JustOneMinute

Traditional Friday Immigration Open Rant

Boehner may be leading but is anyone following?

Wait'll He Discovers Obama's Plan For Immigration "Reform"

David Bonior, former Dem Congressman from Michigan, takes to the NY Times to decry Obama's push for expanded free trade authority. Why? Because free trade costs America jobs and increases income inequality:

Obama’s Free-Trade Conundrum

By DAVID E. BONIOR

WASHINGTON — IN his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama focused on reversing the growth of economic inequality in the United States and restoring the American dream. At the same time, he also announced his support for fast track authority that would limit Congress’s role in determining the content of trade agreements.

...

But Mr. Obama’s desire for fast-track authority on the T.P.P. and other agreements clashes with another priority in his speech: reducing income inequality.

This month is the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which significantly eliminated tariffs and other trade barriers across the continent and has been used as a model for the T.P.P. Anyone looking for evidence on what this new agreement will do to income inequality in America needs to consider Nafta’s 20-year record.

While many analysts focus on the number of jobs lost from Nafta and similar pacts — and some estimates say upward of a million — the most significant effect has been a fundamental change in the composition of jobs available to the 63 percent of American workers without a college degree.

 

He then offers a number of arguments that apply with equal force to the Democratic plan on immigration:

 

The Labor Department’s Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which documents this trend, reads like a funeral program for the middle class. More than 845,000 workers have been certified under this one narrow and hard-to-qualify-for program as having lost their jobs because of offshoring of factories to, and growing imports from, Mexico and Canada since Nafta.

The result is downward pressure on middle-class wages as manufacturing workers are forced to compete with imports made by poorly paid workers abroad. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly two out of every three displaced manufacturing workers who were rehired in 2012 saw wage reductions, most losing more than 20 percent.

The shift in employment from high-paying manufacturing jobs to low-paying service jobs has contributed to overall wage stagnation. The average American wage has grown less than 1 percent annually in real terms since Nafta, even as productivity grew three times faster.

But the decline in the wages of workers who lost a job to Nafta is only part of the story. They joined the glut of workers competing for low-skill jobs that cannot be done offshore in industries like hospitality and food service, forcing down real wages in these sectors as well.

Even Paul Krugman has touched this progressive third rail and admitted that waving in unskilled workers from abroad depresses the wages of the native unskilled. It does improve the lives of the non-natives, and that ought to count for something in the moral calculus, but similar issues arise when discussing NAFTA.

But in DemWorld it is "free trade"=bad, "more unskilled workers"=good. A baffling contradiction! Of course, the unskilled workers finding jobs abroad can't vote Democratic here.

Krugman Correction Watch

In an epic Princeton v. Harvard battle, Greg Mankiw comes out on top of Paul Krugman.

Here is the Krugman lead from his Jan 29 column:

Rising inequality has obvious economic costs: stagnant wages despite rising productivity, rising debt that makes us more vulnerable to financial crisis. It also has big social and human costs. There is, for example, strong evidence that high inequality leads to worse health and higher mortality.

High inequality leads to higher mortality? Prof. Mankiw encourages everyone (especially Prof. Krugman) to read the link Krugman provided, which includes this punchline:

There are now also a large number of individual level studies exploring the health consequences of ambient income inequality and none of these provide any convincing evidence that inequality is a health hazard. Indeed, the only robust correlations appear to be those among U.S. cities and states (discussed above) which, as we have seen, vanish once we control for racial composition.

We know Prof. Krugman will want to address this.

And while we wait, we hope he will pick up on the opportunity to clarify, amply and correct his blog comments following the Republican response to the State of the Union. In the course of noting a possible exaggeration by Ms. McMorris-Rodgers he said this about ObamaCare:

I’d be interested, by the way, to know the details about the constituent described in the official GOP response, who supposedly faced a $700 a month rise in premiums. What kind of plan did she have? Did that number include subsidies? The ACA is supposed to keep health costs to 8 percent of income, so the only way you could get numbers like that is if the individual (a) had a really bare-bones policy offering hardly any protection and (b) has an income well over $100,000.

The details of the constituent cited are now out.  and Ms. McMorris-Rodgers should have been talking about a premium spike of $500/month, not $700.

Meanwhile, Krugman might want to keep in mind that subsidies disappear at $46,000 for an "individual" and $94,200 for two adults; that is hardly "an income well over $100,000".

And of course, the subsidies are meant to bring the total premium cost down to around 8% of income; after deductibles and co-pays kick in, good luck. His statement that "The ACA is supposed to keep health costs to 8 percent of income" is misinformed or deceptive.

We are confident that Prof. Krugman will be nothing these problems with alacrity and grace, based on his recent exhortation to Bret Stephens of the WSJ:

Instead, he points to an online post he put out admitting, with a minimum of grace, that using nominal incomes was wrong.

Sorry, but that’s not what I — or, if I may speak for my employer, The New York Times — calls a correction.

What, after all, is the purpose of a correction? If you’ve misinformed your readers, the first order of business is to stop misinforming them; the second, so far as possible, to let those who already got the misinformation know that they were misinformed. So you fix the error in the online version of the article, including an acknowledgement of the error; and you put another acknowledgement of the error in a prominent place, so that those who read it the first time are alerted. In the case of Times columnists, this means an embarrassing but necessary statement at the end of your next column.

My breath is unheld.

DECLARE VICTORY AND MOVE ON: In a new post Krugman explains that he was right.

Well, now we know, and I was right: her previous plan was catastrophic coverage only, with a $10,000 deductible — and the “$700 a month more” was the most expensive option offered by her insurer. She didn’t go to the healthcare.gov website, where she could have found cheaper plans.

So this wasn’t sticker shock, at least as described. This was someone finding out that the ACA requires that you have a minimum level of insurance, and that minimalist plans are no longer allowed — and it was also Ms. Rodgers misrepresenting what had happened.

Oh, and why isn’t catastrophic coverage only allowed? For the same reason we have a coverage mandate in the first place: everyone has to be in the risk pool.

Hmm - as to that $10,000 deductible being out-of-bounds, in Covered California I can find Bronze plans with a $10,000 deductible (Anthem Bronze 60 EPO, 2 adults age 58, $927/mo). In My Blue Heaven of Connecticut, Bronze plans with a $12,600 deductible are on offer (Anthem Bronze DirectAccess w/HSA - cdeh, 2 58 yr old adults, $1181/mo.) That said, the max deductible I found in Washington was around $6,000.

I am not so sure Krugman was "right" that $10,000 is automatically a catastrophic, non-compliant plan.

 

Send Better Phony Stats (Pre-K Edition)

Nick Kristof offers a perfectly plausible defense of pre-K programs but can't resist the allure of phony statistics:

We can invest in preschool today (about $8,000 per child per year), or in juvenile detention tomorrow (around $90,000 per child per year).

That would be compelling if every child eligible for one year of pre-K was otherwise sure to spend one year in juvenile detention.

It would be a financial break-even if 9% of the kids eligible for pre-K would otherwise average one year in juvenile detention.

So what are the numbers? We glean this from the Children's Defense Fund:

On any given day, approximately 81,000 children (263 of every 100,000 youths ages 10 through the state’s upper age of origi¬nal juvenile court jurisdiction in the general population) are held in a juvenile justice residential placement. Additionally, 7,560 children are held in adult jails and 1,790 in adult prisons.

If my math is holding up that sums to roughly 300 kids per 100,000 youths "of the general population", or 0.3%. if this pre-K expansion targeted some subset of youths, e.g, the bottom 20% by income, and if all the detainees came from that subset, then roughly 1.5% of the targeted sub-group would end up in detention.

That is a long way from 9% noted above (And we are assuming that none of the targeted kids eventually end up in detention anyway. Realistic?) As to the duration of the detention, well, it would need to average six years for Mr. Kristof's green-eyeshade argument to make sense.

And as to how helpful this comparison might be, the CDF also tells us this:

With nearly one-half (48 percent) of youths in the juvenile justice system functioning below the grade level appropriate for their age and 30 percent reporting a learning disability diagnosis, compared to 28 and five percent of students in the general population, respectively, children in the juvenile justice system have critical learning needs that must be addressed if they are to get on a more positive track forward.

The kids who end up in detention are likely to have learning issues that are unmitigated by pre-K programs, although early detection might be helpful.

This doesn't mean that expanded pre-K programs are a bad idea. But it does suggest that there is no educational equivalent of the Laffer Curve; pretending these programs can pay for themselves in reduced detention costs is unrealistic.

Looking For Health Care Anecdotes

[LUCKY GUESS: A day later the Spokesman-Review has a chat with the woman I identified.]

In the Republican response to Obama's SOTU Congresswoman McMorris-Rodgers told us this about Obamacare:

Not long ago I got a letter from Bette in Spokane, who hoped the President’s health care law would save her money – but found out instead that her premiums were going up nearly $700 a month.

So what lucky "Bette" is having her switchboard light up this morning? Well, last November Ms. McMorris-Rodgers gave us a bit while discussing the problems with the Affordable Care Act:

It’s about Bette Grenier, who can’t afford the increased payments and is currently uninsured because of Obamacare.

Hmm. Her Joe the Plumber moment is imminent! There is a Bette Grenier in Spokane who heads a roofing contractor firm with ten employees.  And if (IF!!!) this is her little-used Facebook page, she is no fan of Hillary, so maybe she is no fan of Barack.

In any case, a small business owner might well have been in the market for private insurance and may well be looking at higher premiums under Obamacare. There were apparently 290,000 cancellations in Washington State and the state did not pick up onObama 's suggestion that they extend non-compliant plans for another year.

Paul Krugman is deeply interested in this, presumably as long as we can show the Congresswoman to be lying or misinformed:

I’d be interested, by the way, to know the details about the constituent described in the official GOP response, who supposedly faced a $700 a month rise in premiums. What kind of plan did she have? Did that number include subsidies? The ACA is supposed to keep health costs to 8 percent of income, so the only way you could get numbers like that is if the individual (a) had a really bare-bones policy offering hardly any protection and (b) has an income well over $100,000.

As to "an income well over $100,000", I am surprised that such an authority would fail to grasp that for unmarried individuals the subsidies disappear at $46,000. That said, a Silver Plan in Washington for a single mom age 58 (per WhitePages.com) and no kids with no subsidy would be $6,226 per year, which at $519/month is less than the $700/month premium hike we are examining.

So let's give her a hubby and take the income up to $94,300, where subsidies end (still less than $100,000, BTW, but presumably Prof. Krugman has deeper thoughts distracting him).

Now two 58 year olds with two kids are asked to pay $15,556 for a Silver Plan with an annual out-of-pocket maximum of $12,700. Yikes!

And speaking from personal experience, my wife and kids had their non-compliant but quite comprehensive Connecticut plan cancelled for non-compliance (no mental health coverage, which drove us crazy...); a comparable replacement Gold Plan was $600/month more, without subsidies. So personally, I score this anecdote as a "definitely maybe".

It will be interesting to see where the facts lead us. Trust but verify.

SHOW ME THE CLIFFS: Not to get all gloomy and pedantic but the passage from Prof. Krugman excerpted above displays a shocking ignorance of the economics of the ACA subsidies.

As already noted above, subsidies depend on marital status and the number of kids. The claim that they only disappear if "the individual" has "has an income well over $100,000" is only true if "the individual" is also married and has three or more eligible kids.

Per this chart from ObamaCareFacts.com, a single person with no kids loses their eligibility for subsidies at $46,000. And that implies a dramatic subsidy cliff - as the site illustrates, a family of four that is a dollar below the eligibility line ($94,200) can gain $3,550 in subsidies. Earn another dollar, and all of those subsidies disappear. Oops! Not that anyone will finagle their taxes as a consequence. Hmm, Pikkety and Saez will report on declining middle-class reported income, Obama (and Krugman!) will rail about rising inequality - it's a win-win!

But Krugman has embedded a second major misunderstanding:

The ACA is supposed to keep health costs to 8 percent of income...

"Health costs"? Come again? The subsidies are meant to keep premiums at (or near) 8 percent of income. Wait'll he gets a lod of the deductibles and co-pays!

The ObamaCareFacts site refers people to the Kaiser-Permanente subsidy calculator, so here we go: a family of four (non-smokers, national average, mom and dad are forty) earning $55,125 (taken from ObamaCareFacts site as 250% of Federal Poverty Line although Kaiser disputes that):

The premium, pre-subsidy: $9,700. Subsidies of $5,569 per year bring the premium cost down to $4,130 per year. That is 7.5% of $55,125. So far, so good.

However! The fine print, which I recall was initially obfuscated by the ObamaCare website, includes this, on deductibles and co-pays:

Your out-of-pocket maximum for a Silver plan (not including the premium) can be no more than $10,400. Whether you reach this maximum level will depend on the amount of health care services you use. Currently, about one in four people use no health care services in any given year.

If the family does spend $10,400 and hit the out-of-pocket cap I am pretty sure that will represent more than 8% of total income. Hey, insurance is complicated to buy.

Interestingly, Prof. Krugman recently lectured Bret Stephens of the WSJ on an appropriate corrections policy. Let's reprise that here:

Instead, he points to an online post he put out admitting, with a minimum of grace, that using nominal incomes was wrong.

Sorry, but that’s not what I — or, if I may speak for my employer, The New York Times — calls a correction.

What, after all, is the purpose of a correction? If you’ve misinformed your readers, the first order of business is to stop misinforming them; the second, so far as possible, to let those who already got the misinformation know that they were misinformed. So you fix the error in the online version of the article, including an acknowledgement of the error; and you put another acknowledgement of the error in a prominent place, so that those who read it the first time are alerted. In the case of Times columnists, this means an embarrassing but necessary statement at the end of your next column.

I have confidence that Prof. Krugman, with grace and alacrity, will correct these gross misrepresentations about the economics of the ACA subsidies. The impression he is currently promoting is that the subsidy phase-outs only hit the well-off and that total health care costs for a subsidized family are well-contained. Wrong and wrong again.

FROM THE CHAT WITH BETTE: We learn this about her health insurance options:

But the “nearly $700 per month” increase in her premium that McMorris Rodgers cited in Tuesday night’s GOP response to the State of the Union address was based on the priciest option, a $1,200-a-month replacement plan that was pitched by Asuris Northwest to Grenier and her husband, Don.

The carrier also offered a less expensive, $1,052-per-month option in lieu of their soon-to-be-discontinued catastrophic coverage plan.

...

She said she contacted the congresswoman late last year to complain after getting a letter from Asuris Northwest advising that her $552-a-month policy no longer would be offered. She sent the congresswoman’s office a copy of the letter, which included the rate quotes for the suggested replacement policies.

Although the couple’s catastrophic plan had a $10,000 deductible, it included four doctor visits per year at no additional out-of-pocket cost, she said.

The replacement policies offer lower deductibles and broader coverage, she said, but they didn’t include the doctor visits at no extra charge.

No mention of kids, who might well be past the age of 26. As to the notion that her old plan was "catastrophic" with a $10,000 deductible, how would she characterize the Silver plan noted above with a maximum out-of-pocket of $10,400?

But down to cases! Per the Kaiser site, two adults with no subsidy in Washington are looking at a Silver plan costing $12,453 per year. The annual out-of-pocket cap (excluding the premium) is $12,700, so this does not strike me as a lot less catastrophic than their old plan (although we lack information about their old co-pay rate, but they do have the four "free" doctor visits.)

So the old plan was $552/mo; the new one is $1,038/mo. Quelle difference! That is $486/mo., and quite close to the "$1,052-per-month option" mentioned in the story. I have no doubt a Gold Plan costs more, but I doubt the deductibles are comparable.

Since Ms. Grenier did send her Congresslady a letter indicating the cost of her old plan as well as price offers for various replacement alternatives, I would say the heat, if any, is on Ms. McMorris-Rodgers. That said "nearly $500 per month" would have been as useful a sound-bite and essentially accurate.

And Prof. Krugman's objections included this:

We don’t know the particulars here, but many if not most stories of rate shock turn out to involve people who didn’t actually apply for a policy, and therefore never found out what it would really cost.

That seems to be answered. We eagerly await his corrections, clarifications and amplifications. I certainly hope that in the course of noting Ms. McMorris-Rodgers exaggerations he corrects his own over-enthusiams. (My breath is unheld).

 

Traditional SOTU Open Thread

Somebody probably ought to watch Obama rail about taxing the rich anbd spreading the wealth just to keep the rest of us up to speed. Speaking for myself, I am resolutely aware that those back episodes of "Justified" won't watch themselves...

I'm Not Having A Senior Moment, I Am Just Accessing My Vast Database

The Times explains that my memory is not fading as I age:

The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind

By BENEDICT CAREY

People of a certain age (and we know who we are) don’t spend much leisure time reviewing the research into cognitive performance and aging. The story is grim, for one thing: Memory’s speed and accuracy begin to slip around age 25 and keep on slipping.

The story is familiar, too, for anyone who is over 50 and, having finally learned to live fully in the moment, discovers it’s a senior moment. The finding that the brain slows with age is one of the strongest in all of psychology.

And yet...

Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases.

Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.

“What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,” the lead author, Michael Ramscar, said by email. But the simulations, he added, “fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn’t need to invoke decline at all.”

Too many needless scraps precious memories - sort of like the reason I can't find anything on my desk.

They Lost Me With 'Hello'

Glenn links to Stacy Mccain, who is fired up about this new Harvard/Berkekey study on income inequality and intergenerational economic mobility. I will revert to Mr. McCain momentarily but first let me deplore the lead sentence to the NBER working paper:

The United States is often hailed as the "land of opportunity," a society in which a child's chances of success depend little on her family background.

Says who? This is certainly a convenient definition for a team of economists who are embarking on a measurement of outcomes and hoping to pass it off as a measure of opportunity, but who really believes that parents have no influence on the success of their kids? Just by way of example, one might suspect that financial success is influenced by some combination of intelligence, good looks, height, good health, and high energy. All of these factors are subject to genetic inheritance, so one would not be surprised to see the child of successful parents having a bit of a head start. Other traits, such as self-discipline (aka impulse control) or a love of learning can be taught, but are more likely to be exemplified by parents who already possess those traits.

So, to pick an example almost at random, one might expect Sasha and Malia Obama to become successful women based on the genetic gifts and cultural values passed on by their parents. Who among us will attribute any of their future success merely to their parent's high income?

Gary Becker has lots on this; a snippet:

The relation between intergeneration mobility and meritocracy becomes still more complex after we recognize that earnings in a meritocracy would depend not only on cognitive abilities, such as IQ. For it depends also on investments in education and other human capital, on getting to work on time, on being able to take criticism, and on many other psychological characteristics. Families that are more educated and have high earnings tend to invest a lot in their children’s human capital, and in various non-cognitive traits. In a merit-based economy where earnings depend on the totality of abilities and skills, children of high earning parents would also tend to be high earners because their parents would pass on both cognitive skills and investments in various forms of human capital.

Even after including parental investments in education, non-cognitive traits, and other human capital of children, an economy where success and failure are determined by merit would still have low intergeneration mobility. To be sure, investments in education and many other types of human capital are not only determined by parents, but also by government policies and by philanthropists. To the extent that governments and philanthropists invest more in the human capital of children with less successful parents (as appears to be the case for governments in Scandinavian countries), a merit-based economy could have relatively high intergenerational mobility since children from poorer and less educated families might have high levels of human capital investments.

Nevertheless, a big jump is still required to make inferences from the intergeneration mobility in a country to the role of merit in determining success and failure in that country. In particular, although the United States has considerably lower intergeneration mobility than many Western European countries, this does not imply that merit is a less important determinant of success in the American economy than in these other economies.

And all of that said, I further dispute that "the American dream" was ever a claim that one parent's were irrelevant. This is James Truslow Adams, no relation to the Oresidential family:

Adams coined the term "American Dream" in his 1931 book The Epic of America. His American Dream is "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

By way of contrast with a Europe of landed nobles and hereditary guildsmen, America was notably lacking in barriers to self-improvement and advancement.

Now to pick up on Stacy McCain's point - he is deeply dubious of a study that tells us that West Virginia is more of a land of opportunity than, say, Silicon Valley or New York City. Good point!

By way of illustration, here are San Jose, NYC and a few beacons of opportunity from West Virginia:

San Jose

California

12.9%

New York

New York

10.5%

Spencer

West Virginia

14.7%

Buckhannon

West Virginia

12.6%

Welch

West Virginia

16.0%

These results reflect the probability that a child who was "raised" in the locale above in the lowest economic quintile (really, living there at about age 15 regardless of prior or subsequent movement) will eventually rise to the top quintile *of their age cohort* by about age 30. Parts of West Virginia have it all over the Big Apple or the biggest city in Silicvon Valley, which activates Mr. McCain's BS detector:

Stipulating that the data in the study is complete and accurate, and that everything in the analysis is legit — well, why is there a bright spot on the resulting map in the vicinity of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but no corresponding bright spot near Athens, Georgia? Why does rural Arkansas look like a beacon of upward mobility, while the bustling economies of Atlanta and Charlotte produce no such effect?

Most of all, why does the map referenced by O’Brien show that impoverished Appalachia offers more opportunity for advancement than any of the more prosperous surrounding flatlands?

To use a social science term: Your data is obviously fucked up.

Well, that's as maybe. Eric Mertz commented over there with a follow-up on his blog, noting that the decision to fix children to one locale based on where they were at approximately age 15 is fraught with implications.

I will say this: the authors attempt to check the validity of that assumption and conclude that all is well. I am a non-buyer and suspect that a deeper dive into the data would unearth trouble in paradise. But first, their comments in anticipation of this objection:

We permanently assign each child to a single CZ based on the ZIP code from which his or her parent led their tax return in the first year the child was claimed as a dependent. We interpret this CZ as the area where a child grew up. Because our data begin in 1996, location is measured in 1996 for 95.9% of children in our core sample. For children in our core sample of 1980-82 birth cohorts, we therefore typically measure location when children were approximately 15 years old.

For the children in the more recent birth cohorts in our extended sample, location is measured at earlier ages. Using these more recent cohorts, we nd that 83.5% of children live in the same CZ at age 16 as they did at age 5. Furthermore, we verify that the spatial patterns for the outcomes we can measure at earlier ages (college attendance and teenage birth) are quite similar if we define CZs based on location at age 5 instead of age 16.

So that is reassuring. This, however, is far less so:

Importantly, the CZ where a child grew up does not necessarily correspond to the CZ she lives in as an adult when we measure her income (at age 30) in 2011-12. In our core sample, 38% of children live in a different CZ in 2012 relative to where they grew up.

That is a lot of movement, so they offer a bit of a breakdown:

44.6% of children who grow up in rural areas live in urban areas at age 30. Among those who rose from the bottom quintile of the national income distribution to the top quintile, the corresponding statistic is 55.2%.

So the poor move even more than the average. This final test reassures them but not me:

In row 8 [of Table V, p. 68], we assess the extent to which the variation in intergenerational mobility comes from children who succeed and move out of the CZ as adults vs. children who stay within the CZ. To do so, we restrict the sample to the 62% of children who live in the same CZ in 2012 as where they grew up. Despite the fact that this sample is endogenously selected on an ex-post outcome, the mobility estimates remain very highly correlated with those in the full sample. Apparently, areas such as Salt Lake City that generate high levels of upward income mobility do so not just by sending successful children to other CZs as adults but also by helping children move up in the income distribution within the area.

"Apparently"?!? As best I can follow, they looked at the aggregated data for Commuting Zones ("CZ") both large and small and and concluded that dropping the kids who eventually moved didn't change the results much. But that means that CZs with a large population, such as New York, will drive the population-weighted result and swamp whatever story the data might be trying to tell about Spencer, West Virginia.

So when they write that "apparently" Salt Lake City is seeing a combination of kids succeeding in the area and kids succeeding after moving away, my not-so-unreasonable question is, what did the data actually show for Salt Lake City specifically, as opposed to the aggregate? In the data tables all I can find is that without weighting for population the result for "8. Children who stay within CZ" has a correlation of 0.87 with the baseline estimate. However, when they re-weight by estimated population, the correlation rises to 0.95. That makes me think that rural areas are showing a much weaker correlation than urban areas. That overlaps with their comment that rural areas show a lot more movement, but the overall impoact is not to reassure.

And I am not at all sure what to make of this. Are we to conclude that Welch, WV is a great place to be born because it is easier to leave and prosper elsewhere? Or that being poor in Atlanta is dreadful but not so dreadful that people actually leave? Baffling.

GO AHEAD - MAKE MY DAY. Ask about Denmark.

Friday Afternoon

We're slacking again.

IRS Targeting Another Right Wing Group?

The NY Times shocks us by front-paging this:

Leaning Right in Hollywood, Under a Lens

By MICHAEL CIEPLY and NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

LOS ANGELES — In a famously left-leaning Hollywood, where Democratic fund-raisers fill the social calendar, Friends of Abe stands out as a conservative group that bucks the prevailing political winds.

A collection of perhaps 1,500 right-leaning players in the entertainment industry, Friends of Abe keeps a low profile and fiercely protects its membership list, to avoid what it presumes would result in a sort of 21st-century blacklist, albeit on the other side of the partisan spectrum.

Now the Internal Revenue Service is reviewing the group’s activities in connection with its application for tax-exempt status. Last week, federal tax authorities presented the group with a 10-point request for detailed information about its meetings with politicians like Paul D. Ryan, Thaddeus McCotter and Herman Cain, among other matters, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the organization’s confidentiality strictures, and to avoid complicating discussions with the I.R.S.

Since you ask, the "Abe" is Abe Lincoln.

Those people said that the application had been under review for roughly two years, and had at one point included a demand — which was not met — for enhanced access to the group’s security-protected website, which would have revealed member names. Tax experts said that an organization’s membership list is information that would not typically be required. The I.R.S. already had access to the site’s basic levels, a request it considers routine for applications for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status.

Friends of Abe — the name refers to Abraham Lincoln — has strongly discouraged the naming of its members. That policy even prohibits the use of cameras at group events, to avoid the unwilling identification of all but a few associates — the actors Gary Sinise, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer, or the writer-producer Lionel Chetwynd, for instance — who have spoken openly about their conservative political views.

What is going on? This is like reporting, yet it paints team Obama in an unfavorable light. Disorienting! We even learn that left-leaning groups seem to get tax-exempt status somewhat painlessly:

People for the American Way, Mr. Lear’s group, stands as something of a liberal counterpart to Friends of Abe, though the organization is far larger, with an affiliate that spends millions of dollars a year on issue advocacy in Washington and beyond. But the entertainment industry has been crisscrossed by progressive groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, which maintains a tax-exempt educational adjunct under the 501(c)(3) provision, and includes the producer Laurie David and the actor Leonardo DiCaprio among its trustees. Another, the American Foundation for Equal Rights [founded in 2009], is a nonprofit that supports marriage rights for gay people and counts the producer Bruce Cohen and the writer Dustin Lance Black among its founders.

Who could have guessed? FWIW, the American Foundation for Equal Rights is structured to have bi-partisan appeal. From Wikipedia:

Leadership

AFER is governed by a seven-member board of directors. The board president is Academy Award-winning producer Bruce Cohen, and the treasurer is Michele Reiner. Other board members include Academy Award-winner Dustin Lance Black; Human Rights Campaign (HRC) president Chad Griffin (who served as AFER's board president prior to his position at HRC); philanthropist Jonathan D. Lewis; former Republican National Committee chairman Kenneth B. Mehlman; and actor and director Rob Reiner.^[4] Co-founder Kristina Schake was a board member until December 2010, when she joined the White House staff as Special Assistant to the President and Communications Director to First Lady Michelle Obama.

AFER's staff is headed by Executive Director Adam Umhoefer.

AFER’s advisory board is co-chaired by Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, and John Podesta, Chair and Counselor of the Center for American Progress. Advisory board members include Julian Bond, Lt. Dan Choi, Margaret Hoover, Dolores Huerta, Cleve Jones, David Mixner, Stuart Milk, Hilary Rosen, and Judy Shepard.^[5]

US Economic Mobility Not Declining?

Some progressive-approved economists upset the narrative; in a further surprise, the NY Times provides coverage:

Upward Mobility Has Not Declined, Study Says

By DAVID LEONHARDT

The odds of moving up — or down — the income ladder in the United States have not changed appreciably in the last 20 years, according to a large new academic study that contradicts politicians in both parties who have claimed that income mobility is falling.

Both President Obama and leading Republicans, like Representative Paul Ryan, have argued recently that the odds of climbing the income ladder are lower today than in previous decades. The new study, based on tens of millions of anonymous tax records, finds that the mobility rate has held largely steady in recent decades, although it remains lower than in Canada and in much of Western Europe, where the odds of escaping poverty are higher.

But the crisis continues!

“The level of opportunity is alarming, even though it’s stable over time,” said Emmanuel Saez, another author and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Saez and Mr. Chetty are both recent winners of an award for the top academic economist under the age of 40.

Mr. Saez is half of the Pikkety-Saez duo that has run out the income-tax based income inequality data, the limitations of which are noted by Greg Mankiw here and (in a fascinating paper) here.

Some results:

The study found, for instance, that about 8 percent of children born in the early 1980s who grew up in families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution managed to reach the top fifth for their age group today. The rate was nearly identical for children born a decade earlier.

Among children born into the middle fifth of the income distribution, about 20 percent climbed into the top fifth as adults, also largely unchanged over the last decade.

To compare their results to those for earlier decades, the authors noted that a previous study of children born from 1952 to 1975 — by Chul-In Lee and Gary Solon — found broadly similar and steady levels of mobility. Taken together, the studies suggest that rates of intergenerational mobility appeared to have held roughly steady over the last half-century, Mr. Chetty said.

...

The new study is based on a much larger data set than previous work. The earlier papers had to rely on surveys, while the latest paper examines the tax records, stripped of identifying details, of nearly every American born in a given year.

The article delivers the inevitable comparison to Europe:

Today, the odds of escaping poverty appear to be only about half as high in the United States as in the most mobile countries like Denmark, Mr. Saez said.

Since the results are stable my rebuttal from eleven long years ago is probably stable - Denmark has a much flatter distribution of wealth and income, so skipping amongst the quintiles may be merely a matter of gaining or losing a few thousand dollars of income.

 

US Economic Mobility Not Declining?

Some progressive-approved economists upset the narrative; in a further surprise, the NY Times provides coverage:

Upward Mobility Has Not Declined, Study Says

By DAVID LEONHARDT

The odds of moving up — or down — the income ladder in the United States have not changed appreciably in the last 20 years, according to a large new academic study that contradicts politicians in both parties who have claimed that income mobility is falling.

Both President Obama and leading Republicans, like Representative Paul Ryan, have argued recently that the odds of climbing the income ladder are lower today than in previous decades. The new study, based on tens of millions of anonymous tax records, finds that the mobility rate has held largely steady in recent decades, although it remains lower than in Canada and in much of Western Europe, where the odds of escaping poverty are higher.

But the crisis continues!

“The level of opportunity is alarming, even though it’s stable over time,” said Emmanuel Saez, another author and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Saez and Mr. Chetty are both recent winners of an award for the top academic economist under the age of 40.

Mr. Saez is half of the Pikkety-Saez duo that has run out the income-tax based income inequality data, the limitations of which are noted by Greg Mankiw here and (in a fascinating paper) here.

Some results:

The study found, for instance, that about 8 percent of children born in the early 1980s who grew up in families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution managed to reach the top fifth for their age group today. The rate was nearly identical for children born a decade earlier.

Among children born into the middle fifth of the income distribution, about 20 percent climbed into the top fifth as adults, also largely unchanged over the last decade.

To compare their results to those for earlier decades, the authors noted that a previous study of children born from 1952 to 1975 — by Chul-In Lee and Gary Solon — found broadly similar and steady levels of mobility. Taken together, the studies suggest that rates of intergenerational mobility appeared to have held roughly steady over the last half-century, Mr. Chetty said.

...

The new study is based on a much larger data set than previous work. The earlier papers had to rely on surveys, while the latest paper examines the tax records, stripped of identifying details, of nearly every American born in a given year.

The article delivers the inevitable comparison to Europe:

Today, the odds of escaping poverty appear to be only about half as high in the United States as in the most mobile countries like Denmark, Mr. Saez said.

Since the results are stable my rebuttal from eleven long years ago is probably stable - Denmark has a much flatter distribution of wealth and income, so skipping amongst the quintiles may be merely a matter of gaining or losing a few thousand dollars of income.

 

The Ten Thousand

How many, if any, US troops will remain behind in Afghanistan?

U.S. Military Eyes Afghan Force of 10,000, or a Pullout

By JACKIE CALMES and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has proposed to President Obama that 10,000 American troops remain in Afghanistan when the international combat mission there ends after this year, or none at all, senior government officials said Tuesday.

That figure, debated in recent days within the White House, is the midpoint of a range of 8,000 to 12,000 troops — most of them Americans — that has been contemplated for months as the United States and its NATO allies planned for the long mission’s end. Anything less than that, the officials said, would be too few to be able to protect the reduced retinue of diplomats, military and intelligence officials that remain in Afghanistan.

“The proposal is 10,000 or basically nothing, a pullout,” said one official, who has been briefed on the plan but spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal administration deliberations.

Both the intelligence agencies and the State Department, who would have personnel remaining in Afghanistan after 2014, back the Defense Department’s proposal, the officials said. But it has met resistance among some officials in the White House National Security Council, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who question why the choice has to be 10,000 troops or zero, and nothing in between.

About 37,500 American troops are currently in Afghanistan, about twice as many as the number of international forces also there.

Genius Joe Biden, wrong about everything.

 

Walk A Mile In Their, Uhh, Wheelchair...

Wendy Davis is a feminist hero for revising her personal story to minimize the "Find a sugar-daddy to put you through law school" angle. But after admitting that this Harvard-trained and very successful lawyer needs to learn about "focused" language, she pivots to the attack against her probable Republican opponent:

“We’re not surprised by Greg Abbott’s campaign attacks on the personal story of my life as a single mother who worked hard to get ahead...

I am proud of where I came from and I am proud of what I’ve been able to achieve through hard work and perseverance. And I guarantee you that anyone who tries to say otherwise hasn’t walked a day in my shoes.”

She is certainly right that Greg Abbott has not walked in her shoes, since Mr. Abbot has been in a wheelchair since a freak accident rendered him parapalegic 29 years ago. This is hardly a secret down in Texas, so one wonders what, if anything, prompted the use of that particular metaphor.

Ms. Davis would do well to remember some sage and timeless advice - don't criticize someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes. That way, you'll be a mile away from them if and when you decide to criticize them. And you'll have their shoes.

DUELING OBSTACLES: Mr. Abbott's father died when Mr. Abbott was sixteen, so his life has hardly lacked for character-building hardship. Is "my life sucked even harder than yours" ploy going to be a winning tactic for Team Davis?

The Point Is The Process

The peace process has begun with Syria! The NY Times restrains their exuberance in advance of the peace conference in Geneva:

“For any political conference to succeed in trying to defuse, much less settle, an intense conflict, the ground has to be laid,” said Dennis B. Ross, a former Middle East envoy. “An agenda needs to be agreed, the parties have to want some minimal achievement, the convening co-sponsors have to share some basic goals, and there has to be sufficient leverage on those doing the fighting to permit some compromises to be made. Most of these conditions are lacking.”

Added a Western diplomat involved in preparations for the talks: “We don’t have a Plan B.”

However, Plan C is for the delegates to spend a lot of time in local comedy clubs. John Kerry has contributed to the levity:

Unlike the Middle East talks, in which Mr. Kerry set a nine-month goal for completing a peace treaty, there is no target date for completing the Syria peace talks or establishing a transitional administration that could take over if Mr. Assad agreed to relinquish power. In a closed-door meeting with the Syrian opposition last year, Mr. Kerry noted that Vietnam peace negotiations had gone on for years.

Those would be the Paris Peace Talks that eventually led to a deal which the North Vietnamese ignored and the US abandoned. Quite the reassuring precedent, Johnny.

So What Would "Reeking" Smell Like?

The Times "covers" Michelle's star-studded birthday bash. Ms. Stolberg's set-up:

WASHINGTON — President Obama has pledged to use the remainder of his presidency to address income inequality, which he calls “the defining challenge of our time.” This holiday weekend, Mr. Obama had an intimate look at how vast wealth disparities in America have become.

On Monday, Mr. Obama and his family marked the birthday of the civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a visit to the D.C. Central Kitchen, where he, Michelle Obama and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, donned aprons and prepared burritos for distribution to local homeless shelters.

On Saturday, the Obamas marked another birthday — Mrs. Obama’s 50th — with a party at the White House, with music by Beyoncé. Guests included entertainment industry A-listers like Stevie Wonder (who also sang), Paul McCartney and Samuel L. Jackson. Those who brought cellphones were asked to check them at the door, presumably to prevent photographs on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

And her punchline:

The two events — one a very public effort to promote community service, the other a private affair that carried a whiff of celebrity and secrecy — spotlight the often contradictory worlds that modern presidents inhabit.

A "whiff" of celebrity and secrecy? Ms. Stolberg does cite Byron York, who spent a bit more time marshalling a partial guest list:

According to reports in People, the Chicago Tribune, TMZ, US Magazine, and elsewhere, among of the attendees were, in no particular order: Beyonce, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, Janelle Monae, Mary J. Blige, Angela Bassett, Courtney Vance, Herbie Hancock, Samuel L. Jackson, Grant Hill, Alonzo Mourning, Ledisi, Emmett Smith, Star Jones, Al Roker, Steve Harvey, Magic Johnson, Billie Jean King, Michael Jordan, Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, Gayle King, Ahmad Rashad, Kal Penn, and Ashley Judd. Among the current and former government officials attending were Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Susan Rice, Eric Holder, and Kathleen Sebelius.

And to be fair, after warning her readers that she is about to quote a "conservative pundit", Ms. Stolberg delivers the obvious by way of Mr. York:

“Why the secrecy?” wrote Byron York, the conservative pundit, in an opinion article in The Washington Examiner. Perhaps, Mr. York mused, given Mr. Obama’s income inequality agenda, “the White House felt photos of a champagne-soaked, star-studded party would be somewhat off-message.”

No kidding.

Nominally Past The Statute Of Limitations...

Paul Krugman exerts his selective outrage and blasts Bret Stephens for using nominal incomes when he should have used real incomes. Good point! He also blasts the WSJ attempt at a correction:

[Mr. Stephens] points to an online post he put out admitting, with a minimum of grace, that using nominal incomes was wrong.

Sorry, but that’s not what I — or, if I may speak for my employer, The New York Times — calls a correction.

What, after all, is the purpose of a correction? If you’ve misinformed your readers, the first order of business is to stop misinforming them; the second, so far as possible, to let those who already got the misinformation know that they were misinformed. So you fix the error in the online version of the article, including an acknowledgement of the error; and you put another acknowledgement of the error in a prominent place, so that those who read it the first time are alerted. In the case of Times columnists, this means an embarrassing but necessary statement at the end of your next column.

I think Krugman is right twice here. However, although it seems like only yesterday, it was more than ten years ago that I waited in vain for a correction or clarification from Paul Krugman after this particular Bush-basher which hit Bush yet again for weak job growth (go ahead, savor the irony):

To put it more bluntly: it would be quite a trick to run the biggest budget deficit in the history of the planet, and still end a presidential term with fewer jobs than when you started. And despite yesterday's good news, that's a trick President Bush still seems likely to pull off.

As I said at the time, that statement is only literally correct; the Bush deficits as a percentage of GDP were exceeded by many Japanese and some Reagan deficits. So should a top-notch, front-line economist be tossing around nominal deficits like that, or should he be scaling them relative to GDP?

Tough call! No it's not. Ten years later we still don't see a correction. But we exhaled a long time ago.

SINCE YOU ASK: Per this table, total non-farm employment in January 2001 was 132,469,000; four years later (Jan 2005) that had surged to, well, 132,476,000, eclipsing the inital hurdle by a full 7,000 jobs. Another failed prediction from Krugman.

 

Searching 'Google Search' For Insight

A Times guest contributer turns to Google Search data for insight into American parenting:

Google, Tell Me. Is My Son a Genius?

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

MORE than a decade into the 21st century, we would like to think that American parents have similar standards and similar dreams for their sons and daughters. But my study of anonymous, aggregate data from Google searches suggests that contemporary American parents are far more likely to want their boys smart and their girls skinny.

Maybe. On to the data!

Start with intelligence. It’s hardly surprising that parents of young children are often excited at the thought that their child may be gifted. In fact, of all Google searches starting “Is my 2-year-old,” the most common next word is “gifted.” But this question is not asked equally about young boys and young girls. Parents are two and a half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?” Parents show a similar bias when using other phrases related to intelligence that they may shy away from saying aloud, like, “Is my son a genius?”

First, a methodological quibble. WITH the hyphens, I can confirm his assertion about "two-year-old" and "gifted". Eliminate the hyphens, however, and the top suggestions are "autistic", "smart", "advanced", and "color-blind".

And as to what people are thinking as they type these questions, I don't know; the top suggested completion for "Does the sun rise" is "in the west", which I hope is not what most people believe.

As to children and intelligence, do keep in mind that boys show a higher variance in measured intelligence:

In fact, males and females appear equally intelligent, on average. But on standardized intelligence tests, more males than females get off-the-chart test scores—in both directions. The greater variance of males on intelligence tests is one of the best-established findings in psychometric literature. More males are mentally deficient, and more are freakishly brilliant. The difference in variation isn't huge, but it is large enough and consistent enough that a fair selection process should produce more boys than girls in a gifted and talented program.

So, a daughter who can sit still, pay attention in class and get good grades is less of a novelty than a similarly-capable boy. Consequently, perhaps such a daughter provokes fewer Google searches. However, the author manages a "Fox Butterfield, is that you" moment:

Are parents picking up on legitimate differences between young girls and boys? Perhaps young boys are more likely than young girls to use big words or otherwise show objective signs of giftedness? Nope. If anything, it’s the opposite. At young ages, when parents most often search about possible giftedness, girls have consistently been shown to have larger vocabularies and use more complex sentences. In American schools, girls are 11 percent more likely than boys to be in gifted programs. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls.

And what about the other end of the scale?

Parents were more likely to ask about sons rather than daughters on every matter that I tested related to intelligence, including its absence. There are more searches for “is my son behind” or “stupid” than comparable searches for daughters. Searches with negative words like “stupid” and “behind,” however, are less skewed toward sons than searches with positive words.

Fine.

The author switches to appearance. I have no doubt that society, and hence parents, put greater emphasis on a woman's appearance, but I will quibble anyway.

What concerns do parents disproportionately have for their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance. Consider questions about a child’s weight. Parents Google “Is my daughter overweight?” roughly twice as frequently as they Google “Is my son overweight?” Just as with giftedness, this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 30 percent of girls are overweight, while 33 percent of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see — or worry about — overweight girls much more often than overweight boys.

Hmm. I recall overhearing one high school lad telling another "I'm not overweight, I'm a lineman!". I have my doubts about high school football, but I also have my doubts about BMI measurements for athletes, especially male athletes. In any case, whatever the actual ratio of truly overweight boys to girls, I think the author's qualification is important (my emphasis):

...[P]arents see — or worry about — overweight girls much more often than overweight boys.

 

 

The Future Of Gun Control In One Headline

The future is now:

World's first 3D printed metal gun blows through 50 rounds

Oh, my.

A 3D printing services company has built a fully functioning, semi-automatic pistol and shown that it works just as a traditionally manufactured gun.

Built by Solid Concepts, the pistol is a replica of the storied .45-caliber, M1911 semi-automatic that served as the U.S. military’s standard-issue sidearm for more than 70 years. Solid Concept demonstrated the gun by firing 50 rounds with it.

They were using a very high-tech printer to demonstrate the power of this production technique:

Solid Concept’s pistol was made with industrial-grade 3D printers using the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and Direct Metal Laser Sintering techniques (DMLS). Both DMLS and SLS use lasers to melt metals, even titanium, at temperatures exceeding 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The 3D printers work by laying down a fine layer of powder and then using a laser to fuse granules together, building an object layer by layer from the ground up.

“The industrial printer we used costs more than my college tuition (and I went to a private university),” Kent Firestone, Solid Concepts’ Vice President of additive manufacturing, said in a statement. “The engineers who run our machines are top of the line; they are experts who know what they’re doing and understand 3D Printing better than anyone in this business. Thanks to them, Solid Concepts is debunking the idea that 3D Printing isn’t a viable solution or isn’t ready for mainstream manufacturing.”

3D printers that use metal sintering techniques function differently from desktop 3D printers that use stereolithography, which melts plastic filaments and pushes them through a small extruder to build objects layer by layer.

Solid Concept’s gun is composed of more than 30 3D-printed components. The slide, frame and many of the internal components are made of stainless Steel. The main spring, the hammer and part of the upper grip’s handle was made with nickel-chromium-based alloy called Inconel 625.

...

“Laser sintering is one of the most accurate manufacturing processes available, and more than accurate enough to build the 3D Metal Printed interchangeable and interfacing parts within our 1911 series gun,” Solid Concepts said. “The gun proves laser sintering can meet tight tolerances.”

According to the company, 3D metal printing means fewer porosity issues than are seen with the traditional method of casting metal parts.

They are open for your spare parts orders:

“We’re proving this is possible, the technology is at a place now where we can manufacture a gun with 3D printing,” Firestone said. “As far as we know, we’re the only 3D-printing service provider with a Federal Firearms License (FFL). Now, if a qualifying customer needs a unique gun part in five days, we can deliver.”

At this point common street thugs won't be buying a printer capable of this, and I suspect conventional weapons are still cheaper and widely available to well-financed criminal enterprises. But over time, the notion of regulating guns by tracing their serial numbers from the manufacturer will become less relevant if production can be done anywhere.

Traditional Friday Afternoon Open Thread

The thrill of the open road awaits!

Good News If They're Drinking To Forget...

From the AP:

Drinking linked to faster mental decline in men

NEW YORK (AP) — Middle-aged men risk a faster mental decline as they age if they've been drinking heavily for years, new research suggests.

The study of about 5,000 British civil servants found that over a decade, the added decline was the equivalent of about two extra years of aging for a combined measure of mental abilities like reasoning, and about six years for memory. The heavy drinkers' abilities were compared to those of men who drank moderately or abstained.

But did they control for this?

Coffee as a Memory Booster

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

In addition to its other well-known effects, a cup of coffee might improve your memory...

 

The Evolution Of A Drone Assassin And Super-Surveiller

The NY Times traces the evolution of Obama on his "Path From Critic to Overseer of Spying".

Was he a poser, an opportunist or a liar for his Bush-bashing in 2007 and 2008? Nooo, he was (and is!) simply a man who cares passionately about protecting the American people:

WASHINGTON — As a young lawmaker defining himself as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama visited a center for scholars in August 2007 to give a speech on terrorism. He described a surveillance state run amok and vowed to rein it in. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens,” he declared. “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.”

More than six years later, the onetime constitutional lawyer is now the commander in chief presiding over a surveillance state that some of his own advisers think has once again gotten out of control.

...

Like other presidents before him, the idealistic candidate skeptical of government power found that the tricky trade-offs of national security issues look different to the person charged with using that power to ensure public safety.

Reality attacks!

Aides said that even as a senator, Mr. Obama supported robust surveillance as long as it was legal and appropriate, and that as president he still shares the concerns about overreach he expressed years ago. But they said his views have been shaped to a striking degree by the reality of waking up every day in the White House responsible for heading off the myriad threats he finds in his daily intelligence briefings.

“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser. “There are people out there every day who are plotting. The notion that we would put down a tool that would protect people here in America is hard to fathom.”

"Hard to fathom". Yet to earnest progressives, no doubt including Barack and Michelle, Dick Cheney is, well, Dick Cheney. Glenn Greenwald described progressive angst over Obama's transformation three years ago:

The American Right constantly said during the Bush years that any President who knew what Bush knew and was faced with the duty of keeping the country safe would do the same thing.  Obama has provided the best possible evidence imaginable to prove those claims true.

And now Obama's aides are saying what we all knew.

The Times reporter askes us to endure a lot of rationalizations. One of my favorites is this "Trust me; After all, I trust myself" defense:

Mr. Obama undertook no major overhaul of the surveillance programs he inherited. “He’s sitting on the other end of the pen now,” said the former Obama aide. “He has more information than he did then. And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration.”

Critics were told to go whistle:

When civil liberties advocates visited to press him to do more to reverse Mr. Bush’s policies, Mr. Obama pushed back. “He reminded me that he had a different role to play, that he was commander in chief and that he needed to protect the American people,” recalled Mr. Romero of the A.C.L.U.

Right, an argument Bush never thought of.

We are offered reassurance as to the wisdom of the American people:

He was surprised at the uproar that ensued [over the Snowden papers], advisers said, particularly that so many Americans did not trust him, much less trust the oversight provided by the intelligence court and Congress. As more secrets spilled out, though, aides said even Mr. Obama was chagrined. They said he was exercised to learn that the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was being tapped.

In other words, we didn't trust Obama to provide adequate oversight, and we learned (as did he, apparently) that he wasn't. Was it his weaponization of the IRS? The appointment of an Obama donor to lead the FBI "investigation"? Or did We The People sense that Barry was probably distracted from the NSA and fully absorbed by the implementation of HealthCare.Fail?  Ooops.

Let me close with a priceless bit of psychoanalysis from the First Shrink:

Mr. Obama largely left [the security agencies] alone until Mr. Snowden began disclosing secret programs last year. Mr. Obama was angry at the revelations, privately excoriating Mr. Snowden as a self-important narcissist who had not thought through the consequences of his actions.

We'll file that under "Takes One To Know One".

Heroic Idiocy

Bill Keller of the Times demonstrates that being a fool is a full-time job. Let's start with the WaPo:

Former NYT editor Bill Keller and his wife under fire for commentary on cancer patient

Lesson No. 1: Publicly questioning the motives and intentions of a woman who is seriously ill with cancer can land you in a heap of controversy.

Writer Emma Gilbey Keller and her husband, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, seem to have found this out over the past few days. In a successive pair of columns in different publications, the Kellers opined about the prodigious tweets of a woman named Lisa Bonchek Adams, a Stage IV breast cancer patient in New York — and both reaped a whirlwind of outrage in the process.

Ms. Adam is a 44 year old mother of three who has been grappling with cancer for seven years. For some reason this prompted Mr. Keller to contrast her situation with that of his eighty-year old father-in-law, who was told he had inoperable cancer and died six days later. One of his little life lessons:

It seemed to me, and still does, that there is something enviable about going gently.

Please. Maybe mom should have walked out in the traffic seven years ago.

Ms. Keller worried (in a column subsequently taken down because she quoted Ms. Adams without her permission) that although some seem to find inspiration this is all so voyeuristic. Me, I still have reservations about The Diary of Anne Frank. No I don't.

Well. Beat-downs are available in the Times comment section, by the Times Public Editor, and at Technology and Society. But in order to make sure that no dead horse is left behind, unbeaten, let me highlight this absurdity from Mr. Keller's target-rich piece:

Her relationship with the hospital provides her with intensive, premium medical care, including not just constant maintenance and aggressive treatment but such Sloan-Kettering amenities as the Caring Canines program, in which patients get a playful cuddle with visiting dogs. (Neither Adams nor Sloan-Kettering would tell me what all this costs or whether it is covered by insurance.)

I don't know what "all this" costs either, but the Caring Canines program is a charitable endeavor run in cooperation with Angels on a Leash and the Westminister Kennel Club so I'll guess "not much" for the direct costs of that part of the support program.

And while on the subject of our mutual ignorance, I don't know what it would cost to get Mr. Keller a fact-checker or a subscription to Bing. And later he might want to spring for a trip to the Wizard for a heart and a brain...

 

 

Over To A-Rod

Lots of documentation is now available in the A-Rod steroid suspension case. Here is Team A-Rod's request for a federal injunction; their filing includes (Exhibit A, p. 44 and following) the arbitrator's decision which heretofore had been confidential.

If you are confident that baseball's new drug testing program has this situation under control, the following excerpt from the arbitrator's decision rationalizing A-Rod's passing of eleven drug trests while cheating may give you pause:

The claim by Rodriguez that science exonerates him in this case is not supported by any evidence in this record. It is recognized Rodriguez passed eleven drug tests administered by MLB from 2010 through 2012. The assertion that Rodriguez would have failed those tests had he consumed those PES as alleged is not persuasive.

As advanced as MLB's program has become, no drug testing program will catch every Player. In this case, the blood testing required to detect or had not yet been implemented in the JDA and therefore was not administered during the 2010, 2011, and 2012 seasons. With respect to testosterone, the record establishes that during the period in question it was possible for an individual to pass a drug test despite having recently used the substance, depending on variables such as the route of administration transdermal, sublingual, or intramuscular), dosage, concentration, the baseline value of the individual's natural testosterone to epitestosterone ratio and how soon after use the individual's urine sample is collected."

Bosch testified that he consid- ered several of these variables when developing Rodriguez's protocols, and the BBM commu- nications between Bosch and Rodriguez show multiple exchanges where Bosch instructed Rodriguez to use testosterone at such times, and in such forms and doses, as would prevent Rodriguez from testing positive. For these reasons, the absence of a positive test during the three years in question, in and of itself, does not and cannot overcome the unrebutted direct evidence in this record of possession and use.

So people who don't quite trust, oh, David Ortiz, probably won't be reassured by the news that he has not failed a drug test.

It's The Best That Could Happen...

Ari Fleischer talks up marriage as the panacea to push back against income inequality:

How to Fight Income Inequality: Get Married

In families headed by married couples, the poverty level in 2012 was just 7.5%. Those with a single mother: 33.9%.

By Ari Fleischer Jan. 12, 2014 6:07 p.m. ET

If President Obama wants to reduce income inequality, he should focus less on redistributing income and more on fighting a major cause of modern poverty: the breakdown of the family. A man mostly raised by a single mother and his grandparents who defied the odds to become president of the United States is just the person to take up the cause.

"Marriage inequality" should be at the center of any discussion of why some Americans prosper and others don't. According to Census Bureau information analyzed by the Beverly LaHaye Institute, among families headed by two married parents in 2012, just 7.5% lived in poverty. By contrast, when families are headed by a single mother the poverty level jumps to 33.9%.

And the number of children raised in female-headed families is growing throughout America. A 2012 study by the Heritage Foundation found that 28.6% of children born to a white mother were out of wedlock. For Hispanics, the figure was 52.5% and for African-Americans 72.3%. In 1964, when the war on poverty began, almost everyone was born in a family with two married parents: only 7% were not.

 To which I say "Yes, but" and "Furthermore".

First, these statistics don't separate correlation and causation. Maybe men and women inclined to get married are also more competent at other indicators of planning ability and impulse control, and hence more capable of achieving a higher educational and vocational status.

Furthermore, Obama, or at least ObamaCare, is at war with working class marriage. Given the structure of available subsidies relative to marital status, a middle-income couple with a stay-at-home spouse really owes it to their children to get a divorce.

And the Obamacare subsidies impose a noticiable marriage penalty on two-income couples as well. For example, imagine two 30 year old non-smoking spouses both earning $30,000 per year, with two kids. Per this Kaiser Permanente subsidy estimator and using national averages, this family of four is eligible for annual health insurance subsidies of $4,061.

But now suppose they run the numbers, get a divorce and each takes custody of one child. An adult with one child earning $30,000 per year is eligible for subsidies of $2,688 per year; multiply that by two and our divorced "family" is collecting $5,376 in subsidies, an increase of $1,315 per year. That may not be enough to prompt a divorce but it certainly might prompt a couple thinking about tying the knot to live together in unwedded but more heavily subsidized bliss.

In short, Obama is paying low and middle-income people more if they avoid marriage. Is this really sound social policy? I would guess not. But it is politics as usual for the party that thinks a woman's most meaningful long term relationship is with the state.

Saturday Morning

Away we go.

Unhappy Is The Land That Breeds No Hero

No, unhappy is the land that needs a hero like 15 year old Aitaz Hasan:

Pakistan's hero: school boy who stopped suicide bomber

A Pakistani boy, who died trying to defend his school in the troubled north-west from a suicide bomber, has been praised as a national hero with his name being recommended for a top civilian honour for saving the lives of many of his classmates.

Aitzaz Hassan, 15, tackled a suicide bomber as he stood outside as a punishment for being late to school in Hangu, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, on Monday.

Aitzaz grabbed the bomber but he could not stop him from detonating the bomb and died of his wounds in hospital later. No one else was wounded or killed in the incident.

According to AFP, Nasir Khan Durrani, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief of police, has written to the provincial chief minister recommending Hassan for the posthumous award.

"The suicide bomber tried to enter the school where hundreds of students were studying. Aitzaz Hassan sacrificed his life and stopped the bomber with bravery and courage," the police statement issued late on Thursday said.

And from the BBC:

Despite the pleas of his fellow students, he decided to confront and capture the bomber who was approaching the school, his cousin told the BBC's Aleem Maqbool.

"He told them 'I'm going to stop him. He is going to school to kill my friends'. He wanted to capture this suicide bomber. He wanted to stop [him]. Meanwhile the suicide bomber blasted himself which resulted in the death of my cousin," Mudassar Hassan Bangish said.

 

Rachel Maddow Versus The Facts

Erik Wemple, WaPo media-watcher, has trouble with Rachel Maddow's linkage of the Koch brothers to every progressive evil under the sun. Yes, the PowerGuys were on this a couple of days ago, but it is nice to see these psychotic breaks get lamestream notice.

My two cents: when Ms. Maddow was asked to read an on-air retraction and apology she set progressive hearts aflutter with her defiant "I do not play requests". What she should have said is, "I do not appear on reality television".

Lots more from the Ace.

Chris Christie Takes Center Stage

Ron Fournier recaps the GWB lane closing debacle and charts a path forward.

James Taranto notes the parallels and differences with the IRS scandal as an abuse of power.

The governor will have an 11AM press conference.

Friedman On Pluralism (With A New Math Twist)

Tom Friedman explains that the Middle East turmoil can't be blamed on Obama, and offers some New Math to prove it:

Not Just About Us

Every day the headlines from the Arab world get worse: An Al Qaeda affiliate group, aided by foreign fighters, battles with seven different homegrown Syrian rebel groups for control of the region around Aleppo, Syria. The Iranian Embassy in Beirut is bombed. Mohamad Chatah, an enormously decent former Lebanese finance minister, is blown up after criticizing Hezbollah’s brutish tactics. Another pro-Al Qaeda group takes control of Fallujah, Iraq. Explosions rock Egypt, where the army is now jailing Islamists and secular activists. Libya is a mess of competing militias.

What’s going on? Some say it’s all because of the “power vacuum” — America has absented itself from the region. But this is not just about us. There’s also a huge “values vacuum.” The Middle East is a highly pluralistic region — Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Druze and various tribes — that for centuries was held together from above by iron-fisted colonial powers, kings and dictators. But now that vertical control has broken down, before this pluralistic region has developed any true bottom-up pluralism — a broad ethic of tolerance — that might enable its people to live together as equal citizens, without an iron fist from above.

For the Arab awakening to have any future, the ideology that is most needed now is the one being promoted least: Pluralism. Until that changes, argues Marwan Muasher, in his extremely relevant new book — “The Second Arab Awakening and the Battle for Pluralism” — none of the Arab uprisings will succeed.

We are waiting for pluralism to take hold in the Islamic world? I have the idea that it might be a mistake to hold my breath - haven't the Sunnis and the Shiites been schismatic and hostile for over a millenium? Iran and Saudi Arabia will lie down together with the lion and the lamb when cats and dogs are sleeping together.

Well. I promised some New Math:

Again, President Obama could have done more to restrain leaders in Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Syria from going to extremes. But, ultimately, argues Muasher, this is the Arabs’ fight for their political future. If 500,000 American troops in Iraq, and $1 trillion, could not implant lasting pluralism in the cultural soil there, no outsider can, said Muasher. There also has to be a will from within.

"500,000" American troops? That may well be the total number of soldiers that toured through Iraq, but the maximum US troop level never exceeded 166,300.

And dare we ask for a bit of context? First, Iraq borders collapsing Syria and is importing their problems as Al Qaeda attempts to set up shop in Syria and re-open in Iraq.

Second, what is an appropriate time frame to achieve this change? Japan and Germany seemed to manage a forced transition to democracy, but we still have a troop presence there nearly seventy years later. And I see that we are expanding our troop presence in South Korea, although the active phase of that war ended more than sixty years ago.

I don't believe this collapse in Iraq was inevitable; I think it has been unexpected but accepted by Team Obama:

For all the attention paid to Syria over the past three years, Iraq’s slow disintegration also offers a vivid glimpse of the region’s bloody sectarian dynamic. In March 2012, Anthony Blinken, who is now President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, gave a speech echoing the White House’s rosy view of Iraq’s prospects after the withdrawal of American forces.

Iraq, Mr. Blinken said, was “less violent, more democratic and more prosperous” than “at any time in recent history.”

Obama brought the troops home and got re-elected. Victory!

Obama Quit In Afghanistan

Tear out the front page! Here is a shocker from former SecDef Gates, as reported by Bob Woodward:

In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”

So Obama was sending our young men and women off to a meat grinder with no real confidence in the likelihood of success. How like Lyndon Johnson.

Here is the NY Times version:

Obama Lost Faith in His Afghan Strategy, Book Asserts

In His New Memoir, Robert M. Gates, the Former Defense Secretary, Offers a Critique of the President

By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — After ordering a troop increase in Afghanistan, President Obama eventually lost faith in the strategy, his doubts fed by White House advisers who continually brought him negative news reports suggesting it was failing, according to his former defense secretary Robert M. Gates.

In a new memoir, Mr. Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration who served for two years under Mr. Obama, praises the president as a rigorous thinker who frequently made decisions “opposed by his political advisers or that would be unpopular with his fellow Democrats.” But Mr. Gates says that by 2011, Mr. Obama began criticizing — sometimes emotionally — the way his policy in Afghanistan was playing out.

At a pivotal meeting in the situation room in March 2011, called to discuss the withdrawal timetable, Mr. Obama opened with a blast of frustration — expressing doubts about Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander he had chosen, and questioning whether he could do business with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates wrote. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

I wish these two could agree on the timing of Gates' insight - per the Times, the "all about getting out" moment was March 2011; per Woodward,

...by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Well. I was saying the same thing back in September 2009. Activate the auto-quote:

Briefly, I think Obama escalated in Afghanistan for political show - he wanted to back his famous 2002 anti-Iraq war speech about not being opposed to all wars, just dumb ones with some suitably fierce rhetoric, so he campaigned on the notion that we had to abandon Iraq and win on the real battlefield of Afghanistan, despite the many obvious obstacle to success....

[A]s of January 20 2009 the US had better chances for something like a victory in Iraq than in Afghanistan, but Obama has remained committed to pursuing the lesser chance.  For now - who doubts that the anti-war left will turn on the Afghan adventure and Obama will be quick to blame Bush and turn with them?

And again in July 2010, which may or may not have put me ahead of Gates in ruminating about Obama's goals in Afghanistan:

Plenty of progressives are wondering what happened to that nice lefty they voted for, and are wondering when his inner dove will fly forth.  Believe me, plenty of righties are wondering the same thing.

My official editorial position is that if we had Lincoln in the White House, the Afghani equivalent of George Washington in Kabul, and Generals Marshall and Eisenhower peering at maps of Kandahar, we might still lose in Afghanistan.  Gen. Petraeus is a great general and a great American, but he is not partnered with Lincoln and Washington.

Conversely, we might be lucky enough to win even without a President committed to victory, but I don't think it is worth the chance.  It's too late now, but it would have been better if Obama had never escalated the war.

Yeah, Obama lacked commitment to victory in Afghanistan, and in a subsequent post I noticed that the sun rises in the East (and the sky was blue!). There is no way it took Gates until March 2011 to figure that out.

CAN WE IGNORE A SWIPE AT HILLARY? From Woodward:

Gates offers a catalogue of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.”

He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

Wow, Hillary's opposition to the surge was political? Just like her support of the AUMF in 2002 was political. Which makes this genius wrong twice.

As a timesaver, future writers might just want to list the decisions Hillary made that were not political. Put them in the World's Shortest Books collection.

LATE ADD: Per The Fix, I am on the expressway to Obvious Street:

How Bob Gates’s memoir could haunt Hillary in 2016

By Chris Cillizza

In a new memoir of his time as secretary of defense in the Obama administration, Gates writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

...

Opposing the surge was cast by many political observers as a sign to the left that she had evolved since her vote for the use-of-force resolution earlier in the decade.

At one level, Gates's allegation is not at all surprising. Politicians factor in politics when making decisions? Gasp! And they occasionally adjust their policy positions based on the changing winds of public opinion? Double gasp! (Also worth noting: Gates praises Clinton at other points in the memoir, lauding her as "smart, idealistic but pragmatic, tough-minded, indefatigable, funny, a very valuable colleague, and a superb representative of the United States all over the world.")

But, remember this is Hillary Clinton we are talking about.  And, the criticism that has always haunted her is that everything she does is infused with politics -- that there is no core set of beliefs within her but rather just political calculation massed upon political calculation.

It's nice to see this getting attention, then.

 

Cutting Taxes Or Raising Them In My Blue Heaven?

Bill De Blasio was sworn in as mayor and progressives swooned - income inequality would be solved by this weekend and it was fashionable to bash the thieving rich!

But here's a plot twist - back in Albany, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is heading in a different direction, attempting to bolster his upstate and national stature by posing as a Republican:

Cuomo Proposes $2 Billion in Tax Cuts

By THOMAS KAPLAN and JESSE McKINLEY

ALBANY — Sounding a refrain that will most likely echo through his re-election campaign this year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday announced a sweeping $2 billion tax relief proposal, a catchall of cuts for property and business owners, renters and upstate manufacturers.

The announcement, a peek into his goals for the coming legislative session, carried an unmistakable and oft-repeated message: New York’s reputation as a high-tax state cannot be tolerated, and tax reductions will be among his top priorities.

Hmm. Of course, this means it will be even harder for Cuomo to end his straddling and further alienate the left by approving fracking in New York.

The Times has more on the De Blasio/Cuomo divergence.

(Human) Nature Abhors A Vacuum

Obama-bashing in the Times:

Power Vacuum in Middle East Lifts Militants

By BEN HUBBARD, ROBERT F. WORTH and MICHAEL R. GORDON

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The images of recent days have an eerie familiarity, as if the horrors of the past decade were being played back: masked gunmen recapturing the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Ramadi, where so many American soldiers died fighting them. Car bombs exploding amid the elegance of downtown Beirut. The charnel house of Syria’s worsening civil war.

But for all its echoes, the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the past two weeks exposes something new and destabilizing: the emergence of a post-American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the region’s sectarian hatreds.

Amid this vacuum, fanatical Islamists have flourished in both Iraq and Syria under the banner of Al Qaeda, as the two countries’ conflicts amplify each other and foster ever-deeper radicalism. Behind much of it is the bitter rivalry of two great oil powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose rulers — claiming to represent Shiite and Sunni Islam, respectively — cynically deploy a sectarian agenda that makes almost any sort of accommodation a heresy.

Early on Team Obama pushes out a straw man in their defense:

The Obama administration defends its record of engagement in the region, pointing to its efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis and the Palestinian dispute, but acknowledges that there are limits. “It’s not in America’s interests to have troops in the middle of every conflict in the Middle East, or to be permanently involved in open-ended wars in the Middle East,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, said in an email on Saturday.

Since we can't be everywhere, we have settled for nowhere. Uh huh.

Deep in the story we get something like criticism of Team Obama:

For all the attention paid to Syria over the past three years, Iraq’s slow disintegration also offers a vivid glimpse of the region’s bloody sectarian dynamic. In March 2012, Anthony Blinken, who is now President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, gave a speech echoing the White House’s rosy view of Iraq’s prospects after the withdrawal of American forces.

Iraq, Mr. Blinken said, was “less violent, more democratic and more prosperous” than “at any time in recent history.”

But the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, was already pursuing an aggressive campaign against Sunni political figures that infuriated Iraq’s Sunni minority. Those sectarian policies and the absence of American ground and air forces gave Al Qaeda in Iraq, a local Sunni insurgency that had become a spent force, a golden opportunity to rebuild its reputation as a champion of the Sunnis both in Iraq and in neighboring Syria. Violence in Iraq grew steadily over the following year.

If the US had a Secretary of State during this time period she (he?) remains unnamed.

TimesWatch, With A KausWatch Bonus

The NY Times assesses the fifty year War on Poverty, so we are commencing an immediate KausWatch for aneurysms and coronaries. Among the laugh lines from the Times we especially liked this (my emphasis):

The more important driver of the still-high poverty rate, researchers said, is the poor state of the labor market for low-wage workers and spiraling inequality. Over the last 30 years, growth has generally failed to translate into income gains for workers — even as the American labor force has become better educated and more skilled. About 40 percent of low-wage workers have attended or completed college, and 80 percent have completed high school.

Economists remain sharply divided on the reasons, with technological change, globalization, the decline of labor unions and the falling value of the minimum wage often cited as major factors. But with real incomes for a vast number of middle-class and low-wage workers in decline, safety-net programs have become more instrumental in keeping families’ heads above water.

No one the Times spoke to suggested that immigration impacts the incomes of low-wage workers? Lower the Cone of Silence!

Maybe the Times writers could chat with Paul Krugman, who touched this progressive Third Rail back in 2006. From his blog:

Immigration is an intensely painful topic for a liberal like myself, because it places basic principles in conflict. Should migration from Mexico to the United States be celebrated, because it helps very poor people find a better life? Or should it be condemned, because it drives down the wages of working Americans and threatens to undermine the welfare state? I suspect that my March 27 column will anger people on all sides; I wish the economic research on immigration were more favorable than it is.

Well, that is why we had a liberal take-over of academia; eventually, they will figure out how to produce the "right" answer. While we wait:

My second negative point is that immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants. That’s just supply and demand: we’re talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages. Mr. Borjas and Mr. Katz have to go through a lot of number-crunching to turn that general proposition into specific estimates of the wage impact, but the general point seems impossible to deny.

Impossible to deny but easy to ignore!

Krugman lauds Borjas, so let's take this from his current work:

• Although the net benefits to natives from illegal immigrants are small, there is a sizable redistribution effect. Illegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated $99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 to $128 billion.
  
  
• The above estimates are generated by the presence of additional workers in the labor market, not by the legal status of those workers.

That doesn't even factor in low-wage legal immigrants. So more broadly:

Even though the overall net impact on natives is small, this does not mean that the wage losses suffered by some natives or the income gains accruing to other natives are not substantial. Some groups of workers face a great deal of competition from immigrants. These workers are primarily, but by no means exclusively, at the bottom end of the skill distribution, doing low-wage jobs that require modest levels of education. Such workers make up a significant share of the nation’s working poor. The biggest winners from immigration are owners of businesses that employ a lot of immigrant labor and other users of immigrant labor. The other big winners are the immigrants themselves.

The low-skilled workers, whether native, legal, or illegal, earn less; the bosses take him more. Why would the Times want to dwell on that?

ANEURYSM WATCH: This will be the one that kills Mickey:

In some cases, government programs have helped fewer families because of program changes and budget cuts, researchers said. For instance, the 1996 Clinton-era welfare overhaul drastically cut the cash assistance available to needy families, often ones headed by single mothers.

“As of 1996, we expected single mothers to go to work,” Professor Ziliak said. “But if they’re shelling out most of their weekly pay in the form of child care, they can’t make sense of doing it.”

That would be especially interesting if the Times could explain why the serious, economist-adjusted measure of poverty hit its '90's peak in 1994 at around 21% and has bounced around 15% for the last decade.

 

 

WTF Is Up With This?

From Variety by way of Matt Drudge, a Hollywood guy who ought to know better:

‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Breaks F-Word Record

Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” is all about excess. From orgies on a plane to cocaine and cash (or “fun coupons” as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character calls them), the financial drama thrives in taking it up a notch.

So it should be no surprise that Paramount’s R-rated film sets the all-time record for the use of the f-word.

According to Wikipedia, the word “fuck” is used 506 times over “The Wolf of Wall Street’s” 180-minute running time. Previously, the record for a non-documentary was Spike Lee’s 1999 film “Summer of Sam” with 435 instances.

The Wikipedia list is here, and there is no 'effin way this 'effin list is complete without 'effin Jack Nicholson and The Last 'Effin Detail. From the IMDB trivia:

The script was completed in 1970, but contained too much profanity to be shot as written. Columbia Pictures waited for two years trying to get writer Robert Towne to tone down the language. Instead, by 1972, the standards for foul language relaxed so much that all the profanity was left in.

How vulgar was it? This must be hyperbole, but still...

Ayres convinced Columbia Pictures to produce the film based on his consultant's credit on Bonnie & Clyde but had difficulty getting it made because of the studio's concern about the bad language in Townes's script.^[2] Peter Guber recalls, "The first seven minutes, there were 342 'fucks'"

That is roughly fifty per minute, or one per 'effin second. However, the Wiki-crowd may have been deceived by pale substitutes:

A tamer version with less profanity was filmed at the same time for TV showings. Because of the amount of swearing, the entire movie was pretty much shot twice.

Recount.

Among The Top Rank

David Brooks inspires "Fear and Loathing In Falls Church".

Pre-Weekend Open Thread

Shoveling snow!

When Health Care Costs Less People Demand More Of It

In the ongoing struggle between reality and the Reality-Based Community, reality strikes again!

Access to Health Care May Increase ER Visits, Study Suggests

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Supporters of President Obama’s health care law had predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly emergency room visits as people sought care from primary care doctors. But a rigorous new study conducted in Oregon has flipped that assumption on its head, finding that the newly insured actually went to the emergency room more often.

The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made 40 percent more visits to the emergency room than their uninsured counterparts. The pattern was so strong that it held true across most demographic groups, times of day, and types of visits, including for conditions that were treatable in primary care settings.

The finding casts doubt on the hope that expanded insurance coverage will help rein in rising emergency room costs just as more than two million people are gaining coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

If that sounds familiar, it should:

Medicaid coverage also reduces the costs of going to a primary care doctor, and a previous analysis of data from the Oregon experiment found that such doctor visits also increased substantially. Researchers concluded that gaining health coverage led to an across-the-board rise in the use of health care.

Interestingly, the Times summary of the earlier study included this (my emphasis):

Those with Medicaid were 35 percent more likely to go to a clinic or see a doctor, 15 percent more likely to use prescription drugs and 30 percent more likely to be admitted to a hospital. Researchers were unable to detect a change in emergency room use.

The NBER web page dedicated to Oregon makes the same point about the original study:

Medicaid increased the likelihood of using outpatient care by 35 percent, using prescription drugs by 15 percent, but did not seem to have an effect on use of emergency departments.

I can't explain that seeming discrepancy and time does not permit me to dive in just now. Loose the stat hounds!

ObamaCare's War On Marriage (Oregon Edition)

From Oregon, a story highlighting ObamaCare's War on Marriage:

PORTLAND, Ore. (CBS Seattle/AP) — One Oregon mother says that she is unable to afford health insurance for her and her 18-month-old son because it’s too expensive.

Kate Holly, 33, tells KOIN-TV that she originally championed President Barack Obama’s signature health care law because she thought it would help people in her situation.

“I’ve been a cheerleader for the Affordable Care Act since I heard about it and I assumed that it was designed for people in my situation,” Holly, a freelance yoga instructor, told KOIN. “I was planning on using the Affordable Care Act and I had done the online calculator in advance to make sure I was going to be able to afford it.”

Evidently she had to experience the bill to learn what was in it; had she been paying attention, she would have been forewarned that the bill imposes a huge subsidy cliff on working class married couples.

Pressing on:

Holly’s husband works for a non-profit organization that pays for his health care, but the couple is unable to afford to have her and their son covered under his plan. And she’s been told their combined income is too much to qualify for a subsidized health care plan under Cover Oregon.

“It wasn’t until I started the process and got an agent that I started hearing from them I wasn’t going to qualify for subsidies because I qualify on my husband’s insurance,” she told KOIN.

She will be eligible for subsidies or Medicaid once she finalizes the divorce. That suggests a new progressive bumper sticker: Get A Divorce - For The Children!

Meanwhile, Obama is no doubt focusing on the problems of the middle class.

When Your Name Is Your Destiny

In the course of scrolling through the current crop of groupon deals I learnm that I could be taking fitness classes led by Emily Swet. Hmm, not Bikram Yoga?

If anyone has some helpful thoughts about spinning classes I am all ears.

Happy New Year

The traditional New Year's Day open thread, with a non-traditional Supreme Court injunction against the contraception mandate.