Matthew Yglesias's Blog, page 2337

Endgame

We've been nothing but dignified:

— The rent is too damn high.

— Chernobyl 25 years later.

— Francis Fukuyama book talk.

— Banerjee & Duflo on hunger.

— Call for research on attack ads in multi-party political systems.

— A couple of ridings where Québec separatists need to contemplate tactical voting.

— More broadly, Canada should reform its electoral system.

Thao, "Swimming Pools".

The Separation Of Services And Redistribution

PD writes:

Something I've noticed lately is that progressive pundits love to cite polls that show that entitlements are extremely popular. I can't understand why we should consider any of these polls as constructive or relevant to the health care debate. If you look at the figures for the average benefit received vs taxes paid, a majority of Americans are net winners here. Is it surprising to anyone that people are strongly in favor of this?

This debate should be about the most economically efficient method of delivering health care to the greatest number of Americans. Part of that debate will involve determining a level of progressive taxation that is not economically distortive or morally reprehensible. While I personally think that the rich can absorb higher taxes without violating those concerns, surely even the most liberal among us would agree that at some point, higher marginal tax rates on the rich become "unfair". People who focus on the fact that free shit is popular are not helping anyone.

Well, look, people cite polls in part because of disputes about political strategy. I also think it's a mistake to think about Medicare primarily in terms of rich versus poor. The main redistributive issue with Medicare is from the past to the present, or from the present to the future.

But here's where I think this guy is correct. There's a very strong economic argument in favor of single payer health insurance—such insurance has a maximally efficient risk pool, evades adverse selection problems, and has very low administrative costs. There's also a very strong argument (based on the declining marginal utility of money) in favor of redistribution of economic resources away from those who have a lot of it to those who have little. But these are logically separate issues. If you believe in single-payer health insurance as an efficient way of organizing insurance markets (as I do), then you should still think it's a good deal for people even if financed through a broad regressive tax like a VAT (which I do). Then you have to think to yourself, "how generous should the single-payer program be" knowing that a more generous program means a higher VAT rate. And in general, if I were dictator this is how we'd pay for public services—with broad-based taxes so that it's clear that the point of public services is to deliver good value for the money we pay.

Then as a separate matter you'd have a progressive tax whose purpose is to finance cash transfers to people in need of financial assistance.

The current system leads rich people to be irrationally hostile to public services since they see dismantling the state as the key to getting their taxes cut. Simultaneously, it encourages too many egalitarians to think of public services as redistributive programs whose purpose is to deliver high living standards to service providers rather than high-quality services to the public.

East Meets West at the Movies

By Alyssa Rosenberg

The Hollywood Reporter observes that Hollywood, the Chinese film industry, and China's central government would all like to see more movies that are co-produced by Chinese and American companies. The biggest obstacle to cooperation? Finding movies that will play in both Chinese and American markets, and that can make it past Chinese censors.

Obviously, script approval is a big deal. The MPAA is on record as saying the amount of time it takes to get a script approved in China scares off American investors. And the restrictions can be, to say the list, kind of odd. China recently banned time-travel movies on the grounds that they're insufficiently respectful to historical figures (no Bill and Ted reboots for China, I guess!).

But finding the overlapping bit of the Ven diagram of Chinese and American tastes isn't easy either. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which grossed $128 million in the United States, did only $85 million internationally, including in China. Romantic comedies are supposed to be reasonably big in China, but Disney's remake of High School Musical for Chinese markets flopped. Chinese box office data isn't reliably available in real time (the tracking sites like The-Numbers and Box Office Mojo seem to get their numbers through a variety of back-end sources, including the proprietors of streaming horror-movie sites), so it's hard to see Chinese and American audiences reacting simultaneously to a mix of movies. And it would be hard to see that given even more reliable data, since China only accepts 20 American releases a year, so it's hard to know if Battle: Los Angeles would be as popular in China as it is right now given other alternatives.

It's possible that Nanjing Heroes, an upcoming Christian Bale-as-hunky-priest-is-a-hero-during-a-Japanese-massacre, will be the movie that hooks both American and Chinese audiences. Or the girl-learns-to-kick-ass-fairytale-rewrite that is Snow and the Seven. But until China accepts more foreign flicks, and until we've got more box office successes in both countries, we're not going to have a good sense of what works on a massive scale in both markets. And that, not to mention the political complications of trying to navigate both the weirdness of the American market and the limitations of Chinese censorship, is going to make doing joint business hard.

Scott Walker Wants To Give Schools Public Money Without Public Accountability

Milwaukee, Wisconsin is home to one of the most ambitious school choice programs in America and Scott Walker is a wingnut rockstar, so it's no surprise that he'll be headlining at a big pro-voucher event. What's striking here is the harmonic convergence between unsound leftwing and unsound rightwing ideas about public education:

Gov. Scott Walker is scheduled to give a speech next month about school choice at a national meeting of the American Federation for Children. Walker is proposing expanding the voucher program that currently is only available to low-income students in Milwaukee. He wants to expand the program to all of Milwaukee County and phase out the low-income qualifying ceiling. He also wants to do away with a requirement that voucher students take the same statewide achievement tests as students in public schools.

Parents should have more choice about where to send their kids to school. But parents should also have reliable information about school performance that lets them make valid comparisons. This seems to me to be absolutely basic common sense—education is important, so we should tax people to spend money on it, and we should try hard to ensure that the money is well spent.

But you see this alternative idea from both the left and the right wherein education actually isn't important and so it's not important to make any effort to ensure that the money we spend on it is being well-spent. The convergence tends to be obscured by the fact that conservatives fanatically hate teachers' unions and teachers' unions are often influential in Democratic Party politics. But the basic agenda of public money without public accountability is the same. The difference is that Walker wants to take the money out of unionized public schools and shift it to publicly financed religious schools. The dispute over exactly who gets their hands on the accountability-free funding stream is ultimately not that important. What's needed is a firm insistence that schools of all kinds be held to a standard where people can see if kids are learning anything.

Have Republicans Been "Moving Right" On Health Policy?

A conversation I was having over lunch yesterday reminded me that I think some of these discussions about Republicans moving to the right on questions like an individual mandate for health insurance get things pretty wrong. Was there ever actually a moment in time when leading figures in the conservative movement were actively working to steer the United States of America in the direction of something like the Dutch or Swiss health care system? I don't think there was.

What they were, instead, was a couple of moments in time—one in the early 1970s and one in the early 1990s—when it seemed that Democrats might succeed in imposing either a Canadian-style (70s) or German-style (90s) system and some leading Republicans (Nixon in the 70s and Dole in the 90s) felt it was tactically imperative to formulate an alternative. By the winter of 2008-2009, the Democratic proposal had changed yet again and this time the Republican tactical theory had changed to one about the benefits of root and branch opposition.

This root and branch opposition has certainly been successful in many ways, but it of course failed to actually block the bill. Rather than thinking of this as a series of steps in which the GOP leadership "moved right" on health care policy, I think it's better to construe it as shifting tactics in a decades long war. The Democratic position has consistently been that we should raise taxes to give more people health insurance and the Republican position has been a consistent effort to try to stop this from happening. Under Richard Nixon and Bob Dole this goal was pursued in part through tactical retreats which were designed to split moderate Democrats off from the progressive coalition. But each time the progressive drive was halted, the Republican support for the alternatives mysteriously melted away. Then under Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, the GOP dropped this highly successful tactic in favor of a tactic that didn't work.

Debt Peonage In The Fashion Model Industry

Jenna Sauers has a great piece about debt-peonage among fashion models. What happens when Elite takes you to Paris to become a model?

I owed Elite €937,19 for the plane tickets and €142 for plane ticket change fees. I owed €92,40 for composite card printing in the month of September, a print run which incorrectly advertised to clients both my height and my eye color, €113,40 for corrected composite cards in the month of October, €107,64 for November's cards, and €12 for a Paris city map. To live on, I was permitted to withdraw €80 cash from the agency once a week, against future earnings I began to understand were notional. The agency referred to this €80 as my "pocket money." To hasten my weight loss, I stopped taking the pill. I owed €92 for a portfolio book, €555 for "tests" with the fashion photographers who would tell me about the eye and the scoliosis and the way the right corner of my mouth has a downward cast that must be anticipated and corrected for. And I owed €420 and €250 for two line items that appear on my final statement as just "Jenna Rose Sauers /512110" and "Jenna Sauers /5121110."

When she got work, "the agency deducted its standard 70% commission, and then applied the remaining 30% to my outstanding debt." So how does anyone actually wind up getting out from under that debt? Well, "if a model is in demand but in debt — a not-uncommon situation, when expenses are high and rates for the most prestigious jobs can be low — a competing agency might buy her debt and thus acquire her contract." Alternatively, you can end up just skipping town, effectively locking yourself out of that market but gaining yourself the right to roll the dice and do it all over again in a new city.

What Keynesian Budgeting Would Really Look Like

This is hardly the main point they make, but Henry Farrell and John Quiggin's piece on the Eurozone crisis contains an excellent one-paragraph summary of what orthodox Keynesian budget practice would really look like, taking the concept out of the mythic realm of simply caring less about budget deficits:

Contrary to the beliefs of nearly all anti-Keynesians—and, regrettably, some Keynesians, too—Keynesianism demands more, not less, fiscal rectitude in normal times than does the orthodox theory of balanced budgets that underpins the EU. John Maynard Keynes argued that surpluses should be accumulated during good years so that they could be spent to stimulate demand during bad ones. This lesson was well understood during the golden age of Keynesian social democracy, after World War II, when, aided by moderate inflation, the governments of the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development greatly reduced their ratios of public debt to GDP. This approach should not be confused with the opportunistic support for large budget deficits evident, for example, among advocates of supply-side economics. If anything, "hard" Keynesianism suggests that the problem with the macroeconomic rules governing the euro is not that they are too tough and too detailed but that they are not tough or detailed enough. States in the eurozone should not be allowed to run moderate budget deficits in boom years, the Keynesian argument goes; instead, they should be compelled to run budget surpluses. The surpluses could then be saved in rainy-day funds or used to pay down government debt or, if the country had reached a satisfactory debt-to-GDP ratio, spent as a fiscal stimulus in the event of a crisis. Unlike the kind of budget management advocated by the German government, this approach does not seek to eliminate or minimize governments' leeway to conduct fiscal policy. It gives governments up-front the means to manage demand whenever they might need to.

One might go further and say that one of the lessons of the fake "Great Moderation" is that countries facing large net inflows of private funds (like the USA and Spain) ought to be running really gigantic budget surpluses during non-recessionary years. That wasn't necessary during the heyday of Bretton-Woods and managed exchange rates because you dealt with the flow on that end, but in the modern world after the hegemony of the dollar it seems like it might be necessary. The conservative prescription of enacting large debt-financed tax cuts amidst an economic growth cycle fueled by private sector debt, and then immediately pivoting to austerity and spending cuts right when a recession hits and the private sector starts massive deleveraging is a disaster.

Louisiana State Representative Introduces Plainly Unconstitutional Blanket Abortion Ban

Kate Sheppard reports that the bidding war among anti-abortion state legislators to see how far they can push the envelop on the ever-shrinking constitutional protections around abortion has reached its logical conclusion—just straight up ignoring the existing constitutional doctrine:

Anti-abortion lawmakers in state legislatures around the country have already drawn national attention—and outrage—for pushing bills that would drastically limit access to abortions. But in Louisiana, one "unapologetically pro-life" lawmaker wants to go even further. State Rep. John LaBruzzo, a Republican from Metairie, has introduced a bill that would ban all abortions in his state—with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother—and charge women who seek abortions and the doctors who perform those abortions with "feticide."

Louisiana state law calls for jail sentences of up 15 years, with hard labor, for the unlawful killing an unborn child. LaBruzzo told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that the inclusion of the line subjecting women to "feticide" prosecution for seeking abortions was a "mis-draft," and including it "would make [the bill] too difficult to pass." He promised the provision will be removed from the bill before it goes to a committee vote. But while LaBruzzo doesn't expect to punish women who seek abortions, he would still like to see doctors working on the chain gang for providing a constitutionally protected medical procedure.

There's something very ethically and metaphysically weird about the hesitance to legally sanction women who abortions. LaBruzzo and his fellow travelers seem to believe, quite sincerely, that a fetus is a moral person and that killing it is wrong. They're also hardly unwilling to punish women who find themselves with unwanted or unplanned pregnancies—they're eager to punish them via laws mandating that pregnancies be carried to term. And obviously it's not the case that women typically get abortions by accident or because they're somehow swindled into it by unscrupulous doctors. It's almost as if he doesn't take the moral personhood of pregnant women seriously. On the one hand, they have no legal right to control their own bodies, but on the other hand the state has no legal right to hold them personally responsible for their conduct. They're just seen as the subjects for ideological contestation between medical professionals and the state.

Reducing Health Costs With Voluntary Death Panels

Andrew Sullivan notes that if people were a little more responsible about planning for our own demise that this could reduce health care spending:

If everyone aged 40 or over simply made sure we appointed someone to be our power-of-attorney and instructed that person not to prolong our lives by extraordinary measures if we lost consciousness in a long, fatal illness or simply old age, then we'd immediately make a dent in some way on future healthcare costs. A remarkable proportion of healthcare costs go to the very last days or hours of our lives.

Of course put in terms of "everyone" it's creepy and totalitarian. But he reels the idea back to "How about an easily reached website that makes such a legal process easier to accomplish?"

That certainly seems like a good idea to me. Although as with most good ideas about reducing health care spending what's good about it isn't so much that it reduces health care spending as that it seems like it would make people better off. Nobody likes to spend time pondering our own mortality, but lots of us would do well to take at least a little time to consider in advance how we'd like to end our lives.

To me, this is the general shape of the Medicare problem. It's not so much that it "costs too much" as that relative to what it's projected to cost in the future it doesn't deliver enough value to retirees. If you're 77 years old and receive a medical diagnosis that implies you have eighteen months to live without treatment, the government will spend large sums of money on trying to extent your life twelve months further. The government won't pay for you to take a trip to visit the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank or to see Michelangelo's David in Florence. But would it be so crazy for a fatally ill 77 year-old art lover who's never been to Italy to prefer the chance to see her favorite artists' iconic works in person over the chance of receiving extra medical care? I don't think so. The point of our retirement programs should be to deliver high quality of life to senior citizens, and that militates at the margin for more Social Security rather than more Medicare. But the way our programs are set up, per retiree Medicare spending will grow much more rapidly than per retiree Social Security spending. That's not the most cost-effective way to deliver high-quality retirement to people.

Donald Trump Loves Jefferson Davis

By Alyssa Rosenberg*

Or at least, his retirement home. I'm doing some digging into Republican candidates' positions on and involvement in the arts, so on a whim, I Nexised "Donald Trump donated." Turns out the Donald ponied up $25,000 for the post-Katrina restoration of Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis's retirement estate on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Given Haley Barbour's decision not to run, and how some of theless-charming things he's said about race played into his viability as a candidate, I can't imagine this particular donation is going to play into Trump's already-bizarre candidacy. To be fair to the Donald, he apparently made the donation at the recommendation of Richard Moe, then the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Trump, of course, got substantial tax breaks by donating an easement on his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, to the Trust. (I'm not sure what he got out of donating space to the Rainbow PUSH coalition in the late 90s, but he did that, too. But then, Trump doesn't have a record as a consistent, much less charitable, donor.)

*Since people have asked: I'm ThinkProgress's resident culture nerd. Until some technical things get straightened out, I'll be blogging here and on the ThinkProgress mainpage.