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Yglesias

The Agony of Gordon Brown

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 5, 2009 at 3:13 pm

200px-gordon_brown_davos_2008_crop

Today is, to be honest, a pretty slow news day in US politics. But it’s a huge news day in UK politics. Basically, Gordon Brown’s Labour Party had been unpopular. Then came the financial crisis, which has really hammered the UK, where London’s financial sector is a huge portion of the economy. Then on top of that has come some scandals about MPs abusing their expenses. And then most recently, Labour got absolutely wiped out in local elections. So now a bunch of ministers are resigning, Brown is reshuffling his cabinet and vowing to fight on, but realistically coming under increasing pressure to step down so that Labour can try to find some way to put a new face forward rather than march onward into what looks to be certain electoral apocalypse.

At any rate, spending some time reading about this is a powerful reminder of what the emerging information ecology looks like. The cable networks that we keep on in the office seem to have been covering this story not at all, even though it’s clearly more newsworthy than the latest iteration of “hey! look at what Rush did!” But that’s the way it goes on cable. Meanwhile, thanks to the internet I’m able to read about UK news from BBC, The Guardian, British blogs, etc., and get far more detailed information about what’s happening than I ever would have been before. Banal, I know, but I think worth stepping back and thinking about.

Meanwhile, back to the UK, I suppose from an outsider’s perspective I wonder if at some point there can be a tipping point for the Liberal Democrats. I imagine a lot of people who might have some love for the Lib Dems nevertheless don’t want to “waste” a vote on a third party. But if it’s absolutely clear that the Tories will win no matter what, then that incentive seems to melt away and Labour will start polling even worse.

Health

Betsy McCaughey’s Voodoo Health Economics

By Igor Volsky on Jun 5, 2009 at 3:10 pm

betsymBetsy McCaughey’s new editorial in the Wall Street Journal argues that the President’s recent Council of Economic Advisers report — which found that slowing health care spending by 1.5 percentage points (from 6 percent a year to 4.5 percent) would create “as many as 500,000 jobs a year” and increase “annual income for the average family of four by $2,600” — is simply “untrue”:

On Monday President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers released a report called “The Economic Case for Health Care Reform.” The report argues that Americans must curb their consumption of medical care in order to avoid soaring federal deficits, unsustainable burdens on family budgets, and damage to the economy. All of these claims are untrue.

McCaughey argues that efforts to lower health care spending would expose “the nation to medical scarcity,” resulting in “a European-like system where medical care is limited.” She deliberately confuses slowing the growth of health care spending with slashing existing spending. As a result, she’s able to claim that “you may be able to keep your health plan — as politicians have promised — but you’ll find a lower standard of care when you need it.”

But this argument isn’t about Americans not receiving care when they need it, it’s about improving our value of care. More services do not necessarily translate into better health care. In fact, they often produce worse outcomes. A recent Business Roundtable study found that compared to France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, U.S. workers and employers receive 23 percent less value from our health care system than the citizens of these other nations.

We pay for volume and not value; quantity and not quality and McCaughey is trying to conflate the Democrats’ efforts to increase system efficiency with cuts in needed medical services. Simplifying medical forms or doing a better job managing chronic diseases (thus negating the need for more expansive treatments down the road), however, is not the same as denying treatment for a heart attack. In fact, every other major industry has long abandoned the use of paper records or performing numerous unnecessary or duplicated services.

McCaughey buries the distinction and attempts to diminish the severity of the health care crisis. Health care costs are not skyrocketing, families are not burdened by growing premiums, and “cutting annual increases in health-care spending by 1.5% a year” will endanger jobs, she argues. For most families, things are getting better, not worse. “Food and energy together have taken up a declining share of Americans’ spending each year since 1960… [allowing Americans] to spend more on health care.” Never mind the gap between wage and premium growth, the growing number of uninsured, or the increasing number of medically-related bankruptcies.

Since health care costs are increasing at a lower rate in 2007 than in 1980, they are of no concern to the nation’s financial stability. In fact, Medicare’s increasing spending can be fixed by “asking wealthy seniors to pay more or inching the eligibility age upward two months a year until it reaches age 70 in 2043″ — a proposal which, in reality, would save little money, since the young elderly are healthier than older and disabled Medicare beneficiaries.

Politics

Coleman urges Republicans to be more tech-savvy by competing on the ‘ethernet.’

By Guest Blogger on Jun 5, 2009 at 3:09 pm

Over the past few months, improving their web presence has become a hot topic for conservatives. At a debate earlier this year, candidates for the chairmanship of the RNC boasted about the number of followers they had on Twitter and friends on Facebook. Yesterday, in an interview at the Conservative Heartland Leadership Council in St. Paul, former Minnesota Republican senator Norm Coleman inadvertently highlighted the “tech gap” between conservatives and progressives when he encouraged conservatives to compete with progressives on the “ethernet“:

“In the end, we need to compete, as I’ve said before, we need to compete in each and every kind of forum,” said Coleman. “And whether it’s on the ground traditionally, or today it’s in — it’s in the ethernet. It’s in the — you know, it’s online. It’s in the blogs, it’s Twitter, it’s Facebook, and the next iteration.”

Watch it:

(HT: Minnesota Independent)

– Ben Bergmann

Politics

McHugh on DADT: I have no interest in excluding people ‘otherwise qualified to serve.’

By Victor Zapanta on Jun 5, 2009 at 2:37 pm

cnn0602091206113 After President Obama named Rep. John McHugh (R-NY) as his nominee for Secretary of the Army, progressives have been working to better understand McHugh’s current position on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the ban on gays serving openly in the military. While McHugh still intends to refrain from publicizing his own personal view on the issue until his confirmation hearings, yesterday in an interview with Roll Call, he hinted that he believes it’s time to repeal the ban:

“I have no interest as either a Member of Congress or as … secretary of the Army to exclude by some categorization a group of people otherwise qualified to serve,” McHugh told Roll Call.

He noted that the Armed Services Committee has not considered the policy “in any formal way” since 1993. In the meantime, “certainly, the recruiting-age population’s views have changed on that whole matter,” he said.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on Tuesday that McHugh shared Obama’s commitment to repealing the ban.

Update

A new Gallup poll finds that 69 percent of Americans — including 58 percent of self-identified conservatives and 60 percent of those who attend church weekly — now support allowing gays to serve openly in the military.

Related Posts

Yglesias

The Bleak Jobs Outlook

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 5, 2009 at 2:26 pm

David Madland’s analysis of the latest jobs numbers reflects the fact that notwithstanding improvements in the rate of change the situation is still very bad and this chart remains alarming:

job_losses_by_recession-1

Of course for people who haven’t lost their jobs, 401(k)s look a lot better than they did in January, and thanks to declining energy prices real wages have actually risen for those who remain employed. What’s more, Social Security checks got a big boost thanks to last year’s high oil prices. But it’s not really clear that this good-news-within-bad-news can hold up with energy prices back on the rise. Which leaves us with the bad news.

Climate Progress

Obama: Global Warming Is A ‘Potentially Cataclysmic Disaster’

By Brad Johnson on Jun 5, 2009 at 2:06 pm

Obama in DresdenSpeaking bluntly on the international stage on World Environment Day, President Barack Obama said this morning that the world has to “make some tough decisions” to forestall the “potentially cataclysmic disaster” of global warming. Obama made the remarks during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dresden, Germany before traveling to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Obama made it clear he believes the Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation will allow the United States to to retake the lead on global warming:

In terms of climate change, ultimately the world is going to need targets that it can meet. It can’t be general, vague approaches. We’re going to have to make some tough decisions and take concrete actions if we are going to deal with a potentially cataclysmic disaster. And we are seeing progress in Congress around energy legislation that would set up for the first time in the United States a cap and trade system. That process is moving forward in ways that I think if you had asked political experts two or three months ago would have seemed impossible. So I’m actually more optimistic than I was about America being able to take leadership on this issue, joining Europe, which over the last several years has been ahead of us on this issue.

Continuing, Obama explained that the “large carbon footprints” of the United States and Europe — 25 tons of greenhouse gases per person and 10.6 tons respectively — make it difficult to convince the developing world to take action:

As I told Chancellor Merkel, unless the United States and Europe, with our large carbon footprints, per capita carbon footprints, are willing to take some decisive steps, it’s going to be very difficult for us to persuade countries that on a per capita basis at least are still much less wealthy, like China or India, to take the steps that they’re going to need to take in controlling carbon emissions. So we are very committed to working together and hopeful that we can arrive in Copenhagen having displayed that commitment in concrete ways.

China and India’s carbon footprints, by way of contrast, are 5.7 and 2.2 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent per person, according to the Yale Environmental Performance Index.

Climate Progress

Exclusive: New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice, brushes off the “breathtaking ignorance” of blogs like WattsUpWithThat

By Joe Romm on Jun 5, 2009 at 2:01 pm

I interviewed by email Dr. Mark Serreze, recently named director of The National Snow and Ice Data Center.  Partly I wanted him to explain his “death spiral” metaphor for Arctic ice (see NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did”).

And partly I wanted his reaction to the blog, WattsUpWithThat, the quintessential victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS), who called his appointment “Bad News.”

But first, let’s look at where the Arctic sea ice extent stands as of June 3 [click for update]:

nsidc-Arctic ice extent

Note:  The satellites only measure ice area.  Since Arctic ice has been thinning sharply in the past two years, we might be at record low volume for early June — see North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely.”

NSIDC reported Wednesday, the “Melt season gains momentum“:

Read more

Yglesias

Better Living Through Stable Oil Prices

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 5, 2009 at 1:44 pm

Goldman Sachs says that as world economic growth resumes, we’ll see $85 a barrel oil this year and possibly $100 a barrel oil in 2010. That, as I’ve worried before, would stand a good chance of just see-sawing us back into recession. Then the price of oil would plummet again, and once again investment in new oil production and oil alternatives alike would collapse. Could there be a better way? Brad Plumer thinks so:

Another idea—which I mumbled about in my TNRtv video yesterday, but which was originally floated by Jason Bordoff and Gilbert Metcalf here—would be for the United States to implement some sort of variable oil tax that would keep the domestic price of oil more or less stable: When world oil prices rise, the tax decreases; when oil prices plunge, the tax increases. That would help create a predictable price signal to encourage conservation and alternatives to oil, and raise revenue for energy projects (not to mention send fewer dollars overseas). It’s a slight twist on the gas tax idea, and sure seems preferable to the current course.

I think this is a good idea. I think it’s very confusing and unproductive for the US government to be, on the one hand, talking about how we need more fuel efficient cars and then on the other hand acting as if we have an implicit policy objective of making oil as cheap as possible. Meanwhile, we don’t have enough revenue to meet our transportation funding needs. Under the circumstances, it would be very useful to set an explicit medium-term price target, with the price controlled by a variable tax, and the revenue from the tax used to fund our transportation needs.

Back in the tragic real world of actual politics, however, apparently congressional Democrats are terrified of the mere prospect of Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-WI) so much as mentioning an increase in gas taxes. Since the public appears to have an extremely firm and totally wrongheaded opinion on this issue, one additional potential bonus of Plumer’s ideas is that the public also seems to have no concept whatsoever of how tax incidence works. Thus it’s possible that if you could reformulate the basic gas tax concept as not a tax on gasoline that consumers pay at the pump, but a tax on oil paid by evil oil companies, that you could get further with it politically even though the actual impact would not really be different.

Politics

Burr Defends Mint-Flavored Suckable ‘Tobacco Lollipops,’ Claims They’re Not Being Marketed To Children

By Guest Blogger on Jun 5, 2009 at 1:40 pm

On May 27, CNN’s Carol Costello reported on tobacco company R.J. Reynolds new dissolvable “smokeless products.” Noting that critics call them “tobacco lollipops” that are aimed at getting “kids hooked on nicotine,” Costello reported that “R.J. Reynolds will soon test three new products — Camel sticks that dissolve as you suck them, minty tobacco strips that look like breath strips, and orbs — flavored, dissolvable tablets that some say look and taste exactly like candy.”

On the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) came to the tobacco company’s defense, claiming that it wasn’t trying to deceive anyone; it’s CNN’s fault for labeling Camel Orbs as candy. Burr charged that CNN “mischaracterized the product” because “it’s not candy flavored”:

BURR: But when CNN did their story. Take a guess on the angle that they took. They labeled it as candy. Candy! Even though it’s not candy flavored. They said it was candy. … No, they said it was candy. That’s where they labeled it. … They portrayed Reynolds America as being deceptive and luring children. No candy. It’s not going in the candy section. It’s in the tobacco section where smokeless and stick products is.

Later in his speech, Burr responded to Sen. Jeff Merkley’s (D-OR) criticism that some of the dissolvable tobacco products are in containers shaped like cell phones to attract kids. “Let me assure you, Mr. President, if a cell phone doesn’t work, children don’t want it,” said Burr. Watch it:

While Burr might claim that the Orbs aren’t “candy-flavored,” the fact is that they come in “mint and cinnamon flavors” known as “fresh” and “mellow.” Additionally, the tobacco industry has a well-documented history of using flavored tobacco to market their products to children:

Documents from the tobacco industry also contradict these claims. A report from R.J. Reynolds in 1985 stated: “Sweetness can impart a different delivery taste dimension, which younger adult smokers may be receptive to, as evidenced by their taste wants in other product areas.” A Brown & Williamson report from 1972 suggested consideration of developing cola-flavored and apple-flavored cigarettes. The report also suggested a sweet-flavored cigarette and stated: “It’s a well-known fact that teenagers like sweet products. Honey might be considered.” If flavored products were appealing to youth then, what has changed to make them less appealing to youth now?

Burr’s speech today follows his earlier claims that regulating tobacco by the FDA would contradict the agency’s mission to protect public health since there is no healthy way to use tobacco. Burr, whose hometown Winston-Salem is also the home of R.J. Reynolds, is the second-highest recipient of campaign contributions from Big Tobacco.

– Ben Bergmann

Politics

Bye-Bye Satyam

By ThinkProgress on Jun 5, 2009 at 1:18 pm

satyamphoto4ThinkProgress recently bid farewell to our good friend and colleague, Satyam Khanna. For more than two years, Satyam has tirelessly scoured every corner of the Internets to dig up interesting and insightful posts for ThinkProgress. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor slow news days could stop Satyam. A look at some of his posts:

McCain To Deliver Keynote Speech For Creationists [Link]

Fox News Sinks To New Low, Repeatedly Reports Parody Story As Actual News [Link]

Malkin: Sally Field Is The Type Of Mom Who ‘Buys Her Teenager Beer And Condoms On Prom Night’ [Link]

Rep. King Decries ‘Assault On Christmas,’ Calls On Americans To ‘Stand Up’ And ‘Worship Christ’ [Link]

Bush Rejects McCain’s ‘100-Year’ Occupation Of Iraq: ‘That’s A Long Time’ [Link]

Bush: ‘I Don’t Give A Darn’ What Americans Think Of Me [Link]

(You can read all of Satyam’s posts here.)

Satyam is off to law school now. We’ll miss you, Satyam — you’ll always be a part of our team!

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