South Capitol Street

Also, more “investment.”

Apparently, the White House has forgotten the lesson of the Beer Summit and the fallout from Obama’s ignorance in his SCOTUS SOTU Scolding last year. That lesson should have been that the President should either wait to see the evidence and the law before opining on legal matters outside of his jurisdiction, or better yet, […]

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Also, more “investment.”

Apparently, the White House has forgotten the lesson of the Beer Summit and the fallout from Obama’s ignorance in his SCOTUS SOTU Scolding last year. That lesson should have been that the President should either wait to see the evidence and the law before opining on legal matters outside of his jurisdiction, or better yet, […]

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Silly endings.

Happy endings? Yes, I have heard the term before in connection with so-called “massages,” mainly from Curb Your Enthusiasm (mentioned here by Mika Brzezinski in her own defense) and The Mind of the Married Man, which practically turned it into a series-long theme.  The cover of New York Magazine referenced how Barack Obama  “rewrote much […]

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Last week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) called for “elements” of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s radical “Roadmap for America’s Future” — which purports to balance the budget via draconian cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — to be included in the 2011 budget. Cantor’s call came after the Republican leadership spent the last congressional session backing away from Ryan’s plan.

On Meet the Press yesterday, the garbled message from the GOP continued, with Cantor telling host David Gregory that the “direction in which the Roadmap goes is something we need to embrace”:

CANTOR: David, we’ve-we have a program that we have seen one of our members, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee, put together called the “Roadmap.” And he and Kevin McCarthy and I wrote a book together, and in that book we reserved a chapter for a discussion about Social Security, about Medicare, and how we can begin to at least discuss to do that. […]

GREGORY: How about-and the irony of Paul Ryan being introduced, the budget chairman, and he’s doing the response to the State of the Union, he is the one who’s proposed draconian cuts to Social Security and to Medicare and Republicans don’t stand behind him.

CANTOR: David, that’s not true. I just told you that we put a chapter in our book about it because the direction in which the Roadmap goes is something we need to embrace.

Watch it:

Gregory repeatedly pressed Cantor on which aspects of the Roadmap he wants to implement — including cutting Social Security benefits via privatization and a raise in the retirement age — but Cantor refused to specifically endorse anything. For the record, in addition to gutting Social Security, the Roadmap also calls for privatizing Medicare and implementing a tax reform package that manages to raise taxes on 90 percent of Americans and still lose $ 2 trillion in revenue over ten years due to dramatic tax reductions for the wealthiest Americans.

Under the Roadmap, effective tax rates will be higher on the middle class than for millionaires. Not only that, but the Roadmap would actually fail to stem the growing national debt. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, under the Roadmap, “the debt would continue to grow in relation to the size of the economy for at least 40 more years — reaching over 175 percent of GDP by 2050. Even by 2080, the debt would still equal about 100 percent of GDP.”

It’s possible that Cantor — like his and Ryan’s co-author, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — doesn’t actually understand what the Roadmap would mean in practice. But the likelier story is that the Republicans would love to implement the Roadmap, but understand that such draconian cuts would be immensely unpopular, so they continually mention the document while leaving aside all of its specifics.

Wonk Room

Last week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) called for “elements” of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s radical “Roadmap for America’s Future” — which purports to balance the budget via draconian cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — to be included in the 2011 budget. Cantor’s call came after the Republican leadership spent the last congressional session backing away from Ryan’s plan.

On Meet the Press yesterday, the garbled message from the GOP continued, with Cantor telling host David Gregory that the “direction in which the Roadmap goes is something we need to embrace”:

CANTOR: David, we’ve-we have a program that we have seen one of our members, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee, put together called the “Roadmap.” And he and Kevin McCarthy and I wrote a book together, and in that book we reserved a chapter for a discussion about Social Security, about Medicare, and how we can begin to at least discuss to do that. […]

GREGORY: How about-and the irony of Paul Ryan being introduced, the budget chairman, and he’s doing the response to the State of the Union, he is the one who’s proposed draconian cuts to Social Security and to Medicare and Republicans don’t stand behind him.

CANTOR: David, that’s not true. I just told you that we put a chapter in our book about it because the direction in which the Roadmap goes is something we need to embrace.

Watch it:

Gregory repeatedly pressed Cantor on which aspects of the Roadmap he wants to implement — including cutting Social Security benefits via privatization and a raise in the retirement age — but Cantor refused to specifically endorse anything. For the record, in addition to gutting Social Security, the Roadmap also calls for privatizing Medicare and implementing a tax reform package that manages to raise taxes on 90 percent of Americans and still lose $ 2 trillion in revenue over ten years due to dramatic tax reductions for the wealthiest Americans.

Under the Roadmap, effective tax rates will be higher on the middle class than for millionaires. Not only that, but the Roadmap would actually fail to stem the growing national debt. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, under the Roadmap, “the debt would continue to grow in relation to the size of the economy for at least 40 more years — reaching over 175 percent of GDP by 2050. Even by 2080, the debt would still equal about 100 percent of GDP.”

It’s possible that Cantor — like his and Ryan’s co-author, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — doesn’t actually understand what the Roadmap would mean in practice. But the likelier story is that the Republicans would love to implement the Roadmap, but understand that such draconian cuts would be immensely unpopular, so they continually mention the document while leaving aside all of its specifics.

Wonk Room

Seeing as the Freakonomics people were kind enough to link to my list of five recommended books, I’ll return the favor and comment on a remark from Levitt, who said:

Nobody in their right mind votes because they think they’re going to affect the outcome of an election. If you look over the last hundred years of, say, elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, I think there’s been maybe one [very close] election that’s been decided by votes. And in the modern era, elections that are close are always decided by the courts. There’s always litigation — look at what happened with Bush against Gore. So in no meaningful way can you say that your vote will ever decide an election. The reasons for voting have to be something very different: it’s fun, your wife will love you more if you do it, it makes you feel like a proud American — but never should anyone delude themselves into thinking that the vote they cast will ever decide an election. … Just about anything you do with your time would be more productive [than voting].

I’ve discussed this before (see also the string of entries here), so this time I’ll keep it brief. Levitt is making a couple of mistakes:

1. At a purely technical level, it’s not true that litigation of elections means that a single vote can’t matter. Most elections are not litigated, and your vote can be the one that makes the election close enough to send it to the courts. Under any reasonable model, the probability that your vote determines the election is the same whether or not the courts are involved, and you can show this by adding up the probability of any vote margin being decisive. For a mathematical derivation, see page 674 of our article in the British Journal of Political Science.

2. We estimate the probability of your vote being decisive in the presidential election as about 1 in a million, at best. (See, for example, our paper in Economic Inquiry.) But-and this is a big “but”-if your vote does swing the election, this could be a big deal. From the voter’s standpoint, a national election is like a lottery: there is a very very small chance that your vote can matter, but if it does, you can get a big payoff. In this case, it’s not a personal payoff; rather, it’s the social payoff of making the world a better place (as you see it). We discuss this in our article, “Voting as a rational choice: why and how people vote to improve the well-being of others,” in Rationality and Society (see also this shorter version published in the Economist’s Voice).

If your vote is decisive, it will make a difference for 300 million people. If you think your preferred candidate could bring the equivalent of a $ 50 improvement in the quality of life to the average American-not an implausible hope, given the size of the Federal budget and the impact of decisions in foreign policy, health, the courts, and other areas-you’re now buying a $ 1.5 billion lottery ticket. With this payoff, a 1 in 10 million chance of being decisive isn’t bad odds.

And many people do see it that way. Surveys show that voters choose based on who they think will do better for the country as a whole, rather than their personal betterment. Indeed, when it comes to voting, it is irrational to be selfish, but if you care how others are affected, it’s a smart calculation to cast your ballot, because the returns to voting are so high for everyone if you are decisive. Voting and vote choice (including related actions such as the decision to gather information in order to make an informed vote) are rational in large elections only to the extent that voters are not selfish.

3. Levitt says: “Just about anything you do with your time would be more productive [than voting]“: Define “productive.” Is playing chess productive? Going to the movies? Sledding? Etc.

That said, I agree with Levitt’s point that there are a lot of other reasons for voting besides affecting the election. Levitt, Dubner, and I live in New York and Illinois, where any vote has an extremely low probability of determining the presidential election. (First off, it’s highly unlikely that New York or Illinois will be so close that one vote can make a difference; second, if either of those states is tied, we’re probably in an electoral landslide, in which case swinging either of these states’ vote won’t change the Electoral College winner.) I vote anyway. So I’m certainly not claiming that rational decision making is the only reason or even the most important reason to vote. What I’m saying is that it can be rational to vote. “Rationality” does not have to equal “selfishness.”

I’d like to add one more thing. You’ve all heard about low voter turnout in America, but, among well-educated, older white people, turnout is around 90% in presidential elections. Some economists treat this as a source of amusement-and, sure, I’d be the first to admit that well-educated, older white people have done a lot of damage to this country-but it’s a funny thing . . . Usually economists tend not to question the actions of this particular demographic. I’m not saying that the high turnout of these people (e.g., me) is evidence that voting is rational. But I would hope that it would cause some economists to think twice before characterizing voting as irrational or laughable.

P.S. I don’t mind that Levitt doesn’t want to vote, and I’m not saying that it’s rational for everyone or even most people to vote, and it’s fine for Levitt to present arguments against voting, but I don’t think it’s so great for them to him to use his wide influence to spread the notion that “voting doesn’t make good economic sense” as if this is some sort of absolute truth. I think it is far more consistent with the best principles of Freakonomics to try to understand people’s behavior, not to snarkily dismiss it as not making sense.

P.S. Joe Bafumi, Aaron Edlin, Gary King, Noah Kaplan, Jonathan Katz, and Nate Silver participated in various parts of the research discussed above.

The Monkey Cage

Guest blogger Andy Rowell of Oil Change International, in a WonkRoom cross-post.

We are on the path to climate chaos, Big Oil has admitted. Both BP and Exxon have conceded that progress on climate change is totally insufficient to stabilize CO2 emissions. Both oil companies have just published their Energy Outlooks, and the outlook looks grim.

In a bleak prognosis for success on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, BP admits in its new Energy Outlook 2030 report, which was published yesterday, that global CO2 emissions from energy will grow an average of 1.2 percent a year through 2030. In total, BP’s chief economist Christof Ruehl predicts “to the best of our knowledge,” CO2 emissions will rise by 27 percent over the next two decades, meaning an increase of about 33bn tons. All this does not bode well for climate change, with even Bob Dudley calling the scenarios a “wake-up call“:

I need to emphasize that this is a projection, not a proposition. It is our dispassionate view of what we believe is most likely to happen on the basis of the evidence. For example, we are not as optimistic as others about progress in reducing carbon emissions. But that doesn’t mean we oppose such progress. As you probably know, BP has a 15 year record of calling for more action from governments, including the wide application of a carbon price. Our base case assumes that countries continue to make some progress on addressing climate change, based on the current and expected level of political commitment. But overall, for me personally, it is a wake-up call, not something any of us would like to see happening.

BP’s estimate is just higher than ExxonMobil, which believes that CO2 emissions will increase by 25 percent in 20 years, which, according to John Vidal, writing in The Guardian, in effect dismisses “hopes that runaway climate change can be arrested and massive loss of life prevented.”

These projections by BP and Exxon scientists are even gloomier the projections of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which projectst that energy-related CO2 emissions will “grow by 16 percent from 2009 to 2035.” Exxon argues that oil will still be king in 2030:

In 2030, fossil fuels remain the predominant energy source, accounting for nearly 80 percent of demand. Oil still leads, but natural gas moves into second place on very strong growth of 1.8% a year on average, particularly because of its position as a favored fuel for power generation. Other energy types – particularly nuclear, wind, solar and biofuels – will grow sharply, albeit from a smaller base. Nuclear and renewable fuels will see strong growth, particularly in the power-generation sector. By 2030, about 40 percent of the world’s electricity will be generated by nuclear and renewable fuels.

BP too has demand for fossil fuels rising: BP’s “base case” — or most likely projection — points to primary energy use growing by nearly 40 percent over the next twenty years, with 93% of the growth coming from non-OECD countries. The BP report argues that world energy growth over the next twenty years is expected to be dominated by emerging economies such as China, India, Russia and Brazil. Natural gas is also expected to be the fastest growing fossil fuel, with coal and oil losing market share as fossil fuels as a whole experience a slow decline in growth, falling from 83 percent to 64 percent. Coal will increase by 1.2 percent per year and by 2030 it is likely to provide virtually as much energy as oil, excluding biofuels.

There is some good news that energy diversification will continue. Between 2010 to 2030 the contribution to energy growth of renewables (solar, wind, geothermal and biofuels) is seen to increase from 5 to 18 percent.

What oil there is left is predominantly under OPEC control. OPEC’s share of global oil production is set to increase to 46%, a position not seen since 1977, the decade that saw the cartel preside over a series of oil shocks and shortages. In fact, 75 percent of all growth in oil reserves over the next two decades is expected to come from OPEC nations, which include Kuwait, Iran, Angola, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Nigeria.

– Andy Rowell writes for Oil Change International’s Price of Oil.

JR:  Of course as much as BP claims it would not like to see continued rapid growth in carbon pollution, the UK’s Independent reported last year, “Oil giant BP today signalled it would press on with a controversial Canadian tar sands project despite facing a showdown with environmental campaigners and shareholders.”

The tar sands are among the most carbon-intensive of replacements for conventional petroleum (see “Tar sands — Still dirty after all these years“):

X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.

Related Posts:

• BP proves Beyond Petroleum was greenwashing, joins “biggest global warming crime ever seen”
• Memo to all: They ain’t “oil sands.”
• EPA slams State Department tar sands pipeline study

Climate Progress

President Reagan’s First Inaugural Address.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? ….

It is time to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden. And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles there will be no compromise.

Funny how appropriate those words are today,isn’t it?

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J O S H U A P U N D I T

And Rep. Steve King (R-IA) opts for ‘much easier‘:

King appeared on MSNBC earlier, to talk about the upcoming repeal vote. The host noted, “[S]o you’re willing to go out there and repeal health care to everybody, even with a pre-existing condition, repeal the ability for kids to stay on their parents’ health plan till they’re 26 years old — don’t you think that would be met with tremendous backlash?” King replied:

“I actually don’t think it would be met with tremendous backlash. There are Republicans who support those ideas and we start tomorrow the process of replacement of ‘Obamacare.’

“It will not work for us to say there’s a certain component of Obamacare that has some merit and so therefore we want to leave that in place and repeal the rest. This is too many pages, it’s too cluttered, it’s too big an argument to allow it to turn on one or two minor things.”

In this context, it appears protection for children with pre-existing conditions is a “minor thing.”

Of course, what Rep. King more likely means is that figuring out how to change ill-considered parts of a very large and complicated law while retaining the parts that work well, that are popular, and that help solve important problems is just too damn hard. It gives him a headache to even think about it. It’s so much easier just to repeal the entire law. Which is what Ezra Klein is on to with this:

As expected, House Republicans have voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Three Democrats voted with them, which is substantially less than the 13 currently serving Democrats who voted against the bill in the first place, and many less than prominent Republicans had been predicting. On health-care reform, the two parties are moving further apart rather than closer together.

What’s not as expected, however, is that the GOP gave up on “repeal and replace” so early. Throughout the election, that was their message. If you look at their press language, it’s still their message. Being on the side of the status quo is, according to the pollsters, a bad place to be. But that’s where they are. They voted for repeal despite offering nothing in the way of replacement, save for the vague intention to have some committees come up with some ideas at some future date. …

There’s a reason for that: Opposition is easy, governing is hard. You have to get your members to agree on a single piece of legislation. You have to make the tough tradeoffs that are the hallmark of governance. You have to explain how you’ll do things, rather than merely what you want done. You have to own the popular parts and defend the unpopular parts.

Democrats did that for health care. They fought ugly fights in their own party over the public option, the financing of the legislation, the levels of coverage in the bill, the way abortion would be treated in the exchanges. They made some easy decisions, like banning discrimination based on preexisting conditions, and some hard ones, like adding an individual mandate to the bill, and paying for it through Medicare cuts rather than a tax on the wealthy. And in the end, they managed to pass their law through the House and through the Senate. They governed. They sought to move the country forward.

Boehner’s GOP, in deciding against offering the promised replacement for the Affordable Care Act, ducked the hard work and highest responsibilities of governance. Maybe, in the coming months, they’ll do better than that. Maybe their committees will report out serious alternatives and they’ll be brought to the floor of the House. But this isn’t the first time health-care policy has come up in Washington. If the GOP had wanted to offer a plan of their own, there are plenty they could’ve taken off the shelf. If they’d needed more time, well, there was no hurry. But they didn’t take more time, or dust off an existing piece of legislation. Backwards was good enough.

And for at least the last 30 years, that’s been the way the Republican Party operates. The party of Lincoln got left behind a long time ago.

The Moderate Voice

Deutsch Canoe

Before anyone blames me for bringing this up, it was Ed Morrissey who opened up the floodgates of Donny Deutsch media gold over the regular Morning Joe guest’s insightful analysis of Arizona law as it relates to Martin Luther King Day. Well, today he was back on the air in fine form, returning to a […]

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You can’t make this crap up.   KERA Dallas reports (with audio!):

Texas is the only state that has refused to establish a greenhouse gas permit process….

[Texas AG Greg] Abbott:  “Congress did not authorize the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. One of the key greenhouse gases the EPA is regulating is carbon dioxide. It is almost the height of insanity of bureaucracy to have the EPA regulating something that is emitted by all living things.”

So the EPA shouldn’t regulate the discharge from living things.  I guess the Texas AG just wants crap all over the place.  Literally.  [Insert your joke about sewage treatment here.]

Of course, the carbon dioxide emissions from living things don’t throw the carbon-cycle horribly out of balance — industrial emission do (see “Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks“).

The science has become increasingly clear that unrestricted emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion poses the gravest of threats to human health and well-being (see “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice” and “Science stunner: On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter“).  And such emissions directly poison the ocean (see “Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).

Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court understands that:

EPA Regional Director Al Armendariz says the EPA has a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on its side.

Armendariz: “As a direct result of the Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts vs. the EPA, greenhouse gases are federally regulated pollutants. Any major source of greenhouse gas emissions that undergoes new construction or major modifications is going to need authorization and permits under the Clean Air Act.”

Armendariz says Texas leads the nation in carbon dioxide emissions. He says there are 167 businesses that would be affected by the new greenhouse gas permits.

In the TV version of the Texas farce, the part of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott will be played by William Shatner.

Related Post:

• A ‘Tex-extremist’ approach to the Clean Air Act
• William Shatner worries about global warming

Climate Progress

“You know, I don’t have any data on this …”

The Blaze captures audio from progressive political scientist Frances Fox Piven attempting to explain last month why Democrats found themselves out of the House majority in a historic midterm blowout.  You may want to take some Dramamine before listening to it, though, because it has more twists and turns than ObamaCare, which under the circumstances […]

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The partisan scramble continues. (You’d think there would be enough POLICY DIFFERENCES for people to focus on but I’m ohhhhhhh so 20th century.)

The Moderate Voice

Over at The Incidental Economist, Aaron Carroll points to this study which argues — as the government has in its many briefs defending the health law — that you can’t reform the insurance market without requiring (or encouraging in some other way) healthy people to purchase health insurance coverage:

The above results show that community rating was associated with a worsening of the non-group risk pool as younger and healthier individuals left the individual market while older and sicker individuals joined or remained in the market. To test the robustness of this conclusion, we used data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to compare changes in detailed measures of health status and utilization for people with non-group coverage in several community rating and non-community rating states. We found that those maintaining non-group coverage after the adoption of community rating were significantly more likely to have days when they were restricted to bed or when their activities were otherwise restricted because of health problems as well as more doctor visits and hospital stays. In other words, community rating in the non-group insurance market led to a pool of enrollees in poorer health. […]

Our results provide a compelling portrait of the distortions that can result from community rating and guaranteed issue regulations in the non-group market when there are no provisions in place to keep people enrolled in coverage. The deterioration of the risk pool is consistent with predictions from economic theory and potentially lays the foundation for an adverse selection death spiral.

Indeed, there is an extensive history of states trying to exclude pre-existing condition exclusions without also instituting a minimum benefit requirement, and almost all cases have resulted in higher prices or issuers leaving the market. In Maine, many insurance providers doubled their premiums in three years or less, and all but one of the state’s HMOs experienced “at least one rate increase of 25% or more in 1998 or 1999.” New Hampshire was nearly left with no carriers in the market when Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Hampshire announced it was withdrawing from the individual market. And after New Jersey’s preexisting conditions provision took effect in 1993, the state’s individual insurance market became plagued by skyrocketing premiums. Between 1996 and 2001, the cost of the most generous individual insurance plans rose by more than 350 percent.

Conversely, a new analysis from a team of Massachusetts economists published today in the New England Journal of Medicine “concludes that the Massachusetts 2006 health law’s requirement that most residents buy coverage or pay a tax penalty has been pivotal to the law’s success.” The study found a “greater increase in the number of healthy people who signed up for coverage in the state’s subsidized health insurance program in 2007 — the first full year of the ‘individual mandate’ — than chronically ill people, compared with the months before.” The greatest spike in enrollment of healthy enrollment occurred in 2007 — “just before the tax penalty kicked in for failing to get coverage.”

As Carroll put it, if “one is in favor of a well-functioning insurance market in which everyone can obtain affordable insurance, one cannot advocate guaranteed issue and community rating and nothing else. One needs some way to keep adverse selection under control. To be blunt, one can’t just take the favorable parts of the ACA and reject the unfavorable part (the mandate), at least not with suggesting a replacement that will do the same job.”

Wonk Room

Gestures.

Lisa Murkowski’s a big fan of the idea, so hey — how bad it could be? Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaksa) has joined Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) in spearheading Udall’s effort to have bipartisan seating at the State of the Union, Murkowski’s office announced Friday. In a letter to members of Congress today Murkowski and Udall […]

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