Proponents of the health insurance “excise tax” say that if we moved to equalize the tax treatment of compensation received in the form of subsidized health insurance and compensation received in the form of cash money, that people would wind up with less-generous insurance plans and more money. Larry Mishel from EPI is not a proponent of the excise tax. And he’s written a paper (PDF) that I guess is aimed at persuading you that this “less insurance, more cash” connection is wrong.

But if that’s what he’s trying to persuade me of, I’m totally unpersuaded. That said, I agree with Kevin Drum that Mishel convincingly establishes another point which is that if you want to say that rising insurance premiums are the reason for stagnating middle class wages, you’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s true that if you look at wages and benefits together, then things don’t look as bleak if you look only at wages. But it’s still true that there’s been a large compensation slowdown for average workers. The total compensation share of the economy doesn’t really change over time, so if the highest-earners start earning a higher slice of compensation then average people start earning a smaller slice. That’s how it works.

But back to the excise tax. Austin Frakt rounds up the academic evidence that there’s a direct tradeoff between wages and insurance premiums, and it’s pretty overwhelming. And this is really common sense. Your boss wants to spend as little money as possible getting you to work for him. Subsidizing your health insurance costs money. Paying you money costs money. You extract as much total money out of him as your market bargaining power lets you do. If he’s willing to part with $65,000 in exchange for your services, he doesn’t care if that’s $55,000 in salary and $10,000 in insurance benefits or $65,000 in cash or whatever. You can bargain what you can bargain for. If the tax code makes the after-tax value of health benefits larger than the after-tax value of wages, then you have an incentive to take a relatively large share of that $65,000 in the form of insurance. If the tax code doesn’t do that, then you have an incentive to take a larger share in the form of money—money that you might, but then again might not, wind up spending on copayments or deductibles.

Suppose I proposed a law saying that if an employer buys a Vespa for an employee, then the employer can deduct that as an expense, but the employee doesn’t have to pay income tax on it. I don’t think it would be controversial to say that this law is going to increase the number of Vespas people own, but isn’t going to increase the total share of GDP that goes to employee compensation.

Spencer Ackerman explained to me last night that it’s not actually true that a spelling mixup is what caused Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to be approved to fly to the US. And now he can explain it to you. Nevertheless, the spelling mixup did happen, and this kind of thing happens pretty frequently. Noah Schactman vents:

This is a problem that commercial software firms largely solved years ago. (Try typing “Noa Schactmann” into Google, and see what comes up.) How it could persist in the CT community, I just don’t understand.

Alternatively:

But there’s another thing about these persistent spelling issues that bugs me. The problem is oftentimes one of transliteration. There’s some sequence of Arabic characters that’s sometimes rendered into English as “al-Qaeda” and sometimes as “al-Qaida.” And some sequence that’s sometimes “Osama” and sometimes “Usama.” And lord knows the dictator of Libya’s name has been transliterated a whole bunch of different ways. It should be possible to resolve a lot of this confusion by just making sure that the databases (or what have you) include a field in which names are inputted in Arabic (or Cyrillic or Chinese) characters. Americans will want to deal with a transliteration on the page, but that way when you had a computer search through things or try to match files, the back end could use the names spelled out in Arabic where you won’t have all these alternatives.

It’s almost never good for a political party when one of its incumbent members decides to retire. And yet since human lifespans are finite, nobody can stick around forever. Consequently, it would make the most strategic sense for a party to try to swap out its incumbents when it’s in a position of political strength, so as to ensure that it has the maximum number of not-read-to-retire incumbents in place to help weather the storm. But as Andrew Gelman points out, instead the reverse happens:

As expected, it was a good year for the Democrats, and so it was a logical time for them, as a party, to make some investments in new, young candidates. 2008 was the time they should’ve encourage lots of their incumbents to retire, because in that year they could win a lot of these districts without needing the incumbency advantage (estimated to be about 10% of the vote, i.e., enough to take you from 50% to 60%). Conversely, 2008 was the time for the Republican Party to hold on to what it had, and to keep all their incumbents in, trying to hold out until 2010 when the pendulum might swing back in their favor. But we didn’t see that—actually, something like 30 Republican House members retired in 2008. Republicans retiring, Democrats sticking around—that was a recipe for big Democratic gains. But then in 2010, or 2014, or whatever year it is when the Democrats get wiped out—then a bunch of their incumbents will probably retire, and boy will the Democrats wished they had put in younger incumbents back in 2008 when they had a chance!

It’s not so hard to figure out why this happens. But it’s a reminder that American political parties are somewhat strange beasts. They attract enormous loyalty from millions of followers around the country, but can’t really compel their key personnel to act in the interests of the larger organization.