Football = Socialism August 30, 2013August 29, 2013 WESLEY CLARK ON WHY WE INVADED IRAQ This is not new, but remains jaw-dropping. Two minutes. Watch. BILL MAHER ON WHY THE NFL IS SOCIALIST Not new, either, but you don’t want to miss it. A must-send to your Republican uncle. A READER ON THE YOUNG SUBSIDIZING THE OLD Rasley: “You asked, ‘Should Corporate America Force The Young To Subsidize The Old?’ Yes, and you forgot to mention that before there were Social Security and Medicare, who paid for the health and support of the elderly? Their younger relatives. My grandparents by the time they were 40 were supporting his mother, her mother, and an elderly man who was a distant cousin– and my mother remembered that they were all living in her parents’ 1200-square-foot home. My mother shared a room with her own grandmother for most of her childhood. Somehow I doubt that these days young people want to be responsible for the upkeep of elderly relatives. It’s really much cheaper to pay FICA and Medicare taxes. Young people today have grown up never knowing life without Medicare and Social Security. We might need to explain to them that if old people have no income, they move in.” # Have a glorious weekend. And here’s to those who do the hardest work and often get paid the least. And to the REAL job creators. And, for that matter, to a $15 minimum wage (later discussed here).
Fifty Years Later August 29, 2013August 28, 2013 What a day yesterday was. If you missed any of it, click here.
And In Case We DO Live Forever . . . August 28, 2013August 27, 2013 Bill Gates says mortality is “just a software problem,” Ray Kurzweil says average longevity will soon be increasing by more than a year per year, and you read here yesterday about the entrepreneur who plans to download our minds into cyborgs by 2045. Having now had a little more time to think about it, I’d like to expand on yesterday’s advice. (Yesterday’s advice: “Invest for the long-term.”) I would add: (1) floss (2) moisturize (3) avoid buying stock in companies that write annuities But the main thing? The main thing is this: It really, really matters that we, as a species, get things right — or as close to right as possible — these pivotal next few decades. And since world leadership still resides significantly with America, it really matters which vision gains ground here in 2014 and 2016 – the vision that (for example) nixes investment in infrastructure and picks a climate change denier to chair the House subcommittee on climate change . . . that fights to keep wages low for those at the bottom and taxes low for those at the top . . . or the vision that stresses investment in a sustainable, equitable future. What a shame it would be, on the cusp of astounding possibility, to screw it up. Already, I have — in my shirt pocket — a symphony orchestra, an alarm clock, a flash light, a camera, a phone, today’s newspapers, virtually all the books and music ever written, and a team of researchers to find me, more or less instantly, whatever I need and guide me, turn by turn, whether by foot car or public transport, to whatever destination I seek. In my shirt pocket! Imagine what the next few decades could bring. Ceding more control to the current Republican Party, in my view, would not bode well for any of the things most of us care about. Which is why I am obsessed with turnout in 2014, when Nate Silver thinks Democrats may lose the Senate . . . but when, in fact, if Democrats register and turn folks out to the polls, we not only hold the Senate, we take back the House, win governorships and flip state legislative chambers our way. It’s really “just” a matter of doing it. Consider: > The potential for gains is enormous. Voter turnout in 2008 and 2012 was 62% and 60%. In 2010, not quite 42%. We won’t get a Presidential-level turnout in a mid-term election . . . but could we improve from 42% to, say, 45%? Or 47% or 49%? Everything would be different if we could – and we can. Especially among the groups that Republicans are working so hard to disenfranchise. Those efforts get people so mad they could actually backfire again as they did in 2012. There are more than enough House seats in play for us to confound the conventional wisdom and regain control of Congress. > Independents, who broke heavily for the Republicans in 2010, now lean heavily our way. > Obamacare, which we’ve done such a bad job selling, will by then have begun to sell itself. Where it hurt us in 2010, it may actually help us in 2014, as people gain advantages that they won’t want to see taken away. So here’s the thing: Most of the money that goes to politics gets saved up until next fall, then plowed into a sea of TV advertising. It’s necessary; but it doesn’t persuade a lot of Republicans to vote for Democrats or inspire a lot of Democrats to register or vote. If anything, all that advertising, much of it negative, turns people off. The sweet spot – the leverage – is in the neighbor-to-neighbor ground game that gets people who already lean Democratic to vote. Once at the polls, they vote not for just for one candidate whose ads they may have seen, but, typically, for all the Democratic candidates. In 2014, the technology and infrastructure that underlie this ground game are the responsibility of the DNC. If Democrats want to win – and when I see how much progress the Republicans have blocked us from making, I desperately do want to win – then we have to fund this technology and infrastructure. Click here. Not least because laying the groundwork to win in 2014 also improves our chances for 2016. (For starters: Voters we register in 2014 remain registered for 2016.) But laying that groundwork is like planting seed corn. It needs to be sowed well in advance of the harvest. Like . . . now. The two parties have never been more polarized . . . or Congress more paralyzed . . . and if 2014 and 2016 don’t turn out right, we could regret it for the rest of our lives. Which could be very, very long. So click. I’ll see it right away to say thanks.
Living Forever August 27, 2013August 26, 2013 Not everyone wants to. I do. This 32-year-old Russian aims to make it possible. Have a nice day. And just in case it works out: invest for the long-term.
Should Corporate America Force The Young To Subsidize The Old? August 26, 2013August 25, 2013 Today I hand the microphone to my friend Matt Miller, who shared his opinion in the Washington Post. As people increasingly come to appreciate Obamacare — and as it’s phased in, they will — here’s one more “talking point” to help them counteract the criticism: The GOP’s Obamacare youth hoax By Matt Miller It’s rare for a political party to trumpet a position that unintentionally reveals its myopia, incoherence and expediency. Yet such is the trifecta with the Republican campaign to call attention to Obamacare’s young “victims.”Republicans are obsessed with the supposed injustice being done to some healthy young people who will effectively subsidize their sicker elders when Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect. The crusaders are nothing if not convinced of the righteousness of their cause. “The whole scheme is enlisting young adults to overpay, so other people can have subsidies,” Dean Clancy, a vice president at FreedomWorks, told my Post colleague Sarah Kliff. “That unfairness reminded us of the military draft.”Conservatives are therefore urging young Americans to resist. “I’m burning my Obamacare draft card,” runs one theatrical riff from a group called Young Americans for Liberty, “because I’m too busy paying student loans to pay for somebody else’s health insurance.” Republican policy advisors have urged the party to make such child abuse a big part of their anti-Obamacare message. Sounds like a sexy argument, except for one thing. Republicans seem to have forgotten where most people aged 19 to 34 get health coverage: from their employer. And at virtually every company, young people pay the same premiums as employees who are much older than they are and who get more expensively sick than they do. In other words, the evil cross-subsidy Obamacare’s foes are storming the barricades to roll back already exists, at vastly larger scale, in corporate America. These youngsters are already in chains! They’ve been put there by the private sector! And, inexplicably, young employees have entered this servitude of their own volition. (To extend the GOP’s draft analogy, it turns out there’s a voluntary army of health care masochists from sea to shining sea.) How could injustice on this scale escape the GOP’s searing moral scrutiny? After all, the president is only hoping thatabout 2.7 million young people will purchase coverage in the new exchanges. But 20 million Americans between the ages of 19 and 34 get coverage from their employer right now, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. If you’re keeping score, that makes employer-based health care’s cross-subsidy about eight times more evil than Obamacare’s. How does it work? Compare a typical, strapping young employee of 28 to her broken- down 58-year-old colleague. These two employees have very different annual health expenses. Yet under the nefarious plot known as “group health insurance,” they basically pay the same premiums. It turns out every big company in America is essentially a socialized health care republic, in which the young subsidize the old, and the healthy subsidize the sick — all of whom pay the same premiums for the same plans. Similar dynamics explain why, in the federal health-care plan, spry 42-year-olds like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz subsidize 79-year-old geezers like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch. Maybe that’s why Cruz always seems so angry. Of course, most people in civilized nations know and accept that this is how insurance works. But Republicans nowadays aren’t like most people in civilized nations. They think Obamacare is a form of injustice akin to slavery. Which makes employer-provided health care slavery on steroids. Where’s the outrage? If conservatives were consistent and principled, they would devote far more time and effort to liberating 20 million young Americans from the socialism baked into employer-based insurance and look past the Obamacare exchanges as a puny sideshow. But, alas, conservatives are not consistent and principled, save for their consistent determination to hurt the president politically. It would be better if all those smart GOP thinkers devoted their talent and energy to the question of how they would expand coverage to the 50 million uninsured — but to raise that question is to enter the policy cul de sac in all its delicious irony. Because the answer to that question is RomneyObamacare, the only sound way (as Republicans rightly taught us) that a country can move toward universal coverage using private health plans. The GOP could offer a tweaked version with slightly fewer regulations. Or structure it to offer universal catastrophic coverage to save money. But if Republicans were serious, they’d offer the same basic reform architecture. So Republicans choose not to be serious. And it shows. In the end, the GOP’s Obamacare youth hoax shows how silly a party can look when a political focus on one corner of a policy leads it to latch on to “insights” that utterly miss the big picture. It’s a reminder, if we needed another, of how close the connection can be between ideology and idiocy. A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the host of the new podcast “This…Is Interesting,” Miller writes a weekly column for The Post. Peruse his archive or follow him on Twitter.
It’s rare for a political party to trumpet a position that unintentionally reveals its myopia, incoherence and expediency. Yet such is the trifecta with the Republican campaign to call attention to Obamacare’s young “victims.”Republicans are obsessed with the supposed injustice being done to some healthy young people who will effectively subsidize their sicker elders when Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect.
Jobs: Teaching, Buttling, Steve August 23, 2013August 22, 2013 There are so many jobs I’d pay dearly not to have to do. Yet in many cases I am paying — indirectly, via my dinner check or hotel bill — just $7 or $8 an hour not to have to do them. (Thank you for plucking my chicken.) Should unpleasant jobs pay the most? I know . . . I know. Just a thought. TEACHING Teaching is potentially enjoyable. At the right school, with the right kids, I can certainly see doing it (so long as classes don’t start before noon — how about night school for gifted teens?). But the pay and benefits are either inadequate or overgenerous, depending (in part) on whom you’re talking with. Surely some teachers should find another line of work; but if your Republican uncle thinks that teachers on the whole have it too sweet — “three months off!” and all that — ask him to consider this graphic. BUTTLING Have you seen it? Lee Daniels’ oddly named “Lee Daniels’ The Butler“? Someone I know — certainly not me — cried through almost the whole thing. What a story! What this man has seen! What times he — and we — have lived through! (My eighth grade algebra teacher, Bob Moses, left Horace Mann School to help build the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and organize the 1964 Freedom Summer; my friend Al Lowenstein, who had been a student at Horace Mann years before Moses arrived, went down to Mississippi, too. I would never — ever — have had the courage to do anything like that. I didn’t even have the courage, a decade or so later, to use my real name on a book I wrote about being gay . . . well, it was 1973, very different times . . . and yet former congressman Lowenstein did — he blurbed the thing with his real name.*) Imagine: a black boy in the Jim Crow south, making his way up to Washington to serve white folks in a hotel bar . . . ultimately rising to serve as personal butler to presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan — and living to vote for, and meet — the forty-fourth President of the United States. I don’t want to spoil it by telling you more, or by telling you which actors play those presidents in the movie (yikes!), or by telling you how much of the story is literally true and how much merely inspired by a true story. But what a way, in two hours with some popcorn, to relive these last 80 years. And what context it adds to the current efforts, in North Carolina and elsewhere, once again to keep African Americans from voting. Go see this movie. *In Googling to refresh my Lowenstein/SNCC recollection, I found this profile from the January 8, 1968, Harvard Crimson. No relevance to The Butler, but I can’t resist the footnote. JOBS Someone I know — again, I want to stress, not me — even teared up watching the Steve Jobs movie. Now that’s just pathetic. And yet what a story his was. And — from a tech point of view, entirely divorced form the political — what amazing times we’ve lived through with that. And here’s the story! At least a good chunk of it. From a time before . . . everything. I almost didn’t see “Jobs” because the reviews have been so mixed. But count me with those who thought it was completely gripping and terrific. # Have a great weekend. See these movies. Support a higher minimum wage. Be outraged by efforts to keep people from voting. And tip your hat to Steve Jobs. What an insanely great impact he had on a billion lives.
The Real IRS Scandal August 22, 2013August 21, 2013 So it turns out that, swamped by applications and looking for short-cuts to spot the most likely politically over-active applicants, the IRS denied tax exempt status for . . . drum-roll, please . . . three left-leaning groups — and none on the right. Not to say there wasn’t mismanagement (under the the Bush-appointed managers); not to say there weren’t outrageous bungles and errors in judgment. But quite a denouement to what my pal Peggy Noonan saw as Obama’s Watergate, just so deeply troubling . . . . . . as she is now so deeply troubled over Obamacare, the top line of which is simply that tens of millions will have better or more secure health care coverage, partly at the expense of those of us at the top. (We still won’t be taxed as heavily as we were in the Forties and Fifties and Sixties and Seventies and much of the Eighties but, yes, those of us fortunate enough to have income above $250,000 will be paying more.) And there are no death panels, and climate change is real, and Al Gore never said he invented the Internet, although he championed its funding at a time when it was mind-numbing to try to understand, not the indispensable magic it is today. I digress, but (a) you don’t pay me enough to exact self-discipline; (b) it’s truly all related. Now: It turns out — and this one is not of recent partisan origin, if it ever was at all — the real scandal is that the IRS has allowed any political activity at non-profits. The 1959 statute establishing c4 status said the activity of such groups must be “exclusively” for the social welfare, which someone at the IRS at some point changed to “primarily.” There’s an effort now under way to change it back. All explained here, by Lawrence O’Donnell, on “The Last Word.”
Do Not Be Alarmed August 21, 2013August 20, 2013 But today has been canceled. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oh, okay. Here are New York — and other cities — as they have grown through the decades. Behold. (Now all we have to do is plan to move them inland 20 miles or so by mid-century, because the Republican chair of the House climate-change committee doesn’t “believe in” climate change.) Tomorrow may be cancelled, too — it’s August, for crying out loud! What are summers for if not a little sloth?
Thanking Peggy Noonan August 20, 2013August 19, 2013 Peggy Noonan is — reluctantly — concerned. She doesn’t want things to be terrible for the Obama Administration (or the country), but it just feels . . . well, for example, the IRS thing evoked for her Watergate, which we should all agree would be deeply concerning (except that Watergate was ordered from the Oval office to subvert a presidential election, while the IRS snafu was Bush-appointed bureaucrats trying to cope with thousands of applications for tax-exempt status by searching on politically-charged words like Tea Party, Occupy, and Progressive). And now, for example, Obamacare. It’s not that she wants 30 million of her fellow citizens to be uninsured — obviously — or tens of millions more subject to the insecurity of “lifetime caps” and “preexisting conditions.” It’s just that, you know, she has deep-seated concerns. As expressed recently in the Wall Street Journal. Actually, Obamacare is beginning to look as though it may, for most people, be a non-event or else a pleasant surprise. (You wouldn’t think an entire political party could be vehemently united against something good, but remember the first Clinton budget? That not a single Republican voted for? That they were certain would tank the economy? And then it turned out we had the eight best years ever?) But Peggy is concerned, as amply quoted in this rebuttal from Aaron Carroll at The Incidental Economist: I know I should just stay away from the WSJ, but I can’t help myself. This time it’s a post by Peggy Noonan, “The High Cost of Obamacare“. I’m going to ignore her discussion of the rodeo clown incident and focus on her issue du jour with the Affordable Care Act: But back to health care. The piece I linked to, by Yuxing Zheng of the Oregonian, makes quick work of a complicated subject. A woman in Cornelius, Ore., takes care of her disabled 22-year-old daughter. The daughter has cerebral palsy, spina bifida and a condition called automonic dysreflexia. She requires 24-hour care. The mother provides it, receiving for this $1,400 a month. The mother fears—and is apparently right to fear—a provision of the Affordable Care Act that will, as Zheng reports, “largely prohibit guardians from serving as the paid caregiver of an adult child with developmental disabilities.” The mother is afraid this will mean foster care for her daughter, or a lengthy and costly process in which she herself will be forced to transfer legal guardianship to someone else. The provision, the paper says, will likely cause hardship for hundreds of Oregon families in which the guardian and the caregiver are the same person. Most of the time, I try to avoid anecdotes when making arguments for or against policy. Opinion writers don’t. But in this case I have to admire the chutzpah Noonan shows. She’s pulled up a mother who is getting paid – by the government – to care for her child. She gets paid $1400 a month to provide services to her daughter. Let me say that again. The government is paying this mother to care for her daughter. Do I have a problem with this? Absolutely not. I doubt many supporters of the ACA do. But CMS does. Why? They’re afraid of fraud: The new federal provision aims to resolve a conflict of interest that arises when the guardian who helps develop an individual service plan hires herself or himself as the paid caregiver, which could lead to financial fraud. Oregon has allowed guardians to be paid caregivers for more than 10 years under various federal waivers, and a state official says she can’t recall a case where that arrangement was problematic. CMS is more cautious than Oregon. They are enforcing federal guidelines about conflicts of interest. Now this will create legitimate problems for some families in Oregon, especially single parent families, who have been paid to serve as caregivers for their adult children with profound disabilities. I sympathize with every single one of them. So do lawmakers in Oregon, who are actively trying to fix the regulations. But let’s take a breather. Let me propose a thought experiment for you. Can you imagine if, as part of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama had proposed a new program to pay parents to stay at home and care for their children? Can you imagine the outrage that type of welfare would have sparked? I bet Peggy Noonan would have had a coronary. But in this universe, suddenly she’s championing this program. Let me propose another. Can you imagine if President Obama had proposed to eliminate this fraud prevention provision, and then the media had uncovered someone who was abusing it to collect a paycheck and stay at home with their child? Can you imagine the outrage? I bet Peggy Noonan would have screamed that all of Obamacare should be scrapped over this abuse. But in this universe, fraud prevention is harming families. So be it. But it’s telling where Noonan got her anecdote. It wasn’t from among the 560,000 people in Oregon who were uninsured in 2011 and will likely benefit from the ACA. It wasn’t from the 237,000 people in Oregon who are expected to buy a guarantee- issue and community-rated policy (many with subsidies!) on the exchange. It wasn’t from the 222,700 people in Oregon who will be newly eligible for Medicaid under the expansion. It wasn’t even from the 14,300 people in Oregon who are currently eligible for Medicaid but not getting it for some reason. No, Noonan tells a story that she picked from the 455 families in Oregon who are going to need a legislative fix in order to keep getting paid to be caregivers for their adult disabled children. I bet they get that fix. Do you think she’ll talk about that legislative triumph if it occurs? She ends with four specific points, which I feel compelled to answer: First, no mother or child should be put in this position by a government ostensibly trying to improve their lives. I agree. So will she support legislation to make it easier for parents to choose to dedicate more time to their children instead of working? Let’s wait and see. Second, everyone in America knows health care is a complicated and complex subject, that a national bill will have 10 million moving parts, and that when a government far away—that would be Washington, D.C.—decides to take greater control of the nation’s health care it will likely get many, maybe a majority, of the moving parts wrong. Again, the anecdote is telling. She didn’t choose from the majority, or even the many. She went after a specific minority where things might go wrong instead of talking about the many, many things that might go right. Third, because health-care legislation is so complex, it is almost impossible for people to understand it, to get their arms around what may be a given bill’s inadequacies and structural flaws. Stories of those inadequacies and flaws dribble out day by day, in stories like this one. They produce a large negative blur, and a feeling of public anxiety: What will we find out tomorrow? Is she serious? She’s bemoaning the dribble of bad news stories – like the one she is writing right now – and how they make people afraid! Again – you have to respect the chutzpah. Fourth, when a thousand things have to be changed about a law to make it workable, some politician is going to stand up and say: “This was a noble effort in the right direction but let’s do the right thing and simplify everything, with a transparent and understandable plan: single payer.” If a politician does, I think we’ll have pieces like Peggy Noonan’s to thank.
Ashton Kutcher and North Carolina August 18, 2013August 18, 2013 SEX At the 1:44 mark, Ashton Kutcher tells teens how to be sexy. You will want to share this with your teen. (No: really.) VOTES The Republican Party could hardly be less subtle: they want to make it as difficult as possible for black people and poor people and young people to vote. Watch. One little piece of it: In North Carolina, you now need a state-issued ID to vote — but if it was issued by the state university (because you’re a student) that’s not good enough. Students vote for Democrats. [Sarcasm ON] we certainly don’t want students assuming the mantle of citizenship, do we? And actually, when you think about it[sarcasm OFF], students have the most at stake: the decisions made today will affect them for the next 70 years, whereas those same decisions will affect a 70-year-old voter for maybe another 10 or 20. So [oh for heaven’s sake, sarcasm back ON], shouldn’t we make it as hard as possible for them to have a say in their own future? This is America? This is patriotism? This is what Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower would have been comfortable doing??? Will you ask your Republican uncle to please take his party back from the current Republican leadership? And to vote Democrat, or at the very, very least, stay home, until he has?