I want a revolution, you want to make your mark:

— The pyschology of poverty and temptation.

— A soda tax could raise most of the money necessary to bring the Baucus bill subsidies up to House bill levels.

— Ron Wyden explains what he’s trying to do.

— Apparently Harry Reid can fix many of the problems with the Baucus bill as he merges it with the Senate HELP text.

— Reihan Salam offers a very modest proposal on health reform; it’s a good idea, but there’s no reason to think that small.

— Probably time for the President to hold a health care town hall somewhere in Maine; in fact, not sure why he didn’t go in August at the high tourist season.

Song of the day, Julie Ruin (i.e., Kathleen Hannah) “The Punk Singer”.

Exciting developments in the dinosaur world as researchers discover a creature that’s a lot like Tyrannosaurus Rex, but much smaller:

Apparently this upends our understanding of how T Rex evolved:

But this scaled-down version, which was about nine feet long and weighed only 150 pounds, lived 125 million years ago, about 35 million years before giant Tyrannosaurs roamed the earth. So the discovery calls into question theories about the evolution of T. rex, which was about 5 times longer and almost 100 times heavier.

“The thought was these signature Tyrannosaur features evolved as a consequence of large body size,” Stephen L. Brusatte of the American Museum of National History, an author of a paper describing the dinosaur published online by the journal Science, said at a news conference. “They needed to modify their entire skeleton so they could function as a predator at such colossal size.”

Naturally, this demonstrates that dinosaurs are fun all my political opinions are correct.

(cc photo by Randy son of Robert)

One difference between the House and Baucus versions of health reform that hasn’t gotten much play is the way they treat age differently. In both cases, Exchange insurers will be able to charge different premiums according to how old you are. But in the House this will be restricted to a 2:1 ratio whereas Baucus would leave a larger 5:1 ratio. Baucus’ approach is better for young people and the House approach, which would basically force young people to offer a larger subsidy to our elders, is better for older people. Since this should balance out over the lifecycle, I don’t think there’s a huge fairness question either way. But I’m not very clear on what policy objective doing it the House’s way achieves.

You might say that the problem with Baucus’ bill is that it may cause financial hardship for some people aged 50-64. And, indeed, it might. But the issue here is the relatively stingy subsidies. Taking the Baucus framework and adding the House’s age provisions just pushes the financial hardship off the fiftysomethings and onto twentysomethings. Conversely, if you took the House framework and added Baucus’ treatment of age you’d just wind up with fewer young people needing subsidies and more subsidies going to older people. The net distributive impact is all going to be located among non-subsidized people in the top 60 percent or so of the income distribution, so I don’t see what problem shifting funds from young prosperous people to old prosperous people is supposed to solve.

I do think, however, that it might create a new problem, namely that having such a flat premium schedule is going to create weird incentives for insurers. The way the House is doing it, if for some reason lots of old people want to buy your firm’s insurance policy you’re going to lose a ton of money. Conversely, if lots of young people want to buy your firm’s insurance policy you’re going to earn a fortune. That means it would be in your interests to cultivate a reputation as offering poor services to older people; something that can probably be most easily achieved by actually offering poor services to older people. Allowing insurers to have a steeper price gradient reduces their incentive to try to actively manage the age compensation of their risk pool. I think the House leadership may think they’ve solved this problem by including a public option that won’t have the same profit incentives as for-profit insurers. But in reality this might lead for-profit insurers to just market very heavily to the young and hope to dump all the older unprofitable clients onto the public option, which would then go broke (it’s not eligible for taxpayer subsidies) leading to some kind of crisis.

Greg Sargent comments on a Rasmussen poll about former presidents:

Carter edges both Bushes by double-digits. The poll was taken last month, well before Carter’s race remark the other day. But the numbers are noteworthy, because even before this week, Carter has generally been assumed by some Dems to be terrifyingly controversial, largely because of his writings on the Middle East.

With the focus on the Mideast heating up again, Carter will likely be making more news, and the Obama administration will likely be distancing itself from him again, as it did yesterday. Worth recalling that the public doesn’t take all that dim a view of the stuff he’s done since leaving the White House.

Yes and no. The problem is that this poll result is perfectly consistent with 55 percent of the public thinking that Carter is history’s greatest monster. He’s clearly done more—and more controversial—stuff than any other ex-president. So it’s easy to imagine him being both the most liked and the most disliked. What’s more, there’s the whole question of preference intensity. Most Americans, according to surveys I’ve seen, have perfectly reasonable views about the Middle East. But the people who care most about the Israeli-Arab conflict tend to be the people with the least-reasonable views—Christian Zionists and the Jewish right.

I think this is a pretty foolish Defamer post:

Remember when sci-fi movies were about blowing up aliens and attacking Godzilla? Those days are gone, my friend. Thanks to Battlestar Galactica and District 9, the genre now exists to please the intelligentsia. The latest victim, the Star Trek sequel. [...]

Just as Battlestar used a bunch of humans wandering through space to tell a story about the Iraq war and religion and D9 shed a new light on apartheid, racism, and awesome alien space suits, Star Trek now wants in on the contemporary allegory racket. We must say that is pretty rad. We love to blow shit up, but when you blow shit up with purpose, you get the thrill of blowing shit up, but don’t have the residual guilt of watching something totally idiotic. The way aliens heads explode when you run over them with a warthog in Halo can be like, a metaphor for the way people’s head explode when they are run over by a tank in the Middle East. Or something like that.

The idea that the Trek franchise needed to rip off the idea of “issues” oriented science fiction from BSG borders on the absurd. Taking on the issues has always been a core element. Original Series episodes like “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” about a planet torn apart by race hatred between people who are white on the left and black on the right and people who are black on the left and white on the right are all a good deal more heavy-handed and didactic than anything you’ll find in these more modern episodes. And yet part of the genius of Gene Roddenberry’s quasi-utopian vision is precisely that it attempts to offer us a plausible vision of a better tomorrow in order to better illustrate the issues of today.

And, obviously, Star Trek IV is about environmental degradation, Star Trek VI is about the end of the Cold War and a lot of the basic premises of TNG are about the end of the Cold War. The idea of the Federation itself is an embrace of semi-pacifism and world federalism, and the various shows are chock-a-block with critiques of capitalism and advocacy of democratic socialism.