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Economy

Note To Roll Call Editors: Insurers Don’t Believe Obama’s Plan Does Enough…To Circumvent Regulations

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 22, 2009 at 8:00 pm

insuranceRoll Call headlined this story “Greater Insurance Regulation Sought: Some Say Obama’s Plan Doesn’t Do Enough.” It seemed fishy though, that the groups ostensibly looking for more regulation are the insurance and banking industries’ lobbying arms, including the American Insurance Association and the Financial Services Roundtable.

And sure enough, if you get down a few paragraphs in the story, what the groups are actually seeking is not more regulation, but the ability to avoid state regulations that they don’t like:

Groups like the American Insurance Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the American Council of Life Insurers support the White House’s efforts to create a national insurance infrastructure but are also pushing for the creation of an optional federal charter that would allow insurance companies to choose whether to follow state or federal rules.

Just like the Mortgage Bankers Association wants to avoid regulation of mortgage lending at the state level, insurance companies want to avoid state regulations when it suits their interest. Allowing insurance companies to opt out of state regulation — which is what an optional federal charter would do — would enable them to “shop for the lightest regulation,” which could be worth billions of dollars to the insurance industry.

Thus far, the Obama administration has been very conscious of ensuring that federal regulation doesn’t preempt state law, and acknowledging that states have a good grasp on what their regulatory needs are. Allowing an optional federal charter would fly in the face of that approach. As Charles Symington of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America’s said, “in many respects the battle over the optional federal charter has been between Main Street and Wall Street. The administration appears to have initially decided that the arguments are on the side of Main Street America, small business and consumers.”

Someone should tell Roll Call that looking for different regulation is not the same as looking for more regulation.

Climate Progress

Why do disinformers like Pielke shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?

By Joe Romm on Jun 22, 2009 at 7:35 pm

Would the New York Times have Bernard Madoff as a business columnist?  Only if they hated business.

So why does the NYT let John Tierney write a “science” column?  The “founding principles” of his NYT blog are the clearest anti-scientific statement you will ever find by anybody claiming to be covering science (see “here“).

And, of course, Tierney makes up stuff up to smear real scientists (such as John Holdren and Steven Chu), which is only science as practiced by “political” scientists, like, say Roger Pielke, Jr.  And that’s my segue.

Why does anyone who cares about science quote Roger Pielke, Jr. on scientific matters? We’ve already seen one major NYT reporter tarnish his reputation by relying on Roger Pielke Jr.’s anti-scientific –  and anti-scientist — disinformation (see here).

Pielke has launched what is both the lamest and the most intellectually dishonest attack in his career — on a few innocuous sentences in the terrific new NOAA-led report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.  This attack has been pimped by Swift-boat smearer Morano and Tierney.   Pielke has one primary mission in his professional career — other than working with his colleagues at The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) to spread disinformation aimed at stopping any serious climate action, of course — and that is to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather.

As we’ll see, Pielke’s obsession on this point is so extreme that he trashes the reputation of any scientist who even suggests that there is the tiniest link whatsoever between climate change and extreme weather — even though he himself has stated such a link exists.  Indeed, he has smeared the integrity of many hundreds of the country’s top scientists for merely sitting through a discussion of the issue that doesn’t meet his extreme form of political correctness (see here).

Pielke launches the strongest possible accusation on his blog — “misrepresenting science in a government report” — on the basis of four sentences in this 196-page, 13-agency report:

Read more

Politics

Cornyn Cites Inaccurate Powerline Blog Post To Claim That The Public Health Insurance Isn’t Popular

By Ryan Powers on Jun 22, 2009 at 7:00 pm

Yesterday, the New York Times and CBS News (NYT/CBS) released a new poll showing broad support for health care reform, with 72 percent of respondents favoring the creation of a publicly-funded health insurance option. The conservative blog Powerline immediately took issue with the poll, arguing (wrongly) that the sample was skewed because 48 percent of respondents reported voting for President Obama last fall, while just 25 percent of respondents reported voting for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Powerline compared the NYT/CBS figures to the actual election results in which Obama won 53 percent of the vote and McCain won 46 percent.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), apparently convinced by Powerline’s argument, cited the blog in two cable news appearances this afternoon to deny that there was any significant public support for the creation of a public health insurance option. “With all due respect to the New York Times and CBS, this polling sample was skewed,” he told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Similarly, on Fox News Cornyn said, “I think there’s been some particularly good blog coverage like Powerline blog talking how that sample was so skewed as to be meaningless.” Watch it:

Unfortunately for Cornyn, Powerline is wrong to conclude the sample is skewed based on the data they cited. As Slate’s Christopher Beam explained last week, the disparity between last fall’s actual vote tallies and the results reported by NYT/CBS yesterday comes down to respondents being too embarrassed to admit that they didn’t vote:

The main explanation for the gap, say pollsters, is people who didn’t vote at all saying they did. These people tend to say they picked the winning candidate. Just look at the Times and Journal polls, where about 80 percent of respondents said they voted in the 2008 election. In fact, turnout was about 61 percent. (A 20 percent gap is pretty standard.) Pollsters attribute the disparity to the social discomfort of having to admit, even to a stranger on the phone, that you didn’t vote.

Further as Beam explains, “Retroactive vote reporting tends to be a proxy for popularity. … In a 2006 NYT poll, more people said they voted for John Kerry in 2004 than voted for Bush.” If Powerline wanted a more reliable indicator of who was in the NYT/CBS sample, they could have looked at the proportion of respondents that identified themselves as liberal (27 percent) and compared that to the proportion that identified themselves as conservative (29 percent). Likewise, Powerline could have noted that the sample was 24 percent Republican and 38 percent Democrat — a fairly normal party identification advantage for Democrats at the moment.

To buttress their claim that the NYT/CBS poll was inaccurate, Powerline linked to a recent Rasmussen poll that found comparatively little support for the creation of a public health insurance option, with just 41 percent of Americans supporting such a move. But as Nate Silver documented last week, it is the Rasmussen poll — not the NYT/CBS poll — that falls outside typical levels of support for a public health insurance found in other recent surveys:

pubopt

Powerline’s concerns about the accuracy of the latest NYT/CBS poll are unfounded, but that likely won’t keep Cornyn from continuing to refer to Powerline’s discussion as “particularly good blog coverage.”

Economy

Why It’s Important For The Census To Count Same-Sex Married Couples

By Guest Blogger on Jun 22, 2009 at 6:30 pm

Our guest blogger, Gary J. Gates, PhD is the Williams Distinguished Scholar at the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law and author of The Gay and Lesbian Atlas.

censusWe welcome the good news that the US Census Bureau has announced it will publicly release counts of same-sex married couples identified in Census 2010. In Census 2000, the Bureau altered the responses of same-sex husbands and wives, counting them instead as “unmarried partners.” With marriage equality now established in six states and an estimated 35,000 same-sex couples already legally married in the US, this decision seems like a no-brainer. But the change in policy has important ramifications for researchers (like me), policy-makers, and the LGBT community.

Census same-sex couple data have been critically important in undermining pernicious stereotypes and myths about the LGBT community. For example:

– Many believe that gay people only live in large urban areas and in neighborhoods like the Castro in San Francisco and Chelsea in New York. Census 2000 found same-sex couples living in 99% of US counties.

– Few people think of LGBT people as parents, yet a quarter of same-sex couples are raising children. Among couples that include a non-white partner, childrearing is substantially higher.

– Despite the military’s “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” policy making gay and lesbian servicemembers invisible, Census same-sex couple data were critical in estimating that 65,000 LGB men and women are serving in the US military.

As more same-sex couples marry and the marriage equality debate continues, Census data that allow us to distinguish between same-sex spouses and those who use the term “unmarried partner” can be similarly important. A recent paper I published in Demography compared traits of same-sex couples who registered as domestic partners in California (the state didn’t have marriage when the survey was taken) to non-registered same-sex couples. The differences were very similar to those we observe between married and unmarried heterosexual couples. It may be that, demographically, same-sex married couples look quite a bit like their different-sex married counterparts. Such a finding undermines arguments that same-sex couples are just fundamentally different.

But these data can be useful beyond LGBT issues. Marriage plays a role in tax policy, health care insurance provision, and access to federal poverty programs. More accurate data means all of these policy debates can be better informed with facts, not myths and stereotypes.

Of course, counting same-sex spouses is also just the right thing to do. An accurate decennial Census is critical to our representative democracy. With the recent California Supreme Court ruling upholding Prop. 8, LGBT Americans are a bit extra-sensitive these days around issues of public recognition of same-sex relationships. Counting same-sex spouses assures the LGBT community that the Census respects their families and makes it more likely that they will contribute to a good Census tally. It also comports with the Bureau’s well deserved reputation for quality and accuracy.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 22, 2009 at 6:14 pm

New week, new nonsense to explore:

— VDH thinks Obama is “more at ease with virulent anti-Westerners” than with decent folk.

— Andy McCarthy thinks Obama secretly wants tyranny to prevail in Iran but is restraining himself because “It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs.”

— Kit Bond thinks banks provide “too much information” so there’s no need for consumer protection.

— What happens when New America Foundation scholars stop being polite and start getting real.

Your song of the day is the surprisingly upbeat “Catastrophe”.

Politics

After attacking Obama for it, Krauthammer refers to Khamenei as ‘Supreme Leader.’

By Matt Corley on Jun 22, 2009 at 5:46 pm

Last Friday, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer disdainfully attacked President Obama for referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the “Supreme Leader” of Iran. “‘Supreme Leader’? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator,” wrote Krauthammer. But during an interview on Dennis Miller’s radio show today, Krauthammer himself referred to the ayatollah as “Supreme Leader”:

KRAUTHAMMER: And the reason he did it is that he thinks he needs to preserve his relations with the existing regime so that he can negotiate nuclear disarmament with them, which in and of itself is a lunatic fantasy. It’s not going to happen. There’s no way he’s going to sweet talk, you know, the Supreme Leader out of his nukes. So, that was the point. He thought that if I support the protesters too much, I alienate and I prevent the relations with the government and I can’t.

Listen here:

The New Republic’s Chris Orr notes that Krauthammer also referred to Khamenei as “Supreme Leader” days before his column attacking Obama for using the phrase was published. This isn’t surprising, considering that top conservatives have regularly referred to Khamenei as “Supreme Leader.”

Health

The Public Insurance Plan Is Not Responsible For High CBO Scores

By Igor Volsky on Jun 22, 2009 at 5:30 pm

Since the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued very preliminary cost estimates of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee’s health bill and the Senate Finance Committee’s draft legislation, Republicans and some in the media have argued that the somewhat higher-than expected price tags undermine the President’s contention that a new public heath insurance plan would lower health care spending:

- Rep. John Bohner (R-OH): The Congressional Budget Office came out with a score on Senator Kennedy’s bill, just part of the score — of the — of his bill, that says that the public option would cost over $1 trillion, and would cause 23 million Americans to lose their private health care coverage, and only 16 million of which would — would be covered under the — the government plan. [CNN, 6/16/2009]

- ABC News: The President’s chances for an optional health care plan that would be run by the government may be fading after a Congressional Budget Office report found a Democratic plan in the Senate would cost at least a trillion dollars over the ten years and cover just 1/3 of the uninsured. [ABC News, 6/16/2009]

- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): The CBO estimates were a death blow to a government run health care plan. The finance committee has abandoned that. [This Week, 6/21/2009]

- Fortune Magazine’s Nina Easton: And I think the, the big speed bump this week, of course, was that CBO, Congressional Budget Office study that said that the costs of a public plan are going to be well beyond what they expected. [MTP, 6/21/2009]

Watch it:

But both estimates never scored the public option. The HELP Committee’s bill omitted any language about the public plan and, according to reporting by the Health Beat’s Maggie Mahar, the CBO couldn’t “mark up the Senate Finance Committee plan because the Senate Finance Committee plan doesn’t yet exist.” “Yesterday, I spoke to Peter Orszag’s Office of Management and Budget and they confirmed that there are many blank lines in the draft CBO is looking at. What was missing included a public-sector insurance option,” Mahar wrote.

In fact, rather than add to the costs of reform, a robust public option could produce savings that could actually be scored and identified by the CBO as a money-saver. As the New York Times editorialized on Sunday, “A public plan would have lower administrative expenses than private plans, no need to generate big profits, and stronger bargaining power to obtain discounts from providers. That should enable it to charge lower premiums than many private plans.” “It would also shave hundreds of billions of dollars from the amount needed to cover the uninsured — a crucial advantage as Congress scrambles to finance the reform effort,” the NYT concluded.

Media

Why is Charles Krauthammer on the TNR Masthead?

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 22, 2009 at 5:26 pm

The New Republic’s Christopher Orr has a nice catch:

“[A]fter treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of ‘some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.’ Where to begin? ‘Supreme Leader’? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator.” — Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, June 19

“And the president has said ‘I have seen in Iran’s initial reaction from the supreme leader.’ He is using an honorific to apply to a man whose minions out there are breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, arresting students, shutting the press down, and basically trying to suppress a popular democratic revolution.” — Charles Krauthammer, Fox News All Stars, June 16

“Look, these were sham elections from the beginning. In a real democracy, you can have a change of power as a result. That was not going to happen in Iran. The mullahs are in charge. Khamenei, the supreme leader, remains in charge.” — Charles Krauthammer, Fox News All Stars, June 12

It’s well-established at this point that Fred Hiatt and his superiors have contempt for the readers of the Washington Post and don’t mind using their editorial real estate to misinform the public. But as Brad DeLong points out it continues to be mysterious why Krauthammer is listed as a Contributing Editor on the TNR masthead. The title is, to be sure, merely an honorific. But that only further raises the question of why the magazine would want to honor a writer for whom the rest of the staff seems—appropriately—to have so little respect.

On the merits, I think there’s never before been a taboo against describing foreign leaders, even nasty ones, with their proper titles. Hitler was The Fuhrer, Mussolini was Il Duce.

Politics

Sanford Predicts Stimulus Will Result In ‘A Thing Called Slavery’

By Lee Fang on Jun 22, 2009 at 4:45 pm

Speaking to the Lexington County GOP last week, Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) lamented his defeat in his quest to reject American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds for schools, the unemployed, and for job creation and retention. On June 4, the South Carolina Supreme Court ordered Sanford to accept the $700 million in stimulus funds he had opposed.

To defend his grandstanding, Sanford has previously lashed out at his critics, saying it would be tantamount to “fiscal child abuse” to accept the federal money. He has also compared President Obama to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, because of his fiscal policies. But now Sanford is taking his hyperbolic rhetoric to another level, claiming that the stimulus will result in “a thing called slavery”:

SANFORD: A guy from the northeast did a study on generational accounting. Generational accounting says what is the imputed tax for a young person born in America today? And remarkably, that number is 82, which at all ain’t that far from a thing called slavery. If you’re giving away 82% of every dollar you earn every day and every week and every month, A, it’s not a good deal, B, it collapses the capitalistic system because nobody has any initiative to work at that point, and C, it really isn’t that far from slavery. And what the Republic was originally set up was on the notion that was just talked about a moment ago, which is this larger notion of freedom. And economic freedom is a part of the larger notion of freedom.

Watch it:

Sanford’s comments echo the right-wing meme that nearly every policy President Obama pursues, whether it is the stimulus or his national service plan, is a covert plan to enslave Americans. President Bush’s $1.3 trillion — deficit enlarging — tax cut certainly did not elicit the same hysterical response from Sanford.

Sanford claimed that the nation was founded on “freedom” as opposed to slavery. But that view reveals either a profound ignorance of American and South Carolinian history, or, at worst, is an example of Sanford casually rewriting of the past.

Not only did the nation’s founding documents acknowledge and perpetuate slavery, but South Carolina has a particularly grisly record on the practice. Under the state Constitution of 1790, white men were required to own 500 acres of land and ten slaves to be eligible for the state House of Representatives, and double that to be eligible for the Senate. Author William Dusinberre has described South Carolina as a “charnel house” among other slave states, noting that over fifty five percent of slaves on rice plantations died before the age of fifteen. In addition to brutality from their masters, the deaths were a result of a combination of malaria and infants’ feebleness at birth, which was caused by the mothers’ own chronic malaria and their general exhaustion from rice cultivation during pregnancy.

Update

Gov. Sanford has gone missing. No one knows where he is, nor has anyone seen him in the last four days. Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer told the AP that Sanford was taking time to “recharge” after his failed fight against federal stimulus money.

Yglesias

A My Little Pony Version of the Khmer Rouge

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 22, 2009 at 4:43 pm

200px-my_little_pony

I definitely approve of mocking people who publish ignorant screeds against the internet, and all the more so when my name comes up in the course of doing so. Here’s Ross Douthat in The New York Times:

“One could write a Talmud,” Helprin notes at one point, “in reaction to the oceans of material supplied by commentators who either deliberately or otherwise (probably otherwise) cannot grasp the meaning of a simple sentence.” True — but this does not mean that one should. In particular, one should never, ever write a book that includes, in its footnotes, “Posting No. 12” from thelede.blogs.nytimes.com, or “Posting 3:41” from missnemesis.blogspot.com — or comments by “Peep,” “Constantine” and “Anon,” from Matthew Yglesias’s blog. Helprin acknowledges the peculiarity of arguing with anonymous commenters rather than training his fire on more intellectually serious targets. “Why talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room?” he wonders, quoting Churchill; the answer, he explains, is that in this case only the monkeys really matter. “The philosophical basis of the war on copyright is crackpot and stillborn,” and “apart from unavoidable forays, it is best to stay out of such thickets.” Instead, the battle should be waged “wherever the gnats in their millions crudely make real the musings of the Mad Hatters.”

As the tone of that last line suggests, alas, it’s hard to write a polemic premised on the assumption that your opponents are monkeys without sounding like a particularly high-vocabulary monkey yourself. Helprin variously describes his foes as “wacked-out muppets,” “crapulous professors,” “regular users of hallucinogenic drugs,” “a My Little Pony version of the Khmer Rouge,” “a million geeks in airless basements,” “mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down” and so forth. The overall effect is like listening to an erudite gentleman employing $20 words while he screams at a bunch of punk kids to get off his front lawn.

These kind of arguments really do tend to be self-refuting in my opinion. The underlying conceit behind a lot of this sort of complaining seems to be that the traditional crop of professional writers—full-time journalists and, in Helprin’s case, novelists—are the only well-informed people on the planet. In reality, a great deal of what you see on blogs is writing by people who aren’t or weren’t professional writers but who—unlike most journalists—have actual subject matter expertise. You can get a take on events in Iran from Gary Sick and Juan Cole and Daniel Drezner and Steven Walt. You can read dozens and dozens of blogs by lawyers and economists. It’s Helprin rather than, say, Larry Lessig and Tyler Cowen and Tim Lee who doesn’t know how to seriously evaluate the issues relating to intellectual property law.

That said, “a My Little Pony version of the Khmer Rouge” is a great turn of phrase.

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