body cavity search. They both claim that they were not warned beforehand that the “intrusive” search was about to take place.

KVUE writes:

The lawsuit alleges that Helleson used her fingers to search inside each woman’s genital areas. The suit also says that the trooper did not change the glove she was wearing and performed the search without consent.

The body cavity search is also said to have taken place “on the side of a public freeway illuminated by lights from the police vehicle in full view of the passing public,” the women alleged, according to KVUE.

Wth? This was a full anal and vaginal search. On the side of the highway. Searching for marijuana that was never found.

You cannot tell me this was unique. The way the officers acted, it was obviously not an unprecedented act.

And the scariest part about it what the first women says in her interview above: that she knows she couldn’t resist for fear of what would have happened. That’s the truly scary part. Had I been her, I would have done the same thing she did. She kept it as light as possible, didn’t confront or escalate. Because there is no point in trying to assert your rights to a police officer in the United States of America no matter what insane behavior they are pulling — they can shoot you full of electricity, throw you to the ground and arrest you on the spot if you try to resist their violation. And in most cases, they will suffer no repercussions for such behavior.

After all, it’s obvious that this in “compliance” with standard procedure:

Other than Helleson and Farrell, the women are also suing Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety “for being aware of a long standing pattern of police misconduct involving unlawful strip searches, cavity searches and the like, yet [failing] to take corrective action,” KVUE reports.

Everyone feeling extra,super free today?

You can see the full dashcam video here.
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Premiums rising

by digby

Yikes:

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.

Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations.

The review process not only reveals the sharp disparity in the rates themselves, it also demonstrates the striking difference between places like New York, one of the 37 states where legislatures have given regulators some authority to deny or roll back rates deemed excessive, and California, which is among the states that do not have that ability.

New York, for example, recently used its sweeping powers to hold rate increases for 2013 in the individual and small group markets to under 10 percent. California can review rate requests for technical errors but cannot deny rate increases.

For those of us who depend on the private insurance market and make a modest living, especially those of us in our 50s who are already paying through the nose, these premiums are just terrifying. (Did I mention that I live in California?)

The ACA has no provision for this. It relies on the exchanges to make insurers “competitive” so that people like me will get one of these price increases and go shopping for cheaper insurance. But the prices are already ridiculously high across the board and are only going to go higher. The subsidies will not help the average middle class very much, unfortunately, although they will help a little. At this rate, we’ll be lucky not to end up paying more than we already pay even with them. Even the allegedly small 10% hike in New York is more than many people can easily afford.

I doubt that it will change the overall view of the ACA, however, because most people are still covered by their employer and don’t face this directly, which was always one of the law’s clever political strengths. The only ones who will complain are the same small percentage of people who were most affected by the dysfunctional health care system to begin with — those who are trying to afford private health insurance. I would guess the fallback for many for the time being will be the same as it ever was: don’t buy it and keep their fingers crossed that they don’t get sick. (It’s doubtful the small fine will be much of an incentive at these prices.)

For those of us who will bite the bullet and sacrifice even more to afford these onerous premiums, there are some compensations. We get some free preventive care we previously had to pay for. And obviously, it’s nice to know that you can’t be turned down for insurance if you have a bad diagnosis. But this premium cost problem is huge, especially for middle-aged people in the private market who aren’t well-off.

Oh, and by the way:

Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.

Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.

“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.

But not to worry. I was assured by many people that all such problems would be tweaked and fixed later — there was no way that once it was enacted Obamacare wouldn’t just get better and better over time. And maybe that’s true. But considering the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Medicaid expansion and governors refusing to create the exchanges and the discovery of loopholes like this, it’s going to be a long time in coming. So let’s have no more talk about raising the Medicare age. Many Americans are just trying to hang on by their fingernails until they can get some real health security. And that’s not going to change for a while.

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Something depressing, and not so depressing

by David Atkins

If you want to feel depressed this Sunday morning, head over and read Matt Taibbi’s excellent expose on the grand fraud perpetrated by the government and the too-big-to-fail banks over the last five years. As we all know but Taibbi lays out in simple terms, our government has been using the treasury as a means of making a direct wealth transfer to taxpayers to reckless banks, thereby keeping the executives rolling in millions, increasing income inequality, papering over poor business practices by the banks, and making the economy even more vulnerable to another crash to boot.

I’m not even going to bother quoting from it, as no quote would do it justice. Just head over and read the whole thing. Remember that it’s in the context of this pitchfork-worthy travesty of justice that wealthy finance-sector John Galts and their conservative allies are demanding major cuts to basic social services.

If you need something to lift your spirits after reading all of that, then here’s one of the more adorable pictures to come across my twitter of late:

Enjoy your Sunday, everyone.

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