NTSB Report an excuse for union busting???

So Fox is reporting that the NTSB Report on the helicopter-plane crash in New York City was the result of incompetence on the behalf of the air traffic controllers. Fox didn't come out and blame unions, but I wonder if it will be much time before Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity make this an argument against unions in general.

Scaling back

So a lot of folks are talking about breaking the health-insurance bills in half and passing them as parts, and now, with the death of Senator Kennedy, folks are discussing a scaled down bill and promoting a gradual move to universal coverage and cost-cutting.

Part of it is trust. Do you really trust that a scaled down bill will ever be 'scaled up'? Do you think that we'll ever gradually increase the coverage of the uninsured? Maybe some of this is about the victory of the Right in destroying our faith and trust in government, their reactionary extremism has polarized this nation and undermined even a base-level belief in the efficacy of government.

Part of it is that these reforms must happen together to create a winning coalition. The 'individual mandate' means a boon for insurance companies. To get progressives to agree to the mandate you have to truly reform the private sector insurance market. These must happen together. They must also include an employer mandate to keep employers from dropping millions of employees into the private insurance market, and to pay for the increased cost in covering everyone. These reforms are tied up together to create a reform package that actually accomplishes reform.

Anything for a buck

So the GOP is sending out 'surveys' that suggest that Republicans may be denied health-care. The surveys are attached to fund-raising info. Like Joe Klein said, the republicans have jumped the shark.

It's because they ELECT their wingnuts...

Recently I've found myself in conversations that went something like this.

'The Left has their nutjobs too.'
'Yes, but the media is biased, I mean only Fox News gave airtime to the 9/11 Truthies, and that was to mock them and paint the left with that brush. It doesn't seem to work with the wing-nuts on the Right.'

It's true, it seems the the MSM give DRAMATICALLY more airtime to the right-wing crazies than they ever did to the left-wing ones. It also seems that the more anyone tries to paint the Right with the 'birthers/tea-baggers' label, the more they seem to embrace it.

A couple weeks ago Ezra Klein had a great post on the asymmetrical coverage of political extremism. His point, the right gets coverage cause they want it. They ELECT their crazies, or at least their pols seem to embrace the crazies. You have Senator Grassley, former Vice-Presidential candidate and Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin, and Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner all giving credibility to the 'death panel' lie, and countless other pols embracing the tea-baggers/birthers/town-hall nut-jobs. The MSM is justified in covering this, it's news when those three people say anything, let alone anything like the US government is planning to systematically euthanize the American elderly. It's like all the grown-ups have gone home and we're left with remnants of a once great party, it's just too bad we're still treating the Republicans like the party they once were, and not the party of crazies and obstructionists that they have become.

What?!

According to ThinkProgress, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is headlining a conference on the threat of 'electromagnetic pulse' attacks. This shit sounds like the plot of the last GI Joe movie... I wonder if that where they got the idea...

Another Warrior in Rammell's War against Satan

This guy has just been indicted for threatening the family of an abortion clinic director.

These incidents are increasing. The murder of Dr. Tiller, the Department of Homeland Security report, the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, the Tea Parties, the health-care town halls, the guys with guns at the town halls, the death panels, the death books, etc.

I think it was Paul Krugman that said that when Republicans get into office it's almost like they're incompetent on purpose just to discredit the entire idea of government. Now it seems like they're on their way to trying to discredit the idea of democracy.

Rex Rammell's War against Satan

Tea-bagger and ex-elk rancher Rex Rammell is running for the governorship of Idaho. On Tuesday at a GOP rally he joked about 'hunting' President Obama.

In 2008 he ran, unsuccessfully as an Independent candidate for Senator. In fact, it seems that he has a long list of offices that he has unsuccessfully run for (also check here and here).

In fact, it's confusing exactly what Rex is running for, his website says he's running for governor, but he also evidently announced that he is running against Rep. Mike Simpson for the 2nd District seat in the US House of Representatives.

Mr. Rammell is also an author. Here is a long quote from the beginning of the book, A Nation Divided: The War for America's Soul...

In the beginning there were socialists and capitalists. The socialists said “let us force our neighbors to be charitable that all mankind may be equal.” The capitalists said “let us give our neighbors freedom that they may choose to be charitable for charity freely given is true charity.” But the socialists disagreed that man could ever rise to be charitable; he must be forced. The capitalists disagreed. And henceforth the war for freedom began.

And men made themselves kings and rulers. And despotism and tyranny abounded. And man lost his freedom. And the capitalists fought back as blood covered the earth. And the great Father who sits on his throne in the heavens watched and wept as man fought for his freedom. But man was not worthy of freedom. And more blood covered the earth. Then a righteous people arose and the Father said it is time for man to be free. And the people fought against the King and the Father sent his angels. And the people won their freedom. And the people knew they must bind the ambitions of men. So they assembled their wisest and counseled together and asked the Father to help them create a Constitution. But men’s thirst for power continued. And the Constitution was argued and its meaning distorted. And men began again to lose their freedom…

You can't make this stuff up... 'And despotism and tyranny abounded. An man lost his freedom. And the capitalists fought back as blood covered the earth...' I must of missed that day in US history (or maybe world history, not sure). Then he introduces us to his war against Satan...

…And the capitalists fought back for their freedom and vowed to save the Constitution. And God was on their side. And the armies of socialism led by Satan began to fear. And good men and women rallied to the cause. And the Constitution’s original meaning was accepted. And America reset her course. And she returned to her glory. And freedom and happiness were once again found in America!

That said, the guy does seem to have a pretty good sense of humor.

The interesting thing is how organized these folks are. He's seems to be somehow affiliated with the Freedom21 Conference (it's a right-wing conspiracy-minded show-and-tell in Oklahoma City of all places--coincidence? I think not), and a whole host of other extremist organizations. Just five minutes on Google and the layers of this are truly astounding.

Got the book quotes here.

Avoiding the Most Trusted Man in News

Jason Linkins has an interesting theory on the release of the torture docs. They were postponed until the Daily Show went on summer hiatus! Interesting theory. I for one want to believe it, and so it shall be believed!

Salmon, Drum, and Avent on the Fed and Regulation

Speaking of...

Here is a great post on regulatory consolidation within the Fed.

Chairman Bernanke the 'Regulator'???

So, Chairman Bernanke is in for four more years. As everyone is saying, the next four are gonna be hell. There is going to be significant pressure to keep lower interest rates to stimulate economic growth and also significant pressure to raise interest rates to soak up some of the liquidity (how much pressure may depend on unemployment). But my concern is with the Fed's new role as systemic regulator.

Before Chairman Volcker (a Democrat, just proving you don't have to be a conservative Republican to do the job well). The Fed was somewhat dysfunctional (remember stagflation?) and now seems to have become competent at doing it's primary job--adjusting the flow of money into the economy (moderating the pressure toward inflation and deflation).

However, as the Fed moves into it's new role as systemic regulator, we need to think about the future not the past. Yes, Chairman Bernanke saved the economy from collapse, but what about the NEXT job, regulating the systemically significant parts of the economy (think financial services plus insurance). Will he do what needs to be done?

I don't know. I have my doubts. For example, prior to the crash, back in 2004 he gave a speech called the Great Moderation in which he praised Fed policy as the source of decreased market volatility. We now know that the Fed fell down on the job and didn't regulate what it could have and should have regulated and that led to to some serious market volatility. Volatility that nearly sent this nation into another depression. The Fed under Chairman Bernanke was able to prevent a financial system collapse because he bailed out the banks (I personally think just about anyone would have done that--and he almost failed at that when he let Lehman Brothers go under), but will he be able to regulate? I just don't know.

Tax the Endowment

What would happen if we taxed Harvard's endowment until it improved access to lower income populations? It's an interesting thought experiment from Felix Salmon at Reuters.

How to reign in Wall Street

Matt Ylgesias and Kevin Drum had a back-and-forth today that relates to my call for more progressive tax instruments to pay for stimulus/bailouts and entitlements (including an expanded role in health-care).

Yglesias says we can use tax policy to attempt to put downward pressure on Wall Street compensation which might be a factor in limiting personal avarice as an incentive for rampant and irresponsible risk taking.

we actually have a well-established method of taking market distributions of income and trying to transmogrify it into a more just, useful, and welfare-enhancing deployment of social resources — taxes and public services....It strikes me as ultimately unlikely that the political process will be able to micromanage high finance in a way that strikes people as meeting the claims of justice. But the political process very much can collect tax revenues and use that revenue to finance things that we currently “can’t afford” like more widespread provision of health care services, better rail transportation, cleaner streets, more police officers, more and better pre-kindergarten, etc.

Drum comes back and argues that as a practical matter 50% is an upper bound and that in terms of effective tax rates, we'll likely see much less than that actually paid. He goes on to say that tax policy is a broad-brush.

Overall, there's not much question that Wall Street bankers are going to continue to be paid astronomical sums as long as the firms they run are making astronomical profits. And that's the key problem. Tax policy can help — though it's a pretty broad brush — but the fundamental problem is that the finance sector in the U.S. is so damn big. And it's seemingly an unstoppable juggernaut: Wall Street income may have been down last year, but even the biggest economic collapse since World War II hasn't made even a medium term dent. A mere year later, the overall size and profitability of the finance industry is on track to be about the same size as it was during the boom years.

I remember when the collapse was happening Jared Diamond said that societies that came back from collapse had one thing in common, a shared history of pain. Suffering up and down the income spectrum served as a warning to reform or die. I'm worried that there just hasn't been enough pain for the rich. Like Drum said, it's back to business on Wall Street, with no sign of meaningful regulation (Bernanke was afterall just re-nominated).

Big Debt and Big Unemployment

Krugman has a pretty pessimistic post on the OMB numbers, which he says will put debt at 70-80% of GDP by the end of the next decade. That's a huge number. Huge. We've had higher debt, but that was following a world war. The OMB also has unemployment at 9.7% in 2010 and 8% in 2011. That's also huge. These numbers call for contradictory medicines. Spending to cut unemployment, along with low interest rates to spur growth; and revenue increases to cut the debt and high interest rates to soak up the liquidity.

I'm not sure we need really high interest rates, if we're looking at 8-9% unemployment two years out, will there really be too much liquidity? Regardless, big debt means new revenue (which is actually, maybe, a good thing to deal with inequality, which Krugman discusses here).

Most of the increases in national wealth and income have been concentrated in the hands of a very small group of elites, now it's time to take it back and make stimulate our economy and pay for entitlements.

Why the Death Book is just plain wrong...

Here is a good summary of the craziness behind the 'Death Book' controversy.

Taibbi on Healthcare

Matt Taibbi said something really interesting and really stupid in his brief promo-interviews on RollingStone.com for his new article Sick and Wrong. The interesting thing he said was that the bills have a grandfather clause that allows terrible insurance policies to stand, which will give a competitive advantage to firms with shitty and cheap policies versus those who will have to generate new health insurance policies in the future. This is interesting for the very reason that it means that reform will not really help those people who are say, employed by Wal Mart.

The stupid thing he says is that health insurance reform will be like the Iraq War for Democrats, i.e. something they will ultimately have to apologize for. That's stupid. A good bill is possible without single payer and even a public option. Here are nine reasons why a bill, even without a public option, is a good thing.

Tabarrok via Drum

Kevin Drum quotes Alex Tabarrok's defense of the public option, which basically says that if there is an individual mandate insurers will increase their prices. I would just add that this is more likely for health insurance than car insurance (which remains competitively priced even with mandated coverage) because of the regional quasi-monopolies that health insurers already have.

The Other Side

So, here is a link to The Agenda's argument against the public option. It's probably the most concisely argued view from the other side that I've read.

Basically what Salam is arguing is that there are three paths...

* Public Plan with Medicare Payment Rates. This path includes a public health insurance plan that pays providers at Medicare rates and is offered alongside private plans within a national health insurance exchange.
* Public Plan with Intermediate Payment Rates. This path includes a public insurance plan that pays providers at rates set midway between current Medicare and private plan rates and is offered alongside private plans in a national health insurance exchange—and subject to the same market rules as they are.
* Private Plans. This path does not include a public plan option; it includes only private plans offered to employers and individuals through a national health insurance exchange.

All three offer savings. Over ten years they save, respectively, $3B, $2B, and $1B.

If one or two happens then providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) will engage in cost-shifting, where they make up for the lack of cash from the public option by charging more money to the private insurers. This will lead to higher co-pays, deductibles, etc. and will lead to a single-payer system, and that's just bad (doesn't say why, but medical innovation and wait times will probably top the list).

Salam does end on a slightly anemic note, but does say that we can save money by creating more efficient provider networks. Which is true. Places like Mayo and Cleveland have a much more efficient system, and that's partly because they don't engage in fee-for-service pricing. Which is why the reform package pushes for 'bundling' payments!

'Depressing in its innanity'

Krugman gets the tone just write...

'The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it.'

And that's a great point. There haven't been any coherent arguments against the public option, just that it's politically unfeasible, and that it might be popular and successful.

He also makes a subsequent point about financial regulation...

There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came....

Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.

Krugman suggests that it's the money talking on both health-insurance and financial reforms...

Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.”

More on Goldman Sachs

Matt Taibbi posts an interesting analysis of a WSJ piece describing how GS gives out info to commission paying players before it's public, allowing them to buy early and then flip it back when the info is made public, in this case making 6%. He follows with a wild quote from Cramer about how his wife made her money basically just flipping stocks back after GS or ML analysts went public.

Who is Bluffing?

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) recently reported that there has never been enough votes in the Senate for a 'robust' public option. That's interesting. Must be some of that 'new math' I used to hear about when I was a kid.

Ezra Klein gives us the play-by-play in the actual legislative steps that a reform bill faces. What he reminds us of is, once the bill leaves conference committee it goes to each chamber, if it has any public option it will pass the House, easy enough. Then we go to the anti-democratic, anachronistic US Senate where there are three options, vote yes or no, or filibuster. The Democrats control 60 seats, they need 60 votes to pass the bill, you can assume 55 of those (assuming Byrd and Kennedy can vote). The hold outs might include Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Joe Lieberman, Max Baucus, Mary Landrieu, and Arlen Specter. The Republicans that want a bill passed include Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Richard Lugar. Then there are the dead-enders that are still in the debate (Chuck Grassley, John Kyl, Mike Enzi, Judd Gregg). The question, as Mr. Klein states, who is going to filibuster? Are they really willing to do this? Who is bluffing?

Link-a-palooza

Stuff I haven't read, or have, and want to suggest...

Michael Lewis' great article from Dec. is still great... The End by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis' other great article about AIG... The Man Who Crashed the World by Michael Lewis


Everybody seems to be thinking and writing about obesity recently, this is a great one... The Politics of Thinking Thin: It's about the Kids by Marc Ambinder

Another 'fatter' option, a review of the literature... XXXL: Why are Americans so Fat? by Elizabeth Kolbert

Best article on the political economy of the American health-care... The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health-care by Atul Gawande

A cogent reminder of why bi-partisanship is so hard to find (because all the Moderate Republicans lost)... The Senate's Bad Deal by Harold Meyerson

Four days, sounds like too many to me. This is a great analysis and call to arms... Should Thursday be the New Friday: The Environmental and Economic Pluses of a Four-day Workweek by Lynne Peeples


More Praise for a Four Day Week... The Case for a Four Day Workweek by Brad Plumer

Great 'fighting the last war' analysis... The Ghosts of ClintonCare by Ezra Klein

Dali and Pico... The Doctor is Within by Pico Iyer

Krugman hates markets, I love Krugman... Why Markets Can't Cure Health-care by Paul Krugman

Is Sheila Bair the victim of sexism?... Loaded for Bair: Why Sexism is Behind the Attacks on the FDIC Chief by Maureen Tkacik

2008 in the numbers... Stories and Stats: The Truth about Obama's Victory wasn't in the Papers by Andrew Gelman and John Sides

What happens when a WaPo columnist stops being nice???

Wa Po business columnist Steve Pearlstein stops being nice today. It's about time. I hope others begin to see the sanity through the shouting.

Here is a quick bite. The whole thing is worth a read.

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.

Where is the 'I feel your pain' moment???

President Obama has recently been called our 'economist-in-chief' (by Ezra Klein) and our 'professor-in-chief' (by Paul Krugman). When one of our biggest health-care policy wonks and a professor of economics describe you in such terms you know you have a problem.

President Obama can describe the problem and analyze the different options and forces influencing the process, but can he make you feel the moral imperative of health-care reform? He should be able to, theoretically. His mother died of cancer while trying to negotiate her way into coverage.

I know that feeling. The same thing happened to my mother. It can be too hard to talk about. It's a matter of compartmentalization. It's how we survive with great loss. Don't know if that means much. It's not gonna help pass health-care reform, not unless he can use his experience to make us feel that moral imperative.

Cap-and-Trade vs. Carbon Tax

A couple days ago Paul Krugman argued that opposing cap-and-trade was foolish because fighting global warming is so necessary. I agree that it is, but there is a phenomenally better way to achieve the same ends. A carbon tax. The effect of cap-and-trade will be higher energy prices, essentially the same effect as imposing a carbon tax. The difference is that the 'profits' from cap-and-trade will go to the financial system that trades and speculates in the emission permits (and nearly destroyed our whole economy a few months back). Fear of speculation isn't unfounded, it's prescient. A carbon tax isn't an impossible dream, it's the absolutely right policy. Moving from a federal revenue system based on income taxes (and the regressive Social Security tax) to one based on a carbon tax might be the best thing anyone can ever do for this nation and our world. It's worth losing an election over. Sometimes you fight the fight that needs fighting.

What exactly are they opposing???

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein both make excellent points today. First, Matt Yglesias argues that Sen. Baucus is primarily to blame for the slow pace of progress on health reform...

There’s a reason, after all, why the President wanted the process to be much further along at this point. And I think a big part of that reason is that it’d be much easier to get people engaged and mobilized if there was a thing “the health care bill” that people were supposed to be getting engaged and mobilized about. By contrast, those most full of passionate intensity on the other side are basically prepared to oppose reform sight unseen. But without knowing much about what the content of “reform” is or who it is who’s backing “reform” it’s hard to know what to say about it. At the moment, progressives are simultaneously trying to impact the shape of “reform” (reasonable public option, reasonably generous subsidies and minimum benefits packages) while also trying to push for “reform” to win out against the opponents of “reform.” If the various congressional leaders ever work out what “reform” is, then no matter how disappointed folks may be with some aspects of it, I’m pretty sure just about everyone will find themselves pushing for it.

But by dragging out the process of defining what the proposal is this long, congress in general—but mostly Baucus in particular—have guaranteed a sort of asymmetrical summer.

Ezra Klein shows that according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll the specifics of the health reform are generally popular while the administration's plan isn't. Pretty normal considering that poll after poll shows that progressive policies are often very popular with the public, while the names of those policies (welfare, universal health-care, even single-payer) are not. The right cannot play the game fairly, so they turn to demonizing, lying, and just plain shouting to win.

But what both posts reminded me of, is that there isn't A BILL TO OPPOSE. The fascistic tea-bagging, fear-mongering hooligans who are shouting down elected representatives are opposing what exactly? There isn't a bill to oppose. Which is bad precisely because the big unknown feeds into that old paranoid style of American politics. What they are opposing isn't health reform, cause they don't know a thing about it. So, what are they opposing?

Liberals always claim that folks are opposing the 'changes' happening. The decline of our social connectedness, the rapid growth of minority populations, increasing social equality, the decline of the stable two-parent family, global competition for jobs, the rise of foreign powers, the decline of the industrial state, the rise of the consumer-service oriented economy, stagnating wages, etc. Liberals argue these 'game changers' are pushing people toward xenophobic paranoia, religious revivalism, and political/religious extremism. So, a liberal would argue, that many of these oh so angry and paranoid folks are really opposing these changes when they talk of immigration, health reform, taxes, welfare, etc. Which might explain why the states that are 'suffering' the most at the hands of these changes are the politically conservative communities where racism, xenophobia, religious revivalism, and reactionary politics thrives.

I wonder what a conservative would say? Maybe that 'the people' (never trust anyone who uses the phrase 'the people') love free markets and hate government. Or, maybe that's too simplistic. Maybe I should watch Fox News and report back. It seems like most of the conservative talking points on the blogosphere are just fabrications and prevarications.

Black Suburbanization... White Female Employment Discrimination...

There is an argument I've heard advanced, that when Jim Crow 'died' with the passage of the voting rights acts and the civil rights act and all the court decisions that went along with the Civil Rights Era, and blacks began to have access to 'white' stores, that black-owned businesses suffered dramatically and as blacks began to move to the suburbs that the 'modern' black ghetto worsened. I wish I knew enough to say how large the impact was.

Similarly, Senator Bennet articulated another common argument recently that I've heard many times before. Education has suffered because more women had more access to the job market. Whereas education was once one of the few areas educated women could find employment, now there are a myriad of choices, meaning that the best left, leaving the rest, who, maybe weren't as good. What the impact of this 'exodus' from teaching to other professional careers was, I don't know. I don't know if it even exists. But I'm very curious.

Random Thoughts on Education

Sen. Bennet (D-CO) was Denver's public schools superintendent before he joined the Senate, replacing Ken Salazar who moved into the Department of Interior. He gave an interview recently, and it inspired some thoughts...

The way most school districts and states pay teachers in this country (is) if you leave any time in the first 20 years, you leave with what you've contributed to your retirement system ... but if you stay for 30 years, you (get) a pension that's worth three times what your Social Security is worth.
No matter what else you want to do, you have to stay, (because) you've worked all these years just to get to that place. When you think that between 70 to 80 percent of what we spend on K-12 in this country is spent on compensation and this is the way that we spend it, you need to ask yourself, "Are we providing a set of incentives that actually makes sense?"

As a former teacher I can attest to the reverse incentive this places on young teachers who want to move between the public school system, academia, and policy work. You get none of the extra compensation that other educators get. This also puts pressure on bad teachers to stay in a job that they should not be in. What if we re-imagined retirement policy...

Say we shift to defined contribution (I'm generally against this, but seems like tilting at windmills at this point). Everyone gets an automatic contribution of, I don't know, $2,000 a year, and up to another $2,000 in matching contribution to a tax-free IRA/401(k). Then you incentivize staying. After 5 years you get a bonus contribution of an additional $5,000, after 10 years another $10,000, and so on.

That kind of incentive system might work to keep good teachers in the job, or at least give them the rewards they have earned. Other strategies for keeping good teachers in the job include a universal bonus of $2,000 after every four years of teaching, and scale it up for teachers who actually demonstrate improvement of student outcomes and teachers who work with the lowest performing students. Teacher quality has the largest impact on student performance out of all other variables and it is probably the most cost effective with which to 'tinker'.

Other important factors toward improving student outcome focus mostly on physical resources and dollars, some cost a lot, more support staff, new building construction and smaller class sizes, some not as much, hr reform and 'small' schools. We have a limited amount of dollars and we should therefore focus on what can get us the largest bang for the buck and that is improving teacher quality. There are many ways to do this: reform HR, performance pay, widening the recruitment pool, better professional development, but the most important is probably reforming teacher assessment, figuring out who are good teachers and who are not.

After working in a school for three years, I can name the bottom 10% of teachers, they are easy to spot. The best 10% are also pretty easy to spot, but telling the difference between the middle 80%, now that is hard, after all, when the bell rings the door closes. I bet that if you did some statistical analysis on test scores over the last three years at any school, correlated student improvement to previous teachers, and looked for a pattern, you would see one. I also bet that if you went to the teachers who are 'high' performers, and told them, I bet you would be the first person to tell them anything like that in years. There is no feedback for teachers, you have to create your own systems. I tried to. Skills testing at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year. But, I'm no assessment 'expert' (no one teaches assessment in Ed. school programs). That's what's needed the most, better ways of evaluating teacher performance that are tied to student improvement.

One More Smart Idea

Forgot to promote the IMAC provision in the health-care reform package. This is the provision that creates an oversight board for Medicare. Here is more.

Really?!

Another in our Really?! series, this is the ridiculous and racist ad from KGB.

Cash for Clunkers

Great article on the cash-for-clunkers. Takes a look at it from a lot of different angles. Definitely worth a read.

Good Ideas in Health-Care Reform

Some of the best ideas in the debate:

1. Loan forgiveness for primary care physicians. We need 'em, there aren't enough of them, and they aren't paid very much, especially in comparison with specialists. Pushing more MD students into primary care will have an effect on all of our health-care experiences. In addition, Medicare and Medicaid (which supplies 40% of all the health-care dollars spent in the US) could increase their payments. Some proposals suggest 5-10%.

2. F*CK the Blue Dogs. One of the 'concessions' demanded by the Chien de Azure was to force the public option to negotiate without the purchasing power of Medicare, thus giving lie to their purported goal of cutting costs. Now, they say that it's unfair to force private insurers to compete with an insurance plan that gets to negotiate with the power of Medicare. That's kind of true. It's also true that it's unfair for Americans to think they have insurance only to face rescission at the hands of some faceless corporate cost-saving algorithm or, what's worse, a cubicle-dwelling person who has to live with the knowledge that their job is to look for ways to dis-insure their fellow human beings.

3. The Employer Mandate. Gotta have one, without it you'll have (by some estimates) 40 million Americans losing their insurance to enter the exchange system where they'll have to buy their own insurance individually, which is incredibly inefficient. Where the line gets drawn is important. Small businesses will have to be excluded or brought in gradually to make it politically palatable. Those that don't offer coverage will be taxed, which will help subsidize the cost of the government covering them in the public plan.

4. Get rid of Medicare Advantage. So, President Bush thought it would be a good idea to subsidize private insurers offering Medicare, only problem, they aren't as efficient as Medicare. So, Bush decided to simply pay more for it, 13% more. That's just dumb.

5. Keep the Public Option! So, the idea behind the public option is that it will offer insurance plans that benefit from lower overhead costs (money isn't spent to subsidize huge bureaucracies to decide who not to cover and there isn't any profit) and the possibility of access to the purchasing power of Medicare.

6. Tax the high-end 'gold-platted' insurance policies. The revenue can help fund the costs associated with covering more people (many through the Public Option). Besides, these policies help promote over-treatment.

7. End rescission based on 'pre-existing conditions'. One extremely important regulation, so important, along with the public option, will likely mean that the health-insurance industry succeeds in pushing and individual mandate.

8. End the fee-for-service system. The worst part of the system could arguably be the fee-for-service, it promotes over-treatment and waste. There are various ideas out there. Doctors could work in teams and get lump-sum payments, this is how the Mayo and Cleveland Clinics works.

9. Expand Medicare from 65 to 55. No one is seriously talking about it, but it's the best non-idea out there. It's politically impossible (akin to arguing for Medicare-for-all), so that's that. Ezra Klein describes here.

10. Robust health-care exchange. Ezra Klein calls it the most important part of health-care reform. In fact, I'll let him take it from here.

11. Disclose the value of employer health-care plans, it's a form of compensation after all.

And, finally...

Paying for it all...

1. Carbon Tax. For the dreamer in all of us.

2. Super-wealth surcharge tax. Why should people who make $25 million a year pay the same rate as someone who makes $250,000? Half of $25 million is still $12.5 million, that's enough, seriously. Besides, using the wealth of the uber-wealthy to make INVESTMENTS is what we are all about (Americans I mean, not socialists--well, us too).

3. Tax the gold-plated health plans. It might discourage over-treatment, and besides it's a form of compensation.

4. Close the loop-holes, all of 'em. I heard that Goldman Sachs paid less than one percent of their revenue in taxes, I mean, come on! At least pretend this shit is fair!

Health-care Myths De-Bunked

Linda Bergthold does a great job parsing the truth from the fictions in the on-going health-care debate.

Big-Business America

The cubicle is as American as apple pie, or at least that's what CEPR says via Krugman today.

The illusion of America: small towns, small business entrepreneurs, everybody is middle class, meritocracy and all that jazz, it just ain't true, at least not anymore.

Forty Percent

Forty percent. That's how much of the health-care dollars spent in the US are spent by federal and state governments through Medicare and Medicaid. And, on average these are the expensive health-care patients, namely, the elderly and the poor.

We've all heard the 'keep the government away from my Medicare' story coming out of the public forums and to explain this seemingly inexplicable contradiction I suggest you spend an afternoon watching Fox News and then read Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

I suppose this applies to the 'birthers' as well. President Obama would always be illegitimate in some peoples' eyes - if it's not his birth certificate it would be the swearing in or some other nonsense issue.

The obvious contradiction of saying that the elderly and our veterans can have a government form of health-care insurance but that the rest of us cannot is so ridiculous as to be laughable.

Do we need a new Fairness Doctrine?

As I was watching the Daily Show and Rachel Maddow last night, my always simmering rage at the Republican echo chamber grew and grew.

As I watched President Obama celebrate the new GI-Bill I thought, "this is Roosevelt-level Presidential leadership, but the 'pro-military' right-wing of the Republican Party will likely never even hear about the new GI-Bill." I guess it's the Dems fault, they should talk about it, but would it get coverage? It gets coverage by Rachel, but Fox would never cover it, what then about the others? Is it the media's fault - the blood-in-the-water / conflict-sells / 24-hours-to-fill / he-said-she-said mainstream media?

With a new Fairness Doctrine Fox News would be out of business, CNN wouldn't change that much, MSNBC wouldn't change much, just Keith, maybe Rachel. Even a modified Fairness Doctrine would be better than what we have now.