The Wyden-Ryan Plan: Déjà Vu All Over Again

 

Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton. He has some financial interests in the health care field.

After wrestling for decades and in futility with the triple problems facing health care in the United States – unsustainable spending growth, lack of timely access to health care for millions of uninsured Americans and highly varied quality of care – any new proposal to address these problems is likely to be a recycled old idea.

The widely discussed new proposal from Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, to restructure the federal Medicare program for the elderly is no exception.

The idea – generally known as “managed competition” — goes as far back as 1971, when Dr. Paul Ellwood and his colleagues at the Health Services Research Center of the American Rehabilitation Foundation injected it into President Nixon’s attempt at health reform.

Paul Krugman: Europe's Austerity Measures May Guarantee Recession

Thursday 22 December 2011

European leaders earlier this month announced a plan that, on the face of it, was pure nonsense.

Faced with a crisis that is mainly about the balance of payments,with fiscal crisis as a secondary consequence, they supposedly committed everyone to severe fiscal austerity, which would guarantee a recession while leaving the real problem unaddressed.

The electoral college is a relic. It's time to let the people choose the president

A move to elect the US president by popular vote and to sideline the electoral college is gaining momentum – and it's making some lawmakers very angry indeed

Jason Farago
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 December 2011 10.44 EST

It's nearly 2012, and the national horse-race polls that the media adore during primary season will soon recede. Instead it will be time, once more, for colored maps that divide the United States into red states, blue states, and swing states. Only the last category gets much attention, of course. The Washington Post cuttingly titles its own 13 states that matter." Sorry if you live in one of the other, irrelevant 37.

We all know what's to blame for the writing off of most Americans in the presidential election. The fault lies with the electoral college, that relic that means contests are decided state by state. It's ungainly, it's unpopular, it has a dirty, slavery-inflected history, and it's manifestly unfair. But attempts to reform it haven't made much headway since the passage of the 12th amendment two centuries ago. At least until recently.

How many more crashes before we fix the economy?

COMMENTARY | December 23, 2011
 
Some lessons were learned from the 2008 economic collapse but few reforms have been implemented; moneyed resistance is too powerful and stubborn. So a good question is: When will we fix the system? After the next crisis? The one after that? We sure aren’t fixing it now.

By Martin Lobel
Lobel@LNLlaw.com

“First, do no harm” was the mantra that Tim Geithner and Larry Summers used to rebuild Wall Street the way it was and to protect it from the structural reform proposals of Paul Volcker and others. The result is that, after trillions of taxpayers dollars, we are in the same position we were in before the recent economic meltdown, except that now all the big banks and investment houses are “too big to fail.”

Some observers, including some political leaders, have learned from the 2008 crisis – but not enough have. Pallative reforms were passed but instead of being implemented they are, mostly, being thwarted. So the question as we move into 2012 is:  When the next crisis occurs, will we have learned our lesson? Will we fix the system after that? Because we aren’t fixing it now.

Can we afford eco-cities?

Durban, South Africa (CNN) -- Making cities greener "actually makes a lot of sense" in spite of the economic crisis, says former Irish President, Mary Robinson.

"You save money," she said, adding that the real challenge is greening cities in poorer nations, like Bangladesh, where people live in "almost impossible conditions."

Robinson was one of four leading climate change thinkers discussing how viable it is to invest in sustainable cities in a debate hosted by CNN's Robyn Curnow during the 2011 U.N. Conference on Climate Change last week in Durban.

Goodbye 'Shop Til You Drop' Mentality: Renegade Band of Economists Call for 'Degrowth' Economy

By Christine MacDonald, AlterNet
Posted on December 23, 2011, Printed on December 24, 2011

In this country, shopping is not just a national pastime. Consumer spending, which makes up about 70 percent of the economy, is a sort of patriotic duty -- never more so than in the last four years of economic malaise.

So news from the National Retail Federation that the country is on track for a record-breaking holiday shopping season -- $469.1 billion in sales, up 3.8 percent from last year -- could only be a good thing, right?

But what if all roads to prosperity don't lead to the shopping mall, as most economists would have us believe? What if, in fact, all that shopping -- and the imperative to grow corporate profits quarter after quarter and continuously expand the economy -- was actually the root of many of the problems we face today? 

GOP Voter Suppression Plan: Seven Tactics To Block Your Vote in 2012

If you live in a state where voting is becoming tougher, plan ahead to register, to get the right ID and to know where you can vote.  

December 20, 2011  |   If you are a member of a racial minority, student or young voter, working poor, elderly or disabled, your ability to vote may be a lot harder in 2012—especially if you live in states that have a history of racial repression during the Civil Rights Movement. Simply put, the Republican Party knows which segments of society helped to elect President Obama and other Democrats in 2008, knows tens of millions of these people did not vote in the 2010 midterms, and has worked very hard to stop these people from voting again next year.

Their strategy has been simple: raise the barriers by complicating the rules to register to vote, to get a ballot, to vote early, or speedily. What follows are seven major trends that will affect you if you live in a state with new rules. Republicans know that most people do not pay attention to the fine print of election law. They get excited in the final days before presidential votes. But that may not be good enough in 2012. 

How the Public Misses Out on How Fights Over Bank Regulations Affect Them

The public keeps losing and losing and losing to big finance because financiers have made an art form of using complexity, opacity, and leverage to cover their tracks.

The last example comes in an anodyne-seeming article in the Financial Times about collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs. CLOs are a structured credit product, in this case, made from leveraged (as in risky) corporate loans. Think of it as the corporate lending analogy to subprime bonds. The major differences between CLOs and RMBS are that CLOs are not secured by collateral (houses) and that CLOs turned out to be much better diversified than RMBS (the mortgage bond designers thought that a geographic mix would provide adequate diversification, since the modern US had never suffered a nation-wide housing market price decline. Whoops!)

Bankers, Billionaires Try to Form Movement Against OWS

—By Asawin Suebsaeng  |  Wed Dec. 21, 2011 9:47 AM PST

Whaddaya know? It seems the rich now want to eat the folks who want to eat the rich. Wrap your head around this Bloomberg report:

Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors' conference in New York this month into an occasion to defend wealth.

A Christmas Message From America's Rich

It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.

True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

Paul Krugman: The Post-Truth Campaign

Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”

How would this statement be received? I believe, and hope, that it would be almost universally condemned, by liberals as well as conservatives. Mr. Romney did once say that corporations are people, but he didn’t mean it literally; he supports policies that would be good for corporations and the wealthy and bad for the middle class, but that’s a long way from saying that he wants to introduce feudalism.

Why Are We Forced to Worship at the Feet of 'Mythical' Financial Markets Controlled by the Elite?

We are told to appease the market gods or face eternal financial damnation. 

 

December 20, 2011  |  The markets are “jittery,” “upset,” “skittish” and “unnerved.” They are “confident” or “unsure.” They are “demanding” that political leaders “put up or shut up.” And they are “reacting unfavorably” to Obama’s newfound populism.

 

These are just a few of the many ways financial markets are described each and every day by the media, financial players and public officials. At first it seems as if these markets are humanoids onto which we project our feelings. Yet, on closer inspection, it’s more like we have ascribed to them god-like powers. We are told to appease the market gods or face eternal financial damnation. As President Obama warned Europe recently, they must “muster the political will” to “settle markets down.”

Eliot Spitzer: Our Rallying Cry Should Be, "We Own Wall Street and We Can Stop Corporate America's Worst Behavior."

If the public exercised its ownership capacity by influencing board member selection, compensation, and political donations, then these companies would be fundamentally altered.

December 21, 2011  |  As the year ends, American politics remains mired in the agenda of the right. The House is, at least momentarily, refusing to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits—two policies genuinely beneficial to the middle class. And the presidential campaign heading into the Iowa primaries is dominated by the libertarianism of Ron Paul and the astonishing, appalling ideas—eliminate child labor laws, for instance—of Newt Gingrich.

Yes, Occupy Wall Street changed the debate for a brief spell, and, yes, President Obama harkened back to the glory days of progressivism with his Kansas speech. But in general American politics has lost sight of the most important crisis of our generation: the shrinking middle class.

Governing on Empty

Harold Meyerson

December 21, 2011

With the Tea Party in control, House Speaker John Boehner can do little but make empty promises.

he Senate, having struck its compromise, has gone home. The House, controlled by delusional Republicans, has gone home. Payroll taxes are slated to rise, and unemployment insurance is set to expire before they return in January.


The compromise wasn’t just between the two parties in the Senate, apparently. According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor met with Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell on Friday and told him they’d get the votes to pass the two-month extension deal he’d worked out with Harry Reid. Boehner and Cantor now say they made no promises, but McConnell certainly thought they did, and, as the Post story notes, “McConnell, a 27-year member of the Senate … has no history of communication errors.”

The 10 Worst Economic Ideas of 2011

Thursday, 12/22/2011 - 9:21 am by Jeff Madrick

Let’s hope the New Year brings some new ideas, because this year’s couldn’t have been much worse — or more widespread.

I was at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration this weekend and many clergy addressed the group. One nun told the crowd it was Christmas season and that it was time for something new to be born in America.

It was a nice thought, and I hope that the “something new” is good sense, because it has been a year in which some of the worst economic ideas ever have gained support and are being applied around the world.

Yellowstone transformed 15 years after the return of wolves

The study this story is based on is available in ScholarsArchive@OSU: http://hdl.handle.net/1957/25603

CORVALLIS, Ore. – On the 15th anniversary of the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, a quiet but profound rebirth of life and ecosystem health is emerging, scientists conclude in a new report.

For the first time in 70 years, the over-browsing of young aspen and willow trees has diminished as elk populations in northern Yellowstone declined and their fear of wolf predation increased. Trees and shrubs have begun recovering along some streams, providing improved habitat for beaver and fish. Birds and bears also have more food.

The Defining Issue: Not Government’s Size, but Who It’s For

The defining political issue of 2012 won’t be the government’s size. It will be who government is for.

Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government.

Did Congress Just Endorse Rendition for Americans?

You've heard about indefinite detention in the defense bill. But it also contains some eyebrow-raising language regarding the transfer of terrorist suspects to foreign countries.

—By Nick Baumann | Wed Dec. 21, 2011 3:00 AM PST

A defense spending bill that passed both houses of Congress overwhelmingly and is set to be signed by President Barack Obama as early as this week could make it easier for the government to transfer American terrorist suspects to foreign regimes and security forces.

The National Defense Authorization Act (PDF) contains a section that says the president has the power to transfer suspected members and supporters of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or "associated" groups "to the custody or control of the person's country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity."

Paul Krugman: Politifact, R.I.P.

This is really awful. Politifact, which is supposed to police false claims in politics, has announced its Lie of the Year — and it’s a statement that happens to be true, the claim that Republicans have voted to end Medicare.

The Ongoing Republican Plan to Shame the Poor

Jamelle Bouie on December 20, 2011 - 11:32am ET

 

That House Republicans are opposed to anything that could assist regular Americans is par for the course. After all, this is a class of lawmakers who voted for two budgets that would slash social spending and gut the welfare state. What’s remarkable, as seen in the current fight over extending payroll tax relief, is the extent to which House Republicans are eager to heap scorn and disdain on the poor and disadvantaged. In addition to forcing drug tests on those who receive unemployment insurance—as if recipients are prone to drug abuse and thus undeserving—House Republicans want to require GED training for anyone who receives UI and does not possess a high school diploma.

An Inconvenient Truth

By JOE NOCERA
Published: December 19, 2011

There is so much about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that we should be angry about.

In their heyday, these strange hybrids — part corporation, part government agency — were the biggest bullies in Washington, quick to bludgeon critics who dared suggest that their dual missions of maximizing profits while making homeownership affordable for low- and moderate-income Americans were incompatible. They steamrolled their regulator and pushed back at any suggestion that their capital was inadequate.

The Last Thing Medicare Needs is More Privatization

Tuesday, 12/20/2011 - 11:02 am by Richard Kirsch

 By enlarging the role of private insurers, the Ryan-Wyden Medicare plan would drive up costs and undermine effective reforms.

Americans United for Change said it best in a recent e-mail: “You can’t put lipstick on a pig,” even if a Republican and Democrat are applying the red gloss together. The big hype in federal health care politics last week was the announcement of a joint proposal to mostly-privatize Medicare from Republican House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. But all the hubbub about bipartisanship won’t mask the truth: the plan takes Medicare in the wrong direction, building on the program’s failures and undercutting its most promising reforms.

Global Savings Glut or Global Banking Glut?

Yves here. It has been striking how little commentary a BIS paper by Claudio Borio and Piti Disyatat, “Global imbalances and the financial crisis: Link or no link?” has gotten in the econoblogosphere, at least relative to its importance.
As most readers probably know, Ben Bernanke has developed and promoted the thesis that the crisis was the result of a “global savings glut,” which is shorthand for the Chinese are to blame for the US and other countries going on a primarily housing debt party. This theory has the convenient effect of exonerating the Fed. It has more than a few wee defects. As we noted in ECONNED:

The average global savings rate over the last 24 years has been 23%. It rose in 2004 to 24.9%. and fell to 23% the following year. It seems a bit of a stretch to call a one-year blip a “global savings glut,” but that view has a following. Similarly, if you look at the level of global savings and try deduce from it the level of worldwide securities issuance in 2006, the two are difficult to reconcile, again suggesting that the explanation does not lie in the level of savings per se, but in changes within securities markets.

Similarly, the global savings glut thesis cannot explain why banks created synthetic and hybrid CDOs (composed entirely or largely of credit default swaps, which means the AAA investors did not lay out cash for their position) which as we explained at some length, were the reason that supposedly dispersed risks in fact wound up concentrated in highly leveraged financial firms.

Making Citizens Enemy Combatants: Glenn Greenwald on Bradley Manning and the NDAA

Constitutional lawyer and blogger Glenn Greenwald speaks to Amy Goodman about the Manning hearings and the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. 

 

December 19, 2011  | AMY GOODMAN: We go right now to Rio, Brazil, where we’re joined by the Salon.com writer, blogger, attorney, Glenn Greenwald, who has expressed criticism of Adrian Lamo for revealing the contents of his correspondence with Manning to the military.

 

Glenn, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about what’s happening right now at Fort Meade.

Don't Blink. The DC Machine Is Killing Medicare Right Before Our Eyes

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

December 19, 2011 - 3:05pm ET

This last week we've seen how Washington's elites are able to suppress popular opinion, work against the public interest, and wrap it all up with a bow so that it looks like 'democracy in action.' It's not. What we're seeing isn't democracy, and it isn't a free press either. It's merely another cynical ploy to rob Americans of government programs they both need and want.

The latest assault is on Medicare. The "Ryan/Widen plan" is a perfect case study in the cynical workings of an antidemocratic machine - a machine whose cogs are lazy journalists, whose gears are selfish politicians, and whose levers are pulled by the wealthy and powerful.

Paul Krugman: Will China Break?

Consider the following picture: Recent growth has relied on a huge construction boom fueled by surging real estate prices, and exhibiting all the classic signs of a bubble. There was rapid growth in credit — with much of that growth taking place not through traditional banking but rather through unregulated “shadow banking” neither subject to government supervision nor backed by government guarantees. Now the bubble is bursting — and there are real reasons to fear financial and economic crisis.

Am I describing Japan at the end of the 1980s? Or am I describing America in 2007? I could be. But right now I’m talking about China, which is emerging as another danger spot in a world economy that really, really doesn’t need this right now.

California politician advocates assassination of Obama and family

Sick and idiotic--Dictynna

Michael Stone,
Democrat Examiner December 18, 2011

Facebook faux pas: California libertarian and Tea Party darling Jules Manson is caught calling for the assassination of President Barack Obama and his children.

On Sunday, many Facebook users were greeted by the shocking spectacle of a California libertarian and Ron Paul supporter by the name of Jules Manson advocating for the assassination of President Barack Obama. Manson, a failed politician, recently ran for and lost a seat on the City of Carson’s City Council last March.

The Little-Known, Inside Story About How Newt Became the Man He Is

By Max Blumenthal, Nation Books
Posted on December 18, 2011, Printed on December 19, 2011

*The following is excerpted from Max Blumenthal's book, Republican Gomorrah.

When Clinton returned to the White House for a second term, Dob­son redoubled his efforts against the Republican leadership, particularly in undermining Newt Gingrich, whom conservatives within the House Republican Conference and outside it had come to regard as chronically unreliable because of deals he had made with Clinton, despite his shutting down the federal government twice. Dobson and ­DeLay agreed that Gingrich lacked not only the lust for confrontation that they sought in a party leader but also the moral qualities to be “a friend of The Family.” Referring to the Speaker, DeLay later wrote, “Men with such secrets are not likely to sound a high moral tone at a moment of national crisis.” Throughout his career in public life, Gingrich brushed off concerns about his moral fitness as mere distractions, reflecting to journalist Gail Sheehy, “I think you can write a psychological profile of me that says I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.” Newt Gingrich was born Newt McPherson to teenaged parents. Gingrich’s mother divorced his father and married a Marine officer, who adopted him and throughout his childhood savagely beat him and his mother. (Gingrich’s half-sister, Candace, became a lesbian activist. At the moment Newt became Speaker, she became the Human Rights Campaign’s National Coming Out Project Spokesperson.) As a young man, Gingrich, fascinated with zoos and dinosaurs, longed for an illustrious career in academia. He wound up teaching history and environmental studies at West Georgia College.

Brominated battle: Soda chemical has cloudy health history

Banned in other countries, little-known ingredient sparking renewed concerns

By Brett Israel
10:45 am, December 12, 2011 Updated: 11:02 am, December 14, 2011

 

MARIETTA, Ga. — It's Monday night at the Battle & Brew, a gamer hangout in this Atlanta suburb. The crowd is slumping in chairs, ears entombed in headphones, eyes locked on flat-screen monitors and minds lost in tonight’s video game of choice: "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim."

To help stay alert all night, each man has an open can of "gamer fuel" inches from his keyboard. "I've seen some of these dudes plow through six sodas in six hours," said Brian Smawley, a regular at the gamer bar.

 

Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?

By NICHOLAS K. PEART
Published: December 17, 2011

WHEN I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.

One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”