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Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center reports that Sen. Baucus
is floating the following trial balloon: Congress would fund fund part of health reform with a cap on the tax exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance but only at a level "significantly above" the cost of the standard plan offered to federal employees. The measure would also exclude policies bargained under current union contracts. ... [E.A.]
Why exclude policies negotiated by unions but not policies negotiated by individuals? Politics, I assume. Unions wouldn't stand for anything else. Fine. But here's the thing--the provision appears to be more than a simple "grandfather" clause that protects current union contracts. A kf source says that the new tax will not take effect until 2013. Does this mean that labor contracts agreed on between now and that date would also be protected? If so, Baucus has just given a big tax incentive for workers--perhaps encouraged by labor signature collectors under a "card check" bill--to form unions and bargain for lavish health benefits that will then be exempted from his tax on lavish benefits. Join a union, get a tax break! (A break the rest of us would have to pay for). ... If Dems start lavishing IRS advantages on union members, maybe organized labor won't even need the "card check" bill to reverse its declining membership numbers. ... 9:53 P.M.
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Mitosis in the Faster Electorate: Conor Friedersdorf notices that the fast twitter-driven news out of Iran has divided his fellow citizens and friends into two groups: 1) Those who keep up to the second with what is happening and how the U.S. should react; and 2) Those who take the weekend off and only know the vaguest details (i.e. " that Ahmadinejad won"). I'd say that Friedersdorf has stumbled upon Jerry Skurnik's "Theory of the Two Electorates"--except it's a peculiarly accelerated version of the Skurnik theory, because Friedersdorf's two groups are both made up of people who would normally be part of the better informed of Skurnik's two electorates:
And those out of the know? They aren't any longer just grandmothers, the apolitical, and the middle manager in Scranton who gets all his news at 11 o'clock after the game. Now people who watch The Daily Show, subscribe to The New Yorker, and read the CNN subtitles as they run on the 24 Hour Fitness treadmill possess radically less information than a self-selecting group of their fellow citizens, granting that they mostly catch up on any given piece of information in a matter of days.
Will this make a difference, Friedersdorf asks?
Are we approaching a point where political information is processed so fast that an event happens, information elites weigh in to shape the discourse surrounding it, the conventional wisdom is communicated to Congress, and elected leaders formulate reactions based on public opinion... all before most of even the formerly plugged in members of the public ever learn what on earth is going on, or have a chance to form an opinion?
I could see Congress, spooked by twitter, overreacting in this fashion--if, say, a draft of Senator Baucus' health care plan comes out that displeases the left, which reacts by shutting down various switchboards before the David Broders of the world can even get to their typewriters keyboards. ... It's hard to believe it will have an effect on official U.S. Iran policy.** (Friedersdorf agrees.)
Of course, to the extent it does empower Friedersdorf's first group, including the fastest bloggers, it would empower Andrew Sullivan-- which (as Obama has learned) is always a dangerous thing. ...
**--That doesn't mean it hasn't had a big effect on the events in Iran itself--the events that the U.S. government must react to--or on the unofficial reaction of American activists to those events. ... 8:53 P.M.
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Alert reader J: "Interesting that the WaPo could write an entire article on the decline of public housing in NYC without ever mentioning the words "ACLU," "liberalism," and "Lindsay." [Link added] ... True! The piece--on Sotomayor's childhood--makes it seem as if the projects were just suddenly swamped by waves of drugs ("Then heroin surged through the projects ... Then came crack ...") as opposed to, say, an increasingly concentrated culture of fatherless dependence in which drug users and dealers and gang members couldn't be evicted because of misguided due process concerns about deprivation of "new property"! ... (I remember an excellent piece by WaPo's Blaine Harden on the difficulty of evicting bad actors from housing projects, but haven't been able to find it.). ...
P.S.: The Post's Robin Shulman does mention that in 1981 Congress "changed eligibility rules to give preference in public housing to the poorest households," which had the perverse effect of intensifying the culture of poverty by excluding middle class and working class tenants. But Shulman doesn't make that point--instead quoting an expert who simply says the change made public housing the "housing of last resort." And that was a problem because ...? ... 8:21 P.M.
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Matt Cooper calls "the idea that that the Clintons were unwilling to take half-a-loaf" on health care "total revisionism." Hmm. It sure seemed that way at the time! ... P.S.: Unless Cooper's talking about a specific early-on period when the Clinton plan was first being produced--he uses the vague qualifier "back then" .... 7:32 P.M.
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Obama vs. Slate: Obama cites "medical errors that lead to 100,000 lives lost unnecessarily in our hospitals every year." [E.A.] Walter Olson smells BS, and cites a Slate article to back him up. ... 7:25 P.M.
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"[Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton has intervened in talks over the future of Opel and Vauxhall at the request of German ministers," reports the London Times. Why is that fascinating to those who read the gossip columns? Because the two bidders for Opel are FIAT of Italy and Magna of Canada. Magna's Executive Vice-Chairman and former CEO is Belinda Stronach (whose father, Frank Stronach, founded the company and is board chairman). Belinda Stronach has been linked in the gossip pages with ... Bill Clinton. Even the Washington Post once cited Canadian reports of their "'close personal and business relationship.'" She's the one whose mere presence in a tabloid photograph, leaving a restaurant in a group with Bill, caused concern among N.Y. Dem pols, according to the NYT.
Now Bill Clinton's wife will help decide the fate of her firm's bid for Opel.
I thought Jeffrey Toobin told us sex was never relevant! ... [Hillary's listed as a friend on her (unofficial) MySpace "tribute" page. Will her relationship with Bill hurt her or help her?--ed Don't know. But it's likely to be one or the other!]
Update: It appears that Stronach's firm, Magna, will get Opel (after coming up with "new ideas"). That leaves FIAT the loser bidder, and FIAT's new American partner, the New! Chrysler, looking awfully Choochy:
Opel’s technology would have been a major asset in the Chrysler effort, because of its strength in small to medium size cars that Chrysler’s current lineup lacks. Industry analysts were much bigger supporters of the potential Opel deal for Fiat, viewing the chance of a successful combination with Chrysler as much smaller. [NYT]
12:55 A.M.
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Defining Ruthlessness Down
"As it has been up to this point, the Obama administration's role going forward is to be ruthless and impatient about the restructuring of these once-great American companies so they can emerge from the current recession profitable and competitive." --Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein, defending the Chrysler and GM bailouts. [E.A]
"For our active members these tentative changes mean no loss in your base hourly pay, no reduction in your healthcare and no reduction in pensions.”--UAW memo to GM workers about the concessions made to help the company. Via WSJ. [E.A.]
3:08 A.M.
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We almost lost Burkle! Hillary's gift to the press: With Hillary, Obama gets the Bill Drama. And with the Bill Drama, he gets the Burkle Drama! The latest, from S.F. Chronicle: "Billionaire supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, who is former President Bill Clinton's confidant and financial benefactor, put in millions" in a failed biometric bill-paying venture run by a sketchy-resumed "visionary" who apparently knew how to party. ... Partying seems to be a common thread in Burkle investment missteps. ...[Tks to reader H.] 12:52 P.M.
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Saturday December 6, 2008
New York Daily News gossip columnists Rush & Molloy cut back to one day a week. Somewhere, Lloyd Grove is smiling. ... 11:13 P.M.
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Thursday, December 4, 2008
Mark Krikorian takes on the Illegals-Are-Leaving-So-What's-the-Problem argument (which has of necessity replaced the Illegals-Are-Here-To-Stay-So-Deal-With-It-Yahoos argument). We might as well make the borders porous, this new argument goes, "because people will just leave when the economy slows down." Yes, they will. But Krikorian notes they're leaving in part because of the economy but in part because of the enforcement efforts that people like Krikorian have championed. And, he might add, because the promise of amnesty as a reward for sticking around has faded.
But it's more than that. We don't want low-paid illegals immigrants streaming back in when the economy heats up again. One of the virtues of a hot economy, for Democrats, and certainly for Democratic adherents of Clintonomics, is that it tightens the labor market at the bottom, raising wages for the groups that have gotten screwed the worst by the forces of trade and technology over the past three decades. Sure, in boom times we need more workers. But we want employers to have at least some trouble finding help--then they have to pay more to get it (and maybe pay relatively less to their well-educated managers). It worked in the '90s. It won't work if the proximate effect of a boom isn't raises for unskilled American workers but rather more jobs (in America) for new, unskilled non-American workers. A free flow of immigrants, in this sense, functions eerily like the reserve army of the unemployed functions in paranoid Marxist theory. ("My men are demanding raises. Time for a recession," whisper the industrialists to each other over cigars at the club.) It's bad enough that the Fed takes away the punch bowl whenever the party starts getting good.** ...
Of course, sophisticated defenders of "comprehensive" reform realize this, and argue that in the future the inflows will be controlled. That argument's equally flawed (in part because many of the interests supporting "comprehensive" reform don't really want it to be controlled). But it's a different argument from the one Krikorian is refuting--which is the idea that--hey, look!--uncontrolled, natural flows solve any problem themselves. ...
**--['without all sorts of uninvited guests crashing the party and drinking the punch first?'-ed No. The full metaphor might almost work, I suppose, if the "party" is a wage-increase party, not a growth party. Immigration doesn't seem to inhibit growth. But the "punch" in the metaphor is easy money--and the immigrants aren't drinking that. I give up.] ...10:48 P.M.
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The Jobs Bank Lives! It's not for UAW workers. It's for termed-out Dem politicians in California. The aptly named Waste Management Board ... [via Insta] 10:07 P.M.
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25% of the Amnesty with None of the Enforcement! Even if "comprehensive immigration reform," legalizing more or less all illegals, doesn't pass in the next year, a seemingly more limited measure called the DREAM Act might. In WaPo's words:
The legislation would have halted deportation efforts of children who are here illegally, giving them citizenship opportunities if they entered the country before age 16 and have lived here for five years.
They would then have six years to complete two years of higher education or two years in the military. But because the Act would apply to any illegals between the ages of 12 and 30 (as long as they entered the U.S. before age 16) it could effectively legalize millions. And do you really think the government is then going to take action against their parents, or against siblings who are also here illegally? That's why even DREAM proponents claim the act would be an amnesty for "25% of our total undocumented population."
On bloggingheads I attempt to explain why this means DREAM offers the worst of three worlds. 1) It creates a powerful magnet for future attempted illegal immigration--"Sneak into the U.S. with your children and they can be made U.S. citizens and attend U.S. colleges like their predecessors!" 2) But it doesn't have the toughened enforcement parts of the "comprehensive" compromise--so those incentivized to sneak in by Factor #1 would find it as easy to do as it is now;. Meanwhile, 3) it still leaves the bulk of the illegal population living "in the shadows." ... All of the perverse incentives with none of the non-perverse incentives! It took decades of practice for sophisticated activists to achieve this result. ... 8:21 P.M.
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Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Mazda has joined the ranks of Pixar cars and chosen an unfortunate new corporate face. Is it smiling or hurling? ... 11:04 P.M.
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Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Gird Your Loins: David Frum and Bill Bradley offer hard nosed, savvy explanations of why picking Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State makes sense for Obama. He looks magnanimous. He'll find out her secrets--then he has the goods on her. He can fire her. She'll work for him. Bill will be controlled. Now she'll have real trouble paying Mark Penn's bill! ...
Sorry, I'm not buying it. It seems simple to me: She can't do him much damage from the Senate, where she doesn't rank. She can do him a lot of damage through self-interested leaking from the State Department. (Here's Exhibit Z, if you needed it, from Elizabeth Drew.) If he fires her she can then run against him and make more trouble.
Even smart, well-advised people make mistakes. I think it's a mistake. Or else there is some other factor at work that we don't know about (e.g., Hillary has the real birth certificate! Joking!)... [How do you know her aides will keep leaking? That's just CW. The CW said Joe Biden would be a walking gaffe machine, remember--ed Joe Biden was a walking gaffe machine. Remember] 10:24 P.M.
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Jonathan Chait argues that Clinton made a political mistake by running up a budget surplus in his second term--because "all you ended up doing was just giving more money for George Bush to devote to tax cuts for the rich." I've never understood this argument. It would have been better if the money had been pissed away on veteran's programs, civil service salary hikes, agriculture subsidies and money for the failing education bureaucracy? In Democrats wouldn't have enacted universal health insurance in Clinton's second term after all. (The GOP controlled Congress.) They would have just larded up existing programs--programs that are then almost impossible to cut. Now, at least, the Obama administration has the option of raising money for health care by raising the taxes on the rich back to where they were before. If Chait's advice had been followed, Obama wouldn't have that option (because taxes on the rich would never have gone down). ... It's hard to raise taxes, but it's easier to raise taxes starting from a lower base. And it's easier to raise taxes than to try to finance health care by cutting government programs with powerful constituencies. ... A fuller version of this argument can be found here. ... P.S.: I'm not saying Bush's distribution of tax cuts was the right one. I'm saying that running up a surplus from 1996 to 2001 and then spending the surplus on tax cuts of some sort was way better for Democrats than not running a surplus in the first place (because the money was spent on the sorts of Democratic "priorities" that would have been funded at the time). Politics isn't a football game where Dems gain yards by spending on their "priorities" and GOPs gain yards by helping the rich. Some Dem "priorities" get in the way of other Dem "priorities." Some GOP "victories" set the stage for later Democratic achievements. ... 7:10 P.M.
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