J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 1128

Liveblogging World War II: October 30, 2014: The Ruins of Warsaw

From World War II Today: Wladyslaw Szpilman: The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945:

I was alone: alone not just in a single building or even a single part of a city, but alone in a whole city that only two months ago had had a population of a million and a half and was one of the richer cities of Europe. It now consisted of the chimneys of burnt-out buildings pointing to the sky, and whatever walls the bombing had spared: a city of rubble and ashes under which the centuries-old culture of my people and the bodies of hundreds of thousands of murdered victims lay buried, rotting in the warmth of these late autumn days and filling the air with a dreadful stench.

People visited the ruins only by day, riff-raff from outside the city furtively slinking about with shovels over their shoulders, scattering through the cellars in search of loot. One of them chose my own ruined home. He mustn’t find me here; no one was to know of my presence. When he came up the stairs and was only two floors below me, I roared in a savage, threatening voice, ‘What’s going on? Get out! Rrraus!’ He shot away like a startled rat: the last of the wretched, a man scared off by the voice of the last poor devil left alive here.

Towards the end of October I was looking down from my attic and saw the Germans picking up one of these packs of hyenas. The thieves tried to talk their way out of trouble. I heard them repeating again and again, ‘From Pruszkow, from Pruszkow,’ and pointing to the west. The soldiers stood four of the men up against the nearest wall and shot them with their revolvers, despite their whimpering pleas for their lives. They ordered the rest to dig a grave in the garden of one of the villas, bury the bodies and get out. After that even the thieves kept away from this part of the city. I was the only living soul here now.

The first day of November was approaching, and it was beginning to get cold, particularly at night. To keep myself from going mad in my isolation, I decided to lead as disciplined a life as possible. I still had my watch, the pre-war Omega I treasured as the apple of my eye, along with my fountain pen. They were my sole personal possessions. I conscientiously kept the watch wound and drew up a time-table by it. I lay motionless all day long to conserve what little strength I had left, putting out my hand only once, around midday, to fortify myself with a rusk and a mug of water sparingly portioned out. From early in the morning until I took this meal, as I lay there with my eyes closed, I went over in my mind all the compositions I had ever played, bar by bar. Later, this mental refresher course turned out to have been useful: when I went back to work I still knew my repertory and had almost all of it in my head, as if I had been practising all through the war.

Then, from my midday meal until dusk, I systematically ran through the contents of all the books I had read, mentally repeating my English vocabulary. I gave myself English lessons, asking myself questions and trying to answer them correctly and at length. When darkness came I fell asleep. I would wake around one in the morning and go in search of food by the light of matches — I had found a supply of them in the building, in a flat that had not been entirely burnt out. I looked in cellars and the charred ruins of the flats, finding a little oatmeal here, a few pieces of bread there, some dank flour, water in tubs, buckets and jugs.

I don’t know how many times I passed the charred body on the stairs during these expeditions. He was the sole companion whose presence I need not fear. Once I found an unexpected treasure in a cellar: half a litre of spirits. I decided to save it until the end of the war came.

Interesting Things I Shoulda Written About When They Were Published, But Didn't: David Frum Pleads for Mercy for the Reformicons...

David Frum: Don't Knock the Reform Conservatives: "Sam Tanenhaus profiled a group of self-described "reform conservatives"...

...in respectful praise. The art director went even further: The magazine photographed 11 of the profiled people in an 18th-century hall, crumpled papers at their feet, an homage to J.L.G. Ferris’s well-known painting of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence...

But... but... but... of the 11 people only six--Levin (mentioned in 19 paragraphs), R. Ponnuru (10), A. Ponnuru (4), Strain (2), Wehner (2), and O'Beirne (1)--are mentioned by Tanenhaus at all in the article. It's not a profile of a group, of an intellectual movement. Frum wishes it were--I wish it were. But it isn't.

Frum continues:

As a group, they do not deviate very far from current Republican orthodoxy. But they urge that the next round of Republican tax cuts favor parents rather more and high-income earners rather less... Earned-Income Tax Credit be replaced by more narrowly targeted wage subsidies... consolidate... social programs into a “universal credit” for needy people. There is no equivalent here of, say, the willingness of the New Democrats of the 1980s to tangle with teachers’ unions...

Over the past five years, the American right has veered toward a reactionary radicalism unlike anything seen in American party politics in modern times.... Many of the 11 people profiled by Tanenhaus have skittered back and forth between radicalism and reform. Many of the reformers are employed by the American Enterprise Institute. In the first Obama term, AEI strongly identified itself with the “makers versus takers” rhetoric of the radicals. AEI’s president published a book on the theme. It was at AEI that Representative Paul Ryan delivered his famous speech warning that the United States was nearing a tipping point at which the “makers” would outnumber the “takers,” condemning the country to an inescapable future of government dependency. (AEI even made a cartoon to explain the concept to 8-year-olds!) Almost every single one of Tanenhaus’s reformers backed Ryan at the time—and even now, reformers seek to assure skeptical party radicals that the reform agenda will deliver more ideology, not less. So there is a basis for skepticism about how much change, really, is swirling through the reformers’ institutional water coolers.

Yet as a veteran myself of some of these internal debates—I was fired from AEI in 2010 for saying things that the reformers are edging toward today—I do see cause for optimism in the reformist turn by elite conservatives. What matters most about the reformers is not the things they say but the things they don’t. They don’t shrug off the economic and social troubles of 80 percent of the nation. What matters most about the reformers is not the things they say but the things they don’t. They don’t abuse the long-term unemployed. They don’t advocate tighter monetary policy in the midst of the worst slump since the 1930s. They don’t urge an immigration policy intended to drive wages even lower than they have already tumbled. They don’t pooh-pooh the risks of a government default on its obligations...

In recent years... conservatives seemed to have less to say to the nation. Stagnant wages, rising personal indebtedness, long commutes, health-care costs, climate change—these new challenges did not elicit new thinking...

If the policy agenda that follows remains cautious, remember: These conservative reformers aren’t trying to change the world. They’re trying to change a political party. You don’t change people’s minds by telling them they are wrong, even—or especially—if they are wrong. You change their minds first by establishing an emotional connection with them. Next you ratify their existing beliefs. When it comes time to introduce a new idea, you emphasize its consistency with things they already believe. This is what the reform conservatives are doing, or have begun to do. If they seem to be moving slowly, well, take it from me: It’s no good being even 10 minutes ahead of the times...

Anyone Still Supporting Mitch McConnell for Senate Has No Shame at All: Live from teh Roasterie

Mitch McConnell: Study shows Kentucky among national leaders in lowering uninsured rate because of Affordable Care Act: "As you know, Medicaid existed before Obamacare...

...The state operated Medicaid before Obamacare. The state can continue to operate Medicaid after Obamacare. There were online health insurance marketplaces before Obamacare. There are several non-Obamacare insurance sales websites now that are not part of Obamacare. There can be online insurance sales without Obamacare. Obamacare did not create the ability to buy insurance online—people have been doing that for years. Obamacare did not create Medicaid. Medicaid has been available for nearly (50) years...

Of course, repealing ObamaCare would immediately shrink Kentucky Medicaid enrollment by nearly half a million, and quadruple online-insurance costs for those Kentuckians receiving subsidies...

As I have said and will continue to say: there is something wrong with anyone who publicly supports today's Republican Party without having an immediate, practical plan for utterly transforming it root-and-branch into something else.

And as I have said and will continue to say: there is something very wrong with anyone who votes for the candidates of today's Republican Party.

Over at Equitable Growth: Suppose--Counterfactual World--That the U.S. Had Avoided Large-Scale QE since the Start of 2010...

Over at Equitable Growth: ...and that the employment, inflation, and future breakeven outcomes realized in that counterfactual world had been those seen in our world.

Is there any question that in that counterfactual world the FOMC would right now be actively and aggressively on the point of a massive QE program--that the only questions would be "how much" and "how quickly"?

Today, with the ending of QE, we live in that counterfactual world--with three differences:

READ MOAR

Since the start of 2010 the FOMC has already done $2.2 trillion of QE--and has thus taken duration risk of a magnitude that the private market requires $2 billion a month to bear off of private-sector balance sheets.

As a result, whatever risks are involved in QE start from a baseline in which the private market is bearing $2 billion/month less in the amount of government and GSE duration risk than in the counterfactual world (modulus the Summers point that maturity extension has neutralized 1/3 of QE undertaken). And just what are those risks? And just how are they increased at the margin by starting with $2 billion/month less of government-issued duration risk in private-sector hands?

As a result, whatever benefits are expected from QE have been modified by what we have learned over the past 4.75 years about the benefits of QE. And just what have we learned?

Question: How do those three differences move us from being on the point of undertaking a massive QE program to it being off the table?

Question: And why is the option of regime change--price-level targeting with at least partial catchup to the pre-2008 expected price level trend--off the table as well?

Afternoon Must-Watch: Emmanuel Saez and Laura Tyson: Income Inequality in the Twenty-First Century

Emmanuel Saez and Laura Tyson: Income Inequality in the Twenty-First Century:

Over at Project Syndicate: Material Well-Being in America since 1979

Material Well-Being in America since 1979

J. Bradford DeLong

Over at Project Syndicate: Over at Project Syndicate:The story goes: since 1979, the peak of the last business cycle before the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, economic growth in America has been overwhelmingly a rich-only phenomenon. America's poor and the middle class, it is often said, have at best only trivially higher inflation-adjusted real wages, incomes, and living standards send their predecessors who occupy the same slots in the income distribution back in 1979. While real GDP per capita in America has grown from $29 thousand per year to $50 thousand per year in 2009-value prices--total growth of 72%, or 1.6% per year--all or almost all of this growth has gone to those who now occupy the rich slots in the American income distribution.

How true is this, really? The answer appears to be: true--with perhaps a very few caveats, but important caveats:

READ MOAR

One important caveat is found in the Congressional Budget Office's Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes:

[American] real after-tax income for the lowest quintile [was] 49 percent higher in 2010 than in 1979 (see Figure 9). Income growth averaged 1.3% annually for that group over the period. After-tax income for the middle three quintiles in 2010 was 40 percent higher than in 1979—equivalent to an average annual growth rate of 1.1% for the period. Households in the 81st to 99th percentiles... [saw] after-tax income... 64 percent above its level in 1979.... In 2010, household income for the top 1% was 201 percent above the mark for 1979, representing an average annual growth rate of 3.6%, far ahead of any other income group...

And, by now, with the recovery concentrated among the rich as well, the top 1% of Americans are highly likely to be back to a cumulative 300% gain since 1979.

But real income gains of 1.3% per year for those bottom-quintile slots in the American income distribution are not chopped liver, are they? The gap with the 1.6% per year real American GDP per capita growth rate is small, isn't it?

Well, yes and no.

You can say that market income has become grossly more unequal since 1979 with the slots in the bottom half of the income distribution losing absolute ground in real income, and with taxation becoming less progressive, but that while this increase inequality has not been fully offset it has been substantially moderated by the growth of the social insurance state.

But when you look at the 1.3% per year growth rate of after-tax real income that the CBO calculates for the bottom quintile, 0.9%-points per year of that comes from the growth of the health-care financing programs: Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP. CBO counts all of that growth as an increase in the after-tax real incomes of America's poor. But that is not money that America's poor can spend, so some haircut should be applied. Moreover, only half of those expenditures show up as more health care received by program beneficiaries--the other half flow into the general American health-care financing system and cover care that was previously uncompensated. And America's health care financing system is uniquely inefficient: it really does look like other OECD countries get more bang in terms of health and healthcare services from $1 of spending then America gets $2. Apply all of those haircuts, and it seems to me that a better estimate of the contribution of expanded American public health-care programs to the material well-being of the American poor is not 0.9%-points per year but 0.2%-points per year.

Hence the necessity of something like RomneyCare, or ObamaCare, or biting the single-payer bullet, so that America gets something like normal OECD value out of its enormous health-care expenditures.

Depending on whether the day is odd or even, I come down in two different places on this issue of the interaction of growing government health-care financing programs and inequality. On odd days, my bottom line is that material well-being since 1979 has grown at 0.5% per year for America's poor compared to 4.0% per year for America's rich (and 6.0% per year for America's super-rich) because most of the expansion is not the equivalent a greater income for America's poor in any reasonable sense, and because America's broken health-care financing system seems that America gets relatively little health well-being bang out of it's typical health care financing buck. On odd days, my bottom line is that healthcare for and the health of America's poor in 1979 lagged so far behind that achieved in a normal OECD social democracy that even though each extra $1 produced only $0.25 of real health-care services delivered, poor health status meant that that $0.25 was Worth about one dollar to the poor in terms of material well-being. On this reading, the expansion of the health-care programs has kept the properly-measured material well-being of America's poor improving since 1979 at a rate not too much less then that of real GDP per capita. But that the healthcare coverage and financing gaps that existed in America in 1979 made it then a much more unequal place then the income dollar-share numbers then showed.

BEA and FRED

CBO

CBO

864 words

Noted for Your Morning Procrastination for October 29, 2014

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

At This Point in Time, a (Larger) National Debt Would Indeed Be a National Blessing: (Late) Tuesday Focus for October 28, 2014 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Obamacare Geographic Implementation Overview: Wednesday Focus for October 29, 2014 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Afternoon Must-Read: Fast FT: Lars Svensson: 1, Sadomonetarists 0 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Morning Must-Read: Richard Mayhew: Getting Dropped Hurts - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Yes, the State-Level Benefits of the Medicaid Expansion Are Very Large. Why Do You Ask?: Afternoon Comment - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Afternoon Must-Read: David Hendry: Climate Change: Lessons for Our Future from the Distant Past - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Nick Bunker: Youth unemployment, finding a career, and labor market churn - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Nick Bunker: Youth unemployment, finding a career, and labor market churn - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Plus:

Things to Read on the Morning of October 29, 2014 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Must- and Shall-Reads:

Austin Frakt: Management
Gavyn Davies: Is Economic Growth Permanently Lower?
Jon Faust: An End to QE
Mark Thoma: Are Economists Ready for Income Redistribution?
Fast FT: Lars Svensson: 1, Sadomonetarists: 0
Richard Mayhew: Getting Dropped Hurts
David Hendry: Climate change: Lessons for Our Future from the Distant Past
Ed Luce: Obamacare’s drip-fed success
Henry Farrell: Big Brother’s Liberal Friends

And Over Here:

Over at Equitable Growth: Obamacare Implementation Overview: Wednesday Focus for October 29, 2014 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Liveblogging World War II: October 29, 1944: Pacific Search and Rescue (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
John Michaud in the New Yorker on Walter Miller's "Canticle for Liebowitz": Wednesday Book Reviews/Live from Crows Coffee (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Over at Equitable Growth: At This Point in Time, a (Larger) National Debt Would Indeed Be a National Blessing: (Late) Tuesday Focus for October 28, 2014 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Of All the Many DorkyThings About the Kansas Republican Party, the Dorkiest Is the Pretense that Brownback's Economic Strategy Worked: Live from Teh Roasterie (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Liveblogging the American Revolution: The Battle of White Plains: October 28, 1776 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Material Prosperity since 1980: Hoisted from the Archives from Two Years Ago (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

Fast FT: Lars Svensson: 1, Sadomonetarists: 0: "Lars Svensson quit Sweden's Riksbank in a huff last year, frustrated by the central bank's insistence on raising rates despite the deflationary dangers. His former employer has just tacitly admitted that the economist was right. The Riksbank earlier this morning cut its benchmark interest rate to an unprecedented zero per cent, and markedly moved out its forecast for when it will lift rates again until mid-2016, in an attempt to ease the deflationary forces gripping the Swedish economy. The Riksbank should arguably have listened more closely to its former deputy governor sooner..."

Richard Mayhew: Getting Dropped Hurts: "Back in 2008, there was an excellent study on the cost of losing health insurance and then regaining it for people with chronic conditions.... $240 per member per month for Medicaid members in the mid-2000s is a massive number.... I am speculating that a decent chunk of the cost growth slowdown and differential for Expansion states compared to non-Expansion states is a more streamlined set of care.... In 2013, a person who made a few dollars too many, or had been on a program for a month too long would be dropped from Legacy Medicaid, and previously manageable conditions could become unmanaged. In 2014 in expansion states, that person would be dropped from Legacy Medicaid and instantly re-enrolled into Federally funded Expansion Medicaid. The only difference they would see in most expansion states was a different ID card in the mail three weeks later..."

David Hendry: Climate change: Lessons for Our Future from the Distant Past: "Climate change has been the main driver of mass extinctions over the last 500 million years... provides a stark warning. Human activity is producing greenhouse gases, and as a consequence global temperatures and ocean heat content are rising. Such trends raise the risk of tipping points. Economic analysis offers a number of ideas, but a key problem is that distributions of climate variables can shift, invalidating stationarity-based analyses, and making action to avoid possible future shifts especially urgent..."

Ed Luce: Obamacare’s drip-fed success: "President Barack Obama’s... Obamacare is rapidly settling into America’s landscape. In politics, its virulence is receding: Republicans are far more muted in their attacks than anyone expected a few months ago.... Obamacare is messy and ugly. But it is starting to cover the map.... Republicans in the Senate... are adopting what can politely be called a pretzel stance--promising to keep those parts that voters like while vowing to kill the law ‘root and branch’, in the words of Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader. Mr McConnell has pledged that Kentucky, where he is battling to save his seat, will keep its healthcare exchange, ‘Kynect’, even after Obamacare is abolished.... John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, is equally contorted.... After an outcry on talk radio, he ‘clarified’ that he would fight for the law’s full repeal but his state would still keep its Medicaid benefits, which has brought 330,000 Ohioans in from the cold.... There are roughly 10m fewer uninsured Americans than there were a year ago. That number will only grow..."

Henry Farrell: Big Brother’s Liberal Friends: "Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley are a dismal advertisement for the current state of mainstream liberal thought in America. They have systematically misrepresented and misunderstood Edward Snowden and the NSA."

Should Be Aware of:

Paul Murphy: Still waiting for the Great Rotation? Stop
Pragmatic Capitalism: Thinking About Bond Bubbles…
Katha Pollitt: Wonder Woman’s Kinky Feminist Roots

 

Dan McCrum: ERP Derp: "McCrum smackdown watch.... FT Short View.... 'Over time, the average equity risk premium has been 3.5 per cent, and Goldman Sachs uses that figure to estimate the long term rate of earnings growth embedded in stock prices... the implied rate of real growth for earnings [on European equities]... is now negative.... "Since long-term growth and inflation expectations seem to have fallen in the bond markets, it would be logical that they have fallen in the equity markets too. But... it is hard to disaggregate the relative shifts between growth expectations and the risk premium.... Assuming a fixed 3.5% ERP... the implied real rate of growth... [is] around -4%... clearly pricing in some form of long-run stagnation.... But even if we assume the ERP does not revert to long-run averages of around 3.5% but converges to a long-run average of, say 5%, the market is still implying 0% pa earnings growth over the next 20 years...."' This sort of analysis is probably more of a starting point for an interesting conversation about the market, than fill your boots with stock conclusion. Which we mention as using the Equity Risk Premium for any sort of analysis is not without haters. Here, for one, is the Economist: 'Equity risk premium and term premium sound like sophisticated economic concepts, but in reality they are statistical junk yards into which economists toss stuff they can’t explain with fundamentals... all the murky, unquantifiable factors traders study....' Then there is also this FT blog from Andrew Smithers, scourge of stockbroker economics: 'In some of my more gamesome moments I have challenged students to produce an article about the ERP which made a useful contribution to our understanding of the way financial markets work. So far the challenge has not been met..."

Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch: Resetting the Urban Network: 117-2012: "Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavorable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain, but not in France. As urbanization recovered, medieval towns were more often found in Roman-era town locations in France than in Britain, and this difference persists today. The re-setting of Britain’s urban network gave it better access to natural navigable waterways when this was important, while many French towns remained without such access. We show that towns without coastal access grew more slowly in both Britain and France from 1200-1800, and calculate that with better coastal access, France’s urban network would have been up to 20-30 percent larger in 1800."

The Growth Economics Blog: The Loss of Skill in the Industrial Revolution: "A recent working paper by Alexandra de Pleijt and Jacob Weisdorf... looks at skill composition of the English workforce from 1550 through 1850.... The big upshot to their paper is that there was substantial de-skilling over this period, driven mainly by a shift in the composition of manual laborers. In 1550, only about 25% of all manual laborers are unskilled (think ditch-diggers), while 75% are either low- or medium-skilled (weavers or tailors)... [But] manual laborers [rise], reaching 45% by 1850, while the low- and medium-skilled fall to 55%.... This shift really starts to take place by 1650, while before the traditional start of the Industrial Revolution.... 'High-quality workmen'--carpenters, joiners, wrights, turners--rose only from 3.9% to 4.9% of the workforce between 1550 and 1850. These are precisely the kinds of workers that Joel Mokyr claims are the crux of the Industrial Revolution in England. They built, improved, adapted, and micro-innovated all the classic inventions.... It’s a really interesting paper, and it’s neat to see how much information you can keep sucking out of these parish records from England.... Does industrialization depend on a concentrated core of skills, rather than a broad distribution of skills? That is, if Mokyr is right about the source of English industrialization, then it’s those extra 650K high-skilled workers that really made all the difference.... Second, should we care about de-skilling?... Could this just mean that the economy was getting more efficient at using the human capital at hand? England didn’t need to waste all that time and effort skilling-up a big mass of workers. They could be used immediately, without much training.... Doesn’t that imply that England was getting more (output) from less (human capital)? That’s a good thing, right?...

Jay Rosen: Facebook’s phony claim that “you’re in charge”: "In today’s New York Times... Ravi Somaiya visits with Facebook...a writes: 'Mr. Marra said he did not think too much about his impact on journalism: "We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors... don’t want to have editorial judgment over the content.... You’ve made your friends... connected to the pages that you want to connect to... are the best decider.... We’re saying, ‘We think that of all the stuff you’ve connected yourself to, this is the stuff you’d be most interested in reading.’"'... I say a lie, not just an untruth, because anyone who works day-to-day on the code for News Feed knows how much judgment goes into it.... I’m not sure why it’s sitting there unchallenged in a New York Times story. For that doesn’t even rise to the level of ‘he said, she said.’ It’s just: he said, poof!... A more plausible description would go something like this: 'The algorithm isn’t picking stories the way a home page or front page editor would.... Instead, it’s... recommending stories based on Facebook’s overriding decision rule... maximizing time on site.... The end-in-view is... a user base in constant contact with Facebook. As programmers we have to use our judgment--and a rigorous testing regime--to make that happen. We think it results in a satisfying experience.' That would be a more truthful way of putting it.... Here is where journalists have to do their job better. It’s not just calling out BS statements.... It’s recognizing that Facebook has chosen to go with ‘thin’ legitimacy as its operating style, in contrast with ‘thicker’ forms..."

Matt O'Brien: The worst possible case for the worst possible idea, the gold standard - The Washington Post: "Thiel might think that gold is the only 'real' money, and everything else is just a representation of it. That's what Krugman calls the 'Midas delusion': the belief that the one true measure of money isn't how many goods and services it can buy, but rather how much gold. This is just as nutty as it sounds. It's saying that the only way to measure our standard of living is by the price of gold, but the price of the things we need to actually, you know, live. The dustbin of history is there for a reason."

Over at Equitable Growth: Obamacare Implementation Overview: Wednesday Focus for October 29, 2014

Over at Equitable Growth: David Leonhardt's Upshot is doing some very nice data-visualization work:

Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz: Obamacare: Who Was Helped Most?:

READ MOAR

Key takeaways:

Having a state government that expands Medicaid is, of course, overwhelmingly the most important factor: look at Kentucky-WV vs. Tennessee-Virginia, or Arkansas-Missouri.

A state government that tries to hide the existence of the exchange-marketplaces from people can (largely) do so, and can cause a huge amount of damage in implementation: look at Wisconsin, Kansas, or Montana.

Even in states that did not expand Medicaid and where the state government did not lift a finger to inform people of the exchange-marketplaces, Hispanics have been signing up for insurance in numbers significantly greater than I had expected--look at the Texas-Mexico border.

With respect to what remains to be one, look at the Confederacy! (Minus Medicaid-Advantage Arkansas, of course.) At the end of the nineteenth century the Confederacy was taxed to provide pensions for the widows and orphans of Union-Army Civil-War veterans: now we have a similar pattern underway--although this time it is voluntary, produced not by northern Unionist-Republican votes but by southern neo-Confederate-Repubublican votes.

Given how broadly the money from Obamacare flowed not just to the poor and previously-uninsured but to all the different parts of the medical-industrial-financial complex, I am still amazed by how not ideology--ObamaCare, remember, is in its essentials a Cato Institute production--but mere partisanship (and anti-Obama racism?) trumps the material interest of the money flows. Given the centrality of the medical-industrial-financial complex to so much of so many local economies, this extremely sharp regional cutting-off-one's-nose is an extraordinary shock.

What SL said about NFIP vs. Sibelius: Scott Lemieux: A Disgrace Even By Roberts Court Standards: "The effects of John Roberts re-writing the ACA’s Medicaid expansion are felt in Mississippi.... '"We work hard at being last", said Roy Mitchell, the beleaguered executive director of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, when we met in Jackson. "Even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked"'. This reflects an infliction of pain and suffering and death than was eminently avoidable. If you’ll forgive me for reiterating, it’s nearly impossible to overstate how terrible this decision was. It would be one thing if this denial of access of medical care to millions of people was enforcing some explicit constitutional provision, but it wasn’t. If this judicially invented at least protected some meaningful individual liberty interest it might be a little more understandable, but it doesn’t. At best, the lives of millions of people have been made worse--with consequences up to and including death--in order to prioritize inferential states’ 'rights' [to 'equal dignity'] over human rights. But here’s the kicker: Sebelius does not even provide any significant protection for state autonomy. Congress remains free to create a Medicaid program that requires everyone up to 138% of the federal poverty line to be covered and makes all Medicaid funding contingent on meeting these conditions. It simply would have to structure it by formally repealing the previous Medicaid and replacing it... thus evading the Supreme Court’s newly minted requirement that existing funding can sometimes be made contingent on accepting new conditions and sometimes can’t and we’ll let you know ex post facto.... The fact that so much misery was created for so little should permanently shame the justices who voted for it. It’s judicial review at its least defensible."

Liveblogging World War II: October 29, 1944: Pacific Search and Rescue

Daniel S. Geiser: Story from the Typhoon:

The three of us jumped into the Pacific Ocean, holding on to a two-man life raft while Japanese ships followed the slowly moving OS2N Kingfisher. We hoped!

Thirteen hours earlier, 29 October 1944, the USS Iowa was on rescue duty. Carrier based planes from a Task Force of the Third Fleet were attacking the Manila Bay Area in the Philippines. The V-Division crew had prepared Iowa's two planes for catapulting which were to be flown with empty back seats minus parachutes to increase space. Ensign Ace Riggins, assigned to the Division two months before, was standing by to pilot one of the aircraft while I was checking Iowa's position relative to the Manila area and monitoring any information concerning downed aircraft. About 1500 we were informed by the carrier USS Hancock, code name Bingo Base, that two of her men were in a life-raft about ten miles East of Luzon. Their SB2C Scout Bomber had been shot down over the island and friendly fighters were now flying over head to protect them from enemy planes in the area. We were informed by Bingo Base that two of her F6F Hellcats would fly protection for the floatplanes if we would undertake the mission.

Both OS2N's were catapulted and were joined by Bingo 29 and Bingo 40. It had been estimated that downed aviators were approximately 1`50 miles away on a course of 255 degrees. Around 1700 we approached several unnamed islands and sighted the life raft with the two men aboard. As we had planned Riggins was to stand by and circle with the Bingo fighter while I attempted the rescue. I landed and taxied near the raft and by using a throw line assisted Lt.(jg) Ennis and Radioman Merridith aboard. They shared close quarters but got settled in the rear seat of the Kingfisher. I taxied to the lee side of a nearby island and, through the sea was choppy; I was able to take off without difficulty and joined Riggins and the Bingo Hellcats in the air.

On leaving the Iowa we were told that enemy aircraft were in the vicinity and therefore the Task Force would be high-speed retirement when the last planes were recovered at dusk. We were warned again that 'Rats' and 'Hawks', Japanese aircraft, had been sighted. With the F6F's flying high cover we headed east in the direction of the Task Force. When we left the Iowa Riggins and I both knew that the distance involved in the rescue would take most of the daylight hours and neither one of us looked forward to the difficulty of making a night landing.

After flying an hour or so the sky began to darken; I noticed the white caps picking up and d the weather changing. I had been in VHF contact with the others in our group and we were becoming concerned about the darkness and the rapidly forming line squall in the distance and the likelihood that our ships were in the middle of the storm. It was now raining and wing lights were turned on. In talking to Riggins we decided not to attack the storm head on but to go around, perhaps withdraw, and land on the water on a calmer location. On hearing this Bingo 29 informed me that he would try to fly over the storm to get the Hancock. Riggins stated he was low on gas and we decided to land and wait out the storm on the water. Hearing this Bingo 40 said he would land his plane near us and we could bring him aboard one of our floatplanes. I landed in a rough sea away from the storm and saw Riggins land a short distance away on my starboard beam. Bingo 40 came low overhead and crash landed not very far off the port quarter. I saw Ensign Ace Riggins for the last time as he began to taxi toward the downed Bingo 40. I was doing all I could to keep the plane afloat while searching the area without success. I'm certain Ennis and Merridith in their cramped quarters and hearing none of our communications were shaken up and wondering was going on. Their extra weight may have been instrumental in keeping the plane afloat.

The engine was used to keep the Kingfisher into the wind and afloat until the storm subsided. For the first time, since picking them up, I was able to converse with Ennis and Merridith. It was now very dark and we recalled that the Task Force was scheduled for high-speed retirement at dusk because of enemy action and there would be little concern for our small group as compared to the concern for the safety of thousands. Even if our location was known the best we could expect was to be found by a searching plane or submarine eventually. We convinced ourselves that nothing would happen before daylight. Around 0300, after our last star shell had been fired and lightened the sky for several moments, Lt. Ennis and Merridith stood on the wing beside me, as they had done earlier in the night, asking if I was aware of lights blinking in the darkness. Something different was happening and we concluded that they were lights from ships milling around and that we had been seen. They couldn't be American ships because of the darkened ship policies and the strict restrictions on showing a light at night, which we knew so well. Hours had gone by since friendly ships left the area. Our belief was that these were ships of the Japanese Fleet.

Huge shapes loomed up around us and we expected to be captured or the object of something worse. There was no difference of opinion among the three of us in looking for and doing something to receive a different fate. I started the engine, destroyed the IFF equipment, and the Kingfisher taxied slowly through the Japanese Fleet. Sure that the Japanese would follow the OS2U, we jumped into the water with the life raft and hoped to be overlooked. But, fortunately, it didn't work. A ship hull appeared beside us. Although we had heard some English word from the ship's deck, spoken by Japanese, we thought, we could not believe we were in American hands until we climbed over the rail of the USS Colohan.

Several hours later I was taken alongside the Iowa and out aboard by Breeches Buoy. An OS2N was secured to the port catapult and felt relieved that Riggins and his plane were safe. It was not to be so for it turned out to be my plane.

The storm was responsible for a number of planes being down and the entire Task Force remained to search for and pick up pilots. I was told that the Iowa had my plane on radar and was aware of our position. Around 0400 when they sighted the now empty moving Kingfisher and the ship drew alongside and I am told that the First Lieutenant, Aircraft Recovery Officer, using a megaphone, was Yelling at the moving aircraft telling the pilot to wake up. The Iowa made a 360-degree turn and again came along side the now stationary out of fuel kingfisher. The Iowa stopped dead in the water, backed down, and lowered a V-Division by the stern crane to attach the hook and hoisted the crewman and plane back to the catapult.

Captain Allan McCann ordered me to the Bridge to report. He commended me for a job well done but to this day I can't quite figure the expression that came over his face, was it a hint of a smile, when I gave the reason for leaving my Kingfisher. Did he expect ME TO KNOW that there were no enemy ships in the area?

A day later word came from the USS Hancock that Bingo 40 was found alive drifting in his lifejacket, but in no condition to start flying soon again. Bingo 29 after saying he intended to fly over the storm was not found.

John Michaud in the New Yorker on Walter Miller's "Canticle for Liebowitz": Wednesday Book Reviews/Live from Crows Coffee

Jon Michaud: A Science-Fiction Classic Still Smolders: "The abbey at Monte Cassino... atop a rocky hill...

...eighty miles south of Rome... founded in 529 by St. Benedict of Nursia.... Generations of scribes labored in the abbey’s library to copy texts and preserve artifacts.... From November, 1943, to May, 1944, the hill on which the abbey stood was at the center of one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Second World War. Monte Cassino was a crucial part of the Gustav Line... ‘fortress strength.’... The Allied command, believing that the Germans were using the abbey as a garrison and ammunition dump, made the controversial decision to bomb Monte Cassino. On February 15, 1944, American B-17s, B-25s, and B-26s dropped more than four hundred tons of explosives on the monastery....

One of the American airmen who participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino was a young radio operator and tail gunner from Florida named Walter M. Miller, Jr... best known for the only novel he published in his lifetime, ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’... [which] has never been out of print, selling more than two million copies.... ‘Fiat Homo’ (‘Let there be Man’), is set at a monastery in the Utah desert some six hundred years after a nuclear holocaust known as the Flame Deluge.... The monks who reside in the monastery are devoted to honoring the memory of Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Jewish scientist at Los Alamos who was martyred for his efforts to safeguard scientific knowledge in the aftermath of the conflict.... ‘Fiat Lux’ (‘Let there be Light’), takes place hundreds of years later.... Thon Taddeo, a latter-day Newton or Einstein, visits the monastery to investigate its holdings. He is astonished to find that one of the monks has created a working electric light.... Taddeo believes the Leibowitz Memorabilia will lead him to breakthroughs in his work, but the abbot refuses to let Taddeo take items from the library back to Texarkana.... ‘Fiat Voluntas Tua’ (‘Let Thy Will Be Done’), describes the beginning of another nuclear war... [in] the year 3781.... As the war begins, the abbot Dom Zerchi, instructs a group of monks to flee the earth for a colony near Alpha Centauri. They take the Leibowitz Memorabilia with them. After they depart, the abbey, which has stood for nearly two thousand years, is demolished by an atomic bomb. The abbot is crushed in the ruins. The final passages of the book are an eerie imagining of the Earth without mankind:

A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the old clean currents. He was very hungry that season....

‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ sits squarely at the heart of the subgenre of novels about nuclear holocaust.... Beyond being a repository for his fears about the bomb, ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ was a means for Miller to work through the trauma and guilt that haunted him from his wartime experiences, especially the bombing of the abbey at Monte Cassino....

‘Walt was deeply depressed by post-traumatic stress disorder and had been for half a century,’ Joe Haldeman told the Washington Post. ‘I don’t know how many people he felt responsible for killing, but it was a lot.’ Miller took his own life in January of 1996...