Welcome to The WonkLine, a daily 10 a.m. roundup of the latest news about health care, the economy, national security, immigration and climate policy. This is what we’re reading. Tell us what you found in the comments section below, and subscribe to the RSS feed. You can now follow The Wonk Room on Twitter, where we will be live-tweeting the Senate health care debate. Also, the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson will be blogging and tweeting from Copenhagen on the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Economy
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker “visited nine cities in five countries in the past eight weeks to warn that bankers and regulators ‘have not come anywhere close to responding with necessary vigor’ to the worst economic crisis in 70 years.” Will Volcker win in the end?
In a “major milestone in the year-long effort to rescue the American financial system,” Citigroup and Wells Fargo will pay back their TARP funds, the last major lenders to do so.
Via The Stash, Mark Aguiar and Mark Bils of the University of Rochester find that “consumption inequality increased by 33 percent between 1980 and 2007, approximately the same as the change in income inequality.”
Immigration
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) will introduce his comprehensive immigration reform today, though some congressional analysts “see rough sailing ahead for the legislative effort on immigration.”
Yesterday, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional and privacy rights of people suspected of being undocumented immigrants were violated when authorities “used tax returns to try to build hundreds of identity-theft cases against them.”
Despite the fact that most Latinos are U.S.-born, a new report finds that news media, politicians and Latino-advocacy organizations “lump together the tens of millions of people with Latin American ancestry” and “pigeonhole Latinos by their ethnicity and physical appearance.”
Climate Change
“If we don’t get it right we are all done for,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu says of efforts to combat climate change. “This is not crying wolf. This is the only world we have.”
“The battle against climate change will be won or lost in cities,” said David Miller, mayor of Toronto, Canada alongside Mayor Bloomberg of New York and 80 other cities. “While nations talk, cities are acting to fight climate change.”
President Obama called Prime Ministers Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh “to help reach robust agreement at the Leaders summit later this week in Copenhagen.”
Health Care
“Drugmakers intensified their lobbying push Monday against a popular proposal to allow Americans to buy cheaper drugs from other countries, one of several heated disputes that have bogged down negotiations over a heath-care reform bill.”
Democrats have agreed to “close the annual gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage known as the ‘doughnut hole.’ The gap leaves beneficiaries to pay for their own medicine after they have received $2,700 worth of covered drugs.”
The Wall Street Journal profiles Sen. Ron Wyden’s efforts to offer amendments that would “reward consumers for lowering their health costs.”
National Security
“Demands by the United States for Pakistan to crack down on the strongest Taliban warrior in Afghanistan, Siraj Haqqani, whose fighters pose the biggest threat to American forces, have been rebuffed by the Pakistani military, according to Pakistani military officials and diplomats.”
The Hill reports, “The House is expected to pass tough new sanctions on Iran easily this week, but the Senate may not find the time to approve its version of the legislation before year’s end. Lawmakers could vote as early as Tuesday on new restrictions imposed on companies that provide gasoline to Iran, according to a House Democratic leadership aide.”
“At least 20 people, including 5 women, were killed Tuesday when a car bomb ripped through a marketplace in the central Pakistani town of Dera Ghazi Khan.”
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