The NY Times is full of cheer today:
The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home price index, a widely watched measure of the housing markets in 20 metropolitan areas, rose 0.4 percent from September on a seasonally adjusted basis. It was the fifth consecutive month that prices were up.
Underneath this apparent good news were some disquieting signs of deterioration, however.
But seasonal adjustments tend to hide any weakness in the cooler months, when fewer houses are sold. On an unadjusted basis, the index was flat in October.
“We’ve started to see the possibility of either a leveling off of prices for a few months or perhaps a double-dip,” said Maureen Maitland, the vice president for index services at S.& P.
One of the most frustrating things about politics is when you know one group of people is right about something, but they are just powerless to do anything. Krugman, Atrios, and dozens of others have been warning about a double-dip recession (Krugman was just warning about it on the Sunday shows), and the stimulus bill should have been bigger and not had all those ridiculous tax cuts, but because of the way our legislature is set up, nothing can be done about it.
That is what has been adding to my angst the last couple of weeks regarding the health care debate and the kill the bill folks. On a lot of things, I think they are absolutely right- the public option would be better, I think the mandates will be politically dangerous and suck, there should be more subsidies, single payer would be better, there shouldn’t be abortion restrictions, and so on. On so many of these things, I agree with the DFH crowd. The problem is, I don’t see any way of getting that done, and one of the things I like about Obama is he understands the art of the possible and takes what he can get. Personally, after the behavior I saw from Big Pharm, the insurance industry, the AMA, and medical providers, I’m to the point I would just nationalize the entire damned health care system like the British NHS. And I’m starting to ramble.
At any rate, the DFH crowd is probably right about the economic future- Atrios has been more right than most. And once again, they will be ignored and the centrists and the blue dogs and the self-annointed fiscal conservatives will rule the day, as we all go down the crapper together.
inkadu
What I learned from reading this blog was that keeping real-estate prices artificially high is a bullshit move that had nothing to do with the size of the bailout.
But I don’t understand most of what I read and less of what I write.
I do feel the same way about this health care reform. The only good thing I can say about it (long term) is that it puts the United States government on a suicide track unless it controls health care costs. If that’s enough to make cost reform happen, good. If all it does is drive Republicans into office who are happy to rape subcontractors as bridges crumble around them, then bad.
And aren’t we done talking about this anyway? I thought everyone had gotten their realpolitik angst out before xmas.
eemom
on a related note, there is going to be a collective orgasm from the shit sandwich crowd over Bob Herbert’s Op Ed today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/opinion/29herbert.html?hp
Can’t wait.
David in NY
Sigh.
Sanka
Shorter John Cole: F–k the rest of the country, we need to stroke Obama’s ego and hopefully the rest of the country will
continue to vote the Democratic party line for yearskeep the Democrats in power for 2010.Obama hasnt’ yet gotten a handle on the “governing” part of being President has he? That you’re supposed to be President for the American people and not
your political donorsjust the Democrats.John Cole
Is Sanka a Puma, a firebagger, a teabagger, or all of the above? So hard to keep track of all the wingnuts.
schrodinger's cat
I am trying to figure out the factors that lead to the financial collapse last year. Have we seen the worse yet? or have we just kicked the can down the road.
Edited: I am trying to make my research project more focused any thoughts appreciated.
JGabriel
@eemom: Honestly, though, it’s a good thing shit like that gets publicized now, while it can still be dealt with in conference, than later.
.
Maude
@eemom: Heard it this morning on my radio.
The main point?
Oh, noes, Obama wasn’t wearing a tie.
Kid you not.
blahblahblah
There’s a reason why every few hundred years the Chinese would sweep aside a dynastic empire to make room for the next. It was considered a ‘cycle of rule’: that the new dynasty and emperor would wipe out inefficient bureaucracy in one singular act. He would then build new institutions that were more appropriate to the new time. Those institutions would ossify, and – in time – become the very inefficient bureaucracies that had been replaced by the prior revolution. Soon, in a few generations, the ruling family would be so burdened by unworkable institutions that the people would be forced to rise up once again in order to regain functional government. And so the cycle repeats itself. It has been that way since the fall of Han. The only seeming break in the dynastic cycle of Chinese culture was the success of the Communist Revolution in ’49. We’ll see how long that lasts.
beltane
Home prices are still quite high in relation to incomes. Until this situation is rectified, the real estate market will, and should, remain vulnerable.
I don’t even think this is really about DFHs vs. centrists. Calculated Risk, for example, is hardly a DFH blog. It’s more a battle between pragmatists and ideologues. The situation we’re in reminds me of the early days of the microbe theory of disease: the smart, observant scientists knew infectious diseases were caused by various microbes while the entrenched policy-makers clung to the belief that diseases were caused by “vapors”.
Progress will eventually be made, but only after a lot of carnage, which must be laid at the feet of the ideologues.
toujoursdan
One of the most frustrating things about politics is when you know one group of people is right about something, but they are just powerless to do anything.
That’s what I say regarding those warning us about peak oil, that there are limits to economic and population growth on a finite planet and that our current version of capitalism won’t work in a steady state or contracting economy. When will we have “enough” growth? What do we do when we reach those limits? How is that going to work? What bank is going to risk lending if they don’t think they’ll get more in return? Who is going to risk their life savings starting a business if there is no prospect of growth? Every time I turn on the TV and hear an economist cheer about economic growth I feel powerless.
Personally, I think the writing is on the wall that we’ve reached some hard limits on how much human beings can consume. Many of the economic problems we face are symptoms of this problem. Yet the ones who are trying to warn us are derided as “fringe” while the unlimited growth crowd is on CNN, CNBC and MSNBC every night.
The Grand Panjandrum
@schrodinger’s cat: Unless the economy starts picking up more rapidly, commericial real estate loans arelikely to tank just like the residential mortgage industry did. The ripple effect could be enormous.
cmorenc
@JohnCole
You…ramble? Perish the thought. Wouldn’t Tunch be ripping your toes apart underneath the table by the fifth rambling sentence?
JGabriel
schrodinger’s cat:
Er, uh … we sawed off the top fifth of the can, but we’re kicking the rest down the road.
.
schrodinger's cat
@The Grand Panjandrum:
I think so too, commercial real estate is the next bubble to burst, wonder how GOP will try to spin that one, as Obama’s fault.
burnspbesq
@John Cole:
The correct answer is “none of the above; Sanka’s just an idiot.”
JAHILL10
Curious to know when and where the “Presidents always get what they want if they want it hard enough” meme got its start.
Ash Can
Problem-solving-by-committee is a terrible thing, but that’s essentially what a representative democracy amounts to. Even that unwieldy problem-solving process could work so much better, though, if it weren’t for the misinformation spewed by the assholes in both parties looking to do no more than score political points for themselves, enabled by incompetent and disingenuous mass media. The misinformation ends up hampering or preventing altogether the steps that must be taken to truly solve the problems, and fosters divisiveness among the populace as a bonus. Lovely.
schrodinger's cat
@The Grand Panjandrum:
I think so too, commercial real estate will be the next bubble to burst, wonder how GOP will try to spin that one, as Obama’s fault.
David
The complete lack of intelligent discussion in mainstream news helps create this logjam. The public discourse that results never addresses any real issues.
JGabriel
beltane:
In America these days, to be a Pragmatist is to be a Dirty Fucking Hippie.
.
schrodinger's cat
@burnspbesq:
I thought it was a brand of coffee.
blahblahblah
beltane:
Here’s a great example of still nutty home pricing:
26-28 Adrian St., Somerville, MA. The sellers want $845K for a triple decker a few hundred feet from my two-family. Since I own rental property in the area, I know what I can earn in rent. I called the selling agent to ask a few simple questions like: sq footage per unit, type of heating system and age of the furnace/hot water heaters, appliances, tenants, and expected rent.
The property is vacant. The seller claimed it would pull $2100/mo per unit. Noooooooo waaaaaaaaay. I said, I own rental property in the area. The landlord should expect somewhere between $1500 – $1650/mo. Anyone who buys at that price will go bankrupt. I mean, that property would likely run at an operating loss <i<fully rented, given this price. These people are nuts.
Sanka
@schrodinger’s cat:
How Overhauling Derivatives Died
Consider the can kicked…
inkadu
@schrodinger’s cat: Sanka is a decaffeinated brand of coffee.
I guess it’s one of those ironic names.
R. Johnston
Absolutely false. Obama takes what he’s sure to be able to get. He doesn’t even come close to expanding that to trying to get what it’s possible to get. If there’s something that Obama has a 90% chance of getting then there’s a 0% chance that Obama is going to try to get it. Hell, if there’s a 100% chance of Obama getting something, but in order to get it he’d have to use the bully pulpit and he’d have to threaten the Blue Dogs with cutting off DNC funds and primarying them, then there’s a 0% chance that Obama is going to try to get it.
Obama understands the art of staying above the fray, regardless of whether entering the fray is necessary in order to make the possible happen. Unless of course he can enter the fray by beating up some dirty fucking hippies. That he’s more than willing to do.
blahblahblah
R. Johnston
This.
Boots Day
There’s a very good reason to seasonally adjust the housing figures. Home sales always dip in the winter months, for obvious reasons. If they weren’t seasonally adjusted, we’d have panic in the housing market every winter followed by sighs of relief every spring.
To kvetch that if we didn’t seasonally adjust housing numbers, they’d look even worse, is totally beside the point.
Keith G
@John Cole:
Emopants?
danimal
@schrodinger’s cat:
Obama wants to take over the financial sector by establishing a Marxist regulatory regime. The market failure in commercial real estate is a direct result of the Obama administration’s regulatory proposals.
See, that was easy.
Ash Can
@John Cole: Maybe just a sore loser.
schrodinger's cat
@danimal:
You are good!
burnspbesq
The reporting on the Case-Shiller data is, unsurprisingly, incomplete. Yes, there was a month-over-month increase from September to October. What I find more interesting is that year-over-year (that is, comparing October 2009 to October 2008), prices are down in every one of the 20 markets that Case-Shiller surveys.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/12/29/a-look-at-case-shiller-by-metro-area-december-update/
JGabriel
inkadu:
To expand further: Sanka is a cheap, poor quality, decaffeinated instant coffee that gives everyone agita.
Which, I suppose, makes it less ironic than it is: accurate.
.
JAHILL10
@R. Johnston
If health care reform were such as piece of cake then why didn’t Clinton get it in the 90s? He WANTED it. He presented the Congress with a bill detailing exactly what he wanted. His party had control of Congress in a much less politically charged atmosphere. Why aren’t we all on single payer right now? Explain.
inkadu
@danimal: You could also add that once the federal government takes over retail properties, ACORN will have acres of rent free properties in which to counsel pimps and drug dealers.
Punchy
And yet my wingnut BIL and sister were dead serious when they said–I shit you not–the earth could actually support 85 billion humans. Thus ensued a very heated Christmas argument, and a dearth of raw data to support such insanity that they could obviously not supply.
So, yes, there are a lot of peeps out there who are oblivious to the dire nature of our ecosystems.
Tomlinson
Of the three major things he’s had a chance at “getting”: stimulus, a supreme court nominee, and HCR, what more do you think he could have “got”, at least as a package.
I’m not thinking anything. The stimulus, he could maybe have swung a bit more away from tax cuts, but I think those tax cuts were the sugar that got that past the public.
He could have nominated a liberal fire breather instead of Sotomayor, except I don’t think he *wanted* one – he wanted a good justice – and had he crammed a liberal fire breather through (how? this person has to be confirmed), he probably would have crippled HCR.
As for HCR, here’s a thought. For HCR, you are getting almost exactly what was able to be passed in Massachusetts. Except he did that *for the entire country*. The whole country is just a tad to the right of Massachusetts. Just a smidge.
Sanka
Meanwhile, the Obama administration gave
a blank checka nice Christmas present to Fannie and Freddy on Christmas Eve, while giving the American taxpayer a hot and steamy pile of coal:Which should turn out great:
What could go wrong?
wilfred
That’s called the prison germ.
A proud courtier went to Shibli and asked to become his student. Shibli told the man he wasn’t suitable. Incensed, the courtier listed all the reasons why he would be a perfect student. Shibli declined. This went on for weeks until one day the courtier was competely exasperated and pleaded that surely there must be one thing he could do, anything, to show that he could be a student. Shibli hesitated. There was one thing, actually, but he had never mentioned it because the courtier would never do it. Triumphant at last, the courtier asked for the task, while the other part of his brain imagined a brilliant future.
Shibli said: “Take off all your clothes, shave off all your hair and go to the public square. There, hang a bag of walnuts around your neck with a sign saying ‘a walnut to any boy who will punch me in the nose'”.
Bewildered, the courtier said “But I could never do anything like that”.
And Shibli said, “I know. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Edward G. Talbot
I think@RJohnston is fairly close to being on the mark about Obama, although I wouldn’t go quite that far. he’s right that it’s not the art of the possible. Obama isn’t interested in taking any risks of any sort of loss unless he has to.
One could argue that with today’s media, Obama has to do this. I disagree, but the argument at least holds some weight. The thing about your bemoaning the behavior of Pharma and the insurance industry, John, is that Obama made deals with them. We’ll never know what would have happened if he’d started the process by saying up front and publicly that they were going to have to give and give big (Yes, the Repubs would have screamed, but they did that anyway). And we’ll never know what would have happened if Obama said to Baucus and Nelson and Lieberman and Lincoln – vote against it decent reform if you want, I’m willing to risk losing on this and hang it repeatedly and publicly on your shoulders and not let it go and try again in 2010. he could have said up front – reconciliation is the answer if you fuck with me on this. Harry Reid certainly would have done it if it came from the White House.
Should he have done these things? Again, it’s a matter for legitimate debate. and it’s nothing personal with Obama, he seems to be a good and thoughtful man. I just wonder if his approach is what we need right now. There’s a middle ground between a steamroller and Obama’s approach.
K. Grant
The problem is that a good many in leftblogosphere offer a perfectly valid critique of the economic situation but then cannot help themselves and spill over into long rants about the meaning behind all of this – usually having to do with how Obama has sold us out. Ok, we get it, you don’t think the President is doing a good job. But take the next step – now that you have diagnosed the problem, offer a solution, and without rancor or shrillness, continue to constructively argue your case. Yes, it will take some time, but the notion that the President is locked into one particular mind-set is foolishness.
He is, fundamentally, a law professor, which means that you must present a superior argument without a great deal of emotional flourish to convince him that you are correct. This takes patience, a very strong argument, and plenty of corroborating evidence.
schrodinger's cat
@K. Grant:
but but isn’t he the deciderer?
slag
@schrodinger’s cat: I know a few people in the CRE appraisal biz, and they all hope they’re skimming along the bottom now. I share those hopes, but all signs indicate that the outlook is very bleak. Personally, I can look out my windows right now and see entire floors of unleased office space. Been that way for half a year.
Personally, I blame the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for this disaster.
scudbucket
@John Cole: as we all go down the crapper together.
Yes, this. Definitely give Obama credit where it’s due – and things are much better now than under dubya. No doubt about that. But let’s not sugar coat the bad: some of the stuff coming out of the WH and COngress is a) truly bad policy and b) gives the opposition a big stick to whack the Dems with. Blue Dogs and the GOP will survive, and thrive, next cycle, while centrist/liberal Dems will get pounded. To account for the awfulness of some of these policies, Firebaggers accuse Obama of selling out to Rahmbo-style corporatism. It’s not an unfair accusation, and certainly can’t be dismissed a priori. But the frustration everyone (except the investor class) feels with the apparent coddling of banksters and other corporate interests represents a real threat to the Democratic party in future elections. That’s one reason I oppose the (current) HC bill: there is no win in it for liberals, either in policy or politics. Same goes for Obama’s handling of straight-ahead economic issues: the Fed and job creation, propping up home prices, trickle-down bank bailouts, etc. There is no win for Dems in any of these policy decisions.
Corner Stone
@K. Grant:
Let’s not get too far out in front here. He is, fundamentally, a politician, which means you must present an argument that convinces him of political benefit.
R. Johnston
@JAHILL10:
Lay down the crack pipe, hippie basher.
No one said better health care reform would have been a walk in the park, or that everything the dirty fucking hippies dreamed of could have been made to happen. But better health care reform without a doubt was possible. There’s no doubt that better subsidies, Medicaid expansion, and earlier implementation could have happened. Medicare buy-in almost certainly could have happened. Some form of real cost control probably could have happened. A weak public option with a trigger for a strong public option likely could have happened.
But making anything better than the least possible reform that could be called reform happen requires expending political capital. It requires the President, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority Leader to exert pressure on and offer pork to those reluctant to come along. It requires explicitly leaving reconciliation on the table, whether or not you plan to use it. It requires letting Lieberman know that bad faith negotiations will be met with the hammer: his chairmanship, then committee assignments, then perqs of office will be stripped in turn so long as his bad faith continues. It requires reminding “moderates” that the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC contribute more money to their campaigns than do insurance companies.
burnspbesq
@Sanka:
What could go wrong, did go wrong, i.e., you seem to have convinced yourself that there is some causal link between actions taken by the current Administration and the increase in the delinquency rate.
To which any sensible person would reply in one of two ways: either “Nonsense” or “Let’s see your data.”
The reality is not that Fannie and Freddie’s portfolios have gotten worse. The reality is that we have a more accurate picture of how bad those portfolios always were.
srv
John, some of us were going to approach Project Wonderful with an emopants order. What size do you wear?
gwangung
@Edward G. Talbot: Just a thought: I prefer these types of critiques, where the criticism seems a lot more grounded in reality (i.e., known facts about behavior and temperment). And I think it directs behavior in a slightly more useful direction in that I think it’s more useful to focus on legislature to determine what’s possible, instead of trying to direct it top down. As well, it tends to undercut the wingnuts; if the action of grassroots and more broadly based, it exposes them for what they are: a minority interest group, who can be listened to, but not followed. Much easier to get Congress to be progressive if you present evidence you’re broadly based…
Zifnab
Just put your money where your mouth is and short the market. Then take your profits and tithe your sanest local, state, and federal representatives. That’s really all you can do when the majority choose to be stupid. Bet against them, reap what you sow, and fight on.
As it stands, the “be more conservative!” crowd won’t improve the market in the least. I don’t know if a double dip will bring about more liberal reforms or whiplash into conservative dogma, but I think the money has just about run out for bailouts.
It might actually be a good thing if – on taking a few treacherous steps out into the free market – Citi, Goldman, and the rest watch the turf give way and have to scramble back over to the Federal Government for assistance again.
JAHILL10
With a filibuster happy Republican minority in place and “moderates” holding all the cards, I think this is the best deal that could be got. And plenty of horsetrading had to be done to ge tthat far. You want real change reform the filibuster and Lieberman and other DINOs out of there. Otherwise, this is what comes out of the sausage making. It’s not over, but there are 30 million Americans out there that are going to be glad that we’ve gotten this far.
Corner Stone
@scudbucket:
Did anyone even read the quote I think Cole posted recently from Sen. Landreiu? She flat stated that cost controls were going to be implemented by taxing high value delivery plans.
ISTM that this should’ve perked the ears up of “centrists” and “pragmatists” reading this blog.
slag
@Edward G. Talbot:
I’ve been pretty darn critical of this administration for a variety of reasons, but I don’t know how you can make this statement. Obama started out his term with a fairly ambitious agenda (the one he got elected on) and has been slowly working toward it.
Healthcare is no walk in the park. Obama hasn’t been on vacation for 90+ days yet. And, to top it off, he walked into a friggin disaster on his very first day in office. If he weren’t interested in risking loss, he could have easily used the economic crash as justification for doing nothing. But he didn’t. And that deserves acknowledgement.
Personally, I think the tone of John’s post here is spot-on. Very diplomatic, restrained, and honest. Which makes it incumbent on us to do the same.
Corner Stone
@srv:
Obviously they are one size fits all.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@John Cole:
I always assume spoof unless there’s compelling evidence to the contrary. Sanka pushes too many buttons too deliberately to be genuine, IMO, but hides it better than BoB.
Paul L.
At least Krugman and Atrios mentioned GDP getting revised downward but not the latest to 2.2%
Unlike someone who celebrated the bogus 3.5% growth in GDP.
Good Economic News
Strange.
Under G. W. Bush I remember GDP numbers being revised upward.
But under Clinton and now Obama the GDP numbers are revised downward.
Corner Stone
@JAHILL10:
Horsetrading implies a kind of “give and take”. This was more of a “purchase”.
eemom
“….as we all go down the crapper together.”
Finally, something we all can agree on.
R. Johnston
ROTFL
Lawyers and law professors are, next to theologians and right-wing editorialists, the greatest purveyors of pseudointellectual bullshit that our society has to offer. There’s hardly a lawyer or law professor out there who could recognize a logical argument if it bit him in the ass. The art of lawyering is the art of hiding the logical flaws in your arguments and disguising appeals to emotion with language that morons think resembles the language of logic.
K. Grant
@scudbucket:
I don’t care. Not a whit. Not really. What I want are wins for people who need a job and who need affordable health care. But you see the two actually go hand in hand – if the you want to win elections, make sure that the people win. Give them something that they can point to and say, those folks running the show know what they are doing, let’s keep them around. If you provide enough actual wins, it will matter very little what the chattering class or the town-hall screamers say. People will write them off as cranks. This is always the way it works, if you actually get a few things through the pipeline that benefits the people, they tune out the knaves.
bystander
That is what has been adding to my angst the last couple of weeks…
As I see it, each of us has a choice. We can be junior league political consultants positing what is and isn’t politically feasible. Or, we can be citizens.
The former has the advantage of being without risk. The individual doesn’t have to “own” any of the outcomes which follow. There is a ready made rationalization built right into the position – whatever that position might be. And, like an armchair quarterback, the post-game deconstruction allows one to see everything in 20-20 hindsight. A nice position to have when all the unknowns are finally known with certainty.
The latter is loaded with risk. Consumes a monstrous amount of energy. Requires one to go to their limits in knowledge acquisition. It might mean staking a position that is well outside the sphere of conventional wisdom and having the energy, will, and knowledge to defend that position. Straying from the herd has always left the straying individual vulnerable to attack. And, if the herd – or members of the herd – follows you, and you’re wrong, you get to own it all – and the righteous opprobrium that will surely follow.
Twisting on the fence and choking on some internalized ambivalence is one way to try to solve the conflict. But, it comes with a cost of its own. For me, this position resolves nothing. It simply leaves me feeling powerless and inconsequential. I might indeed be both powerless and inconsequential, but I don’t have to make myself feel that way. I don’t have to do that to myself. Since I reject the former, and fence sitting is unacceptable to me, I am required to embrace the latter and press on accepting the risks which come with it.
scudbucket
@burnspbesq: The reality is that we have a more accurate picture of how bad those portfolios always were.
Well, that claim seems like it needs evidence to support. Sanka merely claimed a correlation here, the WH intervened to bailout Fannie/Freddie and the foreclosure rates are increasing. Not causality, true, but why didn’t the WH require that the subsidies were contingent on foreclosures being suspended or that mortgages be reworked?
K. Grant
@R. Johnston: Such practiced cynicism. Good for you. I am assuming that you have had a great deal of actual experience dealing with this wide array of folks, and not just offering regurgitated bile from others?
Your condescension is appalling. So, in your enlightened thinking and superior existence, teach us poor benighted folks just exactly what you would do if you were in charge of all of this.
Corner Stone
@K. Grant:
When you went to see the movie Avatar did you actually *return* from that 3D experience?
Because I don’t know what world you are living in.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@slag: Exactly. How has taking on something, HCR, that blew up in the last Democratic President’s face and cost the party leadership in congress not taking a risk? Because he won’t come out and say “I want single payer and I want it now?” That’s not risk taking, that’s being an complete fucking idiot about what can be passed in this country.
El Cid
This is an important distinction. From time to time in the interests of understanding decisionmaking and real world constraints, we should look at things from the point of view of various politicians and leaders, but we shouldn’t always limit ourselves to that sort of view.
scudbucket
@K. Grant: if the you want to win elections, make sure that the people win.
Which is exactly my point – liberals aren’t getting any win. Yes, HCR will allow more people to get insurance, and that’s a good thing. But of those folks, probably 90% already vote D in national elections anyway. Of the remaining constituency, most of those people will either a) be legally compelled to buy crappy insurance that they already can’t afford, b) see the quality of their plans erode, or c) pay a 40% luxury tax to maintain their current plan (which is ridiculous, no one will pay this, and it shows the incoherence in the Senate bill to think that this tax will subsidize insurance for the poor).
It’s a lose-lose situation, with the added ‘lose’ that the GOP gets to campaign on a legitimate issue: repeal the mandates for crappy insurance.
El Cid
Good video lecture from Nomi Prins from late October on the need to reduce bank size and increase accountability, via the Union for Radical Political Economists. About 24 minutes.
The Raven
The Case-Shiller Index, which was scaled to be at 100 in the year 2000 when the bubble seems to have begun, is still well over 100 in most cities. In other words, as far as a simple reading of the data goes, the bubble is still deflating.
The NYT presentation of year-over-year data conceals this simple reality.
This simple reading may be wrong, of course. But I can’t see how the “real” price of housing could possibly be higher than the market price at this time.
jenniebee
@Corner Stone:
I saw her say that on I believe Hardball. That’s their plan: lower total expenditures on health care by pricing it out of reach for more people than it’s out of reach for now. And the whole time that insurance does less and less, people are going to be forced to buy it whether they like it or not.
I don’t get how that’s good policy, and I don’t get how enacting a policy that makes life more expensive for a whole bunch of people is good politics. And I don’t get how, if this bill can’t be passed without that provision because Mary Landreiu refuses to let it be voted on without it and it can’t get to a vote without Mary Landreiu, that somehow it can be repealed before it ruins a lot of people without that same Mary Landrieu’s support.
But I’m just one of those DFH’s who’s unpleasantly right about everything except how to get a total POS made into law.
BR
@toujoursdan:
This. Natural resource limits butting against growth isn’t cool enough for the media to talk about, but it’s the problem that’s going to underlie all problems in the coming decade.
Corner Stone
@scudbucket:
IMO, it is a mistake to consider this incoherence on their part. They have a clear goal in mind and this tax achieves it.
cyntax
@The Raven:
Good point. Another thing to look at with Case-Shiller is whether the three seperate pricing tiers have converged again. Prior to the bubble the three tiers tracked together; currently they are still tracking at different levels on the index, with the lowest priced tier being the one that has given most of its pricing back, but with the mid and upper tiers still at higher pricing points on the index. So this spring look to see if mid and upper tier homes (mostly in bubble areas) lose more value.
Royston Vasey
@JGabriel: Instant Coffee Taste Test – Sanka
Sip or skip? Skip
Pass for brewed? Really bad, burned decaf
Tasting Notes: We’re really feeling the burn on this one. The flavor is oddly reminiscent of scorched cheese — not something we’re looking to encounter first thing in the a.m.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Same here, and exactly right. What is dismaying to me is that progressives in general have no idea what “art of the possible” even means. That’s the difference between effective government, and ideological government. We saw what ideological government could do under Bush. Progressive ideologues would want the same style of blunderheadedness as long as it were being applied toward the left instead of toward the right.
The common, malignant, thread, is the ideology. The idea that there is only one way to get at something, and that is the doctrinaire way. If I could change only one thing about American politics, it would be to get rid of that strain of thinking. That ideological, factional way of looking at the world is just so goddam useless and tiresome.
If you want a really good idea what happens when you let that sort of thing run away with your country, you might try looking at Iran. Iran is ideologue heaven. If you agree with the official (that is, in power) ideology, life is good. You just roll over anything that gets in your way.
The problem with the Republic is that about half of the population really wants a king. The problem is that that half is itself divided. Half wants a progressive king, and half wants a reactionary king. Each half wants the other basically dead.
It’s an interesting problem. If you ask me, and I am glad you did, Obama is the answer. If you ask me, and I am glad you did, the reason why righties and progressives are pissed about the HCR solution is that they didn’t think of it. It’s the classic “not invented here” way of looking at everything.
Fuck that, with prejudice.
Corner Stone
@jenniebee:
More precisely, at least IMO – is that it’s a clear move to continue forcing the cost curve away from the employer to the person being insured. The burden will no longer be on the employer, it will revert to the person/s who never had a chance to negotiate the decision of wages vs health insurance as compensation.
The employer will never in an eleventy bijillion years translate less health care insurance into more wages for employees.
Wages will remain stagnant yet HC *insurance* costs out of pocket will rise and ultimate end-user consumption costs for *health care* will skyrocket.
I wanted to make sure my distinction is made here – this bill will force costs for *insurance* to continue to climb as there are no effective price controls in place, and actual costs for *care* will be enormous.
This isn’t conjecture – this is the only possible outcome if you actually listen to what the Senators have said.
scudbucket
@Corner Stone: Good point.
Mike Kay
Cheer up John, the Ambassador Rooney’s steelers won.
This is great news for McCain!
Corner Stone
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Bush’s government was certainly ideological. But it was also effective government.
Their ideology demanded a different outcome than what a progressive ideology would request. But that outcome was achieved, and IMO it can’t be denied.
cyntax
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Really? That’s the extent of the validity of people’s objections to the current form of the HCR bill?
I’ll vote for that being most patronizing comment of this thread.
El Cid
I think the United States is completely riven with ideological conformity, and the vast majority of that ideological conformity lies in adherence to a bullsh*t conservative establishmentarian ideology — i.e., this or that sensible, practical solution is ‘leftist’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘extreme’ or ‘fringe’, therefore we can’t really seriously think about it.
Mike Kay
@Corner Stone:
tell that to Supreme Court Justice Harriet Miers and who’s the privatization of social security going.
Davis X. Machina
Mandates will drive a fairly quick shift in emphasis from the provision of insurance to the control of costs for care.
Which, not coincidentally, is starting to happen in the only state with an actual mandate, Massachusetts.
K. Grant
@Corner Stone: You are willfully missing the point. If people see tangible benefits from those representing them (local, state, or federal level, take your pick) they will respond accordingly. This is not naivete, this is not wishful thinking, it is a rather simple equation. The trick is to get actual, meaningful benefits to the people. This takes time. It takes patience. Most of all, it takes a willingness to slog through and get what you can. Once that bit is accomplished, you steel yourself for the next round of getting what you can. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It is not particularly sexy, but over time, results will happen.
I have absolutely no illusions about any of this, but I will not give up by succumbing wholly to cynicism and condescension. You may think I am naive, but I think you have utterly surrendered to defeatism. I think you enjoy and wallow in it
FlipYrWhig
@jenniebee:
Or maybe you just get off on being able to wallow in this ridiculous “DFH” label because that way you can always be tougher and more pure than anyone who admits that compromise and disappointment are part of politics. Like far, far too many people do. You’ve decided that being critical makes you a fucking hippie, and that you’re disregarded because you’re so smart and brave and dangerous. It’s the same logic as when a mother tells her dorky child that he gets picked on at school because the other kids are jealous. It’s not that you’re annoying, it’s that you’re better.
Yes, all Obama needed to do was “get tough” on Joe Lieberman and lose every slightly controversial vote 59-41 for another year while pointing a finger at Lieberman. That would sure look “tough.”
Mark D
Too late — CRE is already starting to tank, with smaller banks being more affected than the big ones since local contractors tend to stick with local banks. Some are able to write off those losses, but others will have too many and eventually be added to failed list. The bulk of these will probably hit in the first half of 2010.
(Note: I work in the banking industry, and part of my job is to follow this kind of stuff, and I can ensure you while the Fed and FDIC are trying to take steps ahead of time to mitigate issues — they just issued guidelines on how to do CRE workouts. It just probably won’t be enough due to the sheer scale of the problem.)
Prime mortgages are also in trouble, as defaults just went up a huge amount (IIRC, about 40%) compared to last year. A lot of people have been hanging on for dear life after losing a job or having their pay cut, and more will start to slip off the edge real soon.
Of course, if they had allowed bankruptcy judges to do cramdowns, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it probably will be. There’s still time, but I have no confidence that either the WH or Congress will have enough will to fight the banking lobby. And it’ll cost millions of Americans their homes.
Sorry to be such a downer, but those who think subprime was the biggest problem are about to get a gigantic — and really, really shitty — wake up call.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@cyntax:
Yeah, but this is not a democracy. It’s a comment section. My comment stands as written, I have no interest in your vote.
Ideology is crap. I don’t care whose it is. I don’t do religion, and I don’t do ideology. Period.
My idea of ideology is some fuckhead flying an airliner into the World Trade Center. That’s what you get when you convince people that seeing something just one way is worth more than whatever other alternatives are available. It is very pleasing to me that the progressive dickhead ideologues will shit their pants over the current HCR solution. That tells me that I was right from the get-go, that getting what is possible is the real prize, and satisfying the dickheads isn’t worth squat.
Flaws in the laws? That’s a hoot. Just grab any set of Federal regulations about anything, from pavement standards to aircraft inspection to postal regulations, and you can find flaws on every one of the thousands of pages in front of you. Flaw finding in the law is a fun hobby that everyone can practice. And when those flaws are used as grist for improvements to those laws, even better.
Meanwhile, either be part of the solution, or get the hell out of the way, that’s my viewpoint. Take ideological purity and its products, and shove it.
scudbucket
@Davis X. Machina: It’s already happening in other places as well. My wife works in OB-GYN and Insurcos are unilaterally increasing deductible/out-of-pocket on plans across the board. Since they don’t send out a letter informing the client of the policy changes, the new rules come as a bit of a surprise.
Corner Stone
@Mike Kay:
This may be the most irrelevant non-rejoinder I’ve seen in quite some time.
Congrats.
burnspbesq
@R. Johnston:
Sorry you crashed and burned on the LSAT.
Maude
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: WIN
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
This.
Brachiator
@Corner Stone:
If this is the outcome of health care reform legislation, and the Democrats don’t quickly fix it, then they will have squandered their victories in the 2008 elections and given a weakened, demoralized and largely defeated GOP a chance to recover — and to screw over the country again.
If this is the outcome, it would be pointless to blame Obama alone for this. It’s not as if Pelosi and other Congress critters don’t know what the price of failure might be.
Commercial real estate has already been weak, and continues to be so. In addition, the slow steady drip of bank failures is very bad for the economy, as is the refusal of banks to increase lending. All of this keeps economic growth stagnant.
And if there is a rise in the cost of food and fuel (from gasoline to home heating oil), the added pressure on the economy will be enormous. From my reckoning, there has already been an absolute decline in our standard of living, which I consider to be one of the biggest under-reported news stories of the year.
One of the things that I find most frustrating is that the Democrats in Congress, are acting as though there is no real problem with the economy and worse — that Obama is holding back and letting Congress lead the way. The recent “jobs” bill passed by the House is little more than the stale Democratic wish list that they could never push forward while Bush was president.
It’s as though no one in the White House or the Congress can see beyond the Beltway.
Corner Stone
@K. Grant:
The only thing I wallow in is a bathtub full of Jello once in a while. Lime flavored.
Modern recent American history does not bear your willfully naive point out.
kay
@Davis X. Machina:
“It’s going to be threatening to many physicians,” said Massachusetts Medical Society President Mario Motta, MD, a cardiologist.
Yes, yes it is :)
Thanks for the link. I think they ended up (surprise!) at….health care, in Massachusetts. Not cost-shifting. They shifted costs for a while, and shifted them again, and they couldn’t make it work.
It’s going to take twenty years to convince people we have to look at health care, not exclusively health insurance, but I’m confident we’ll get there.
We have to, right? At some point you have to arrive at the service we’re attempting to purchase, and what that costs.
Once you’re done moving the pieces around, trying to shift costs.
“Cost is still there! Move ’em around again! Maybe if we arrange it differently, it will be less“
Jay B.
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
And this is ideological flexibility? Funny how fucking limited “hard headed pragmatism” is. Look, you’re just as full of shit as anyone else. You’re core, reflexive belief is that Obama did everything he could and that’s enough for you. Fine. But that’s just as dogmatic as those — those who often include me — who are equally certain more could have been done. Dogma might not even be wrong. Your conviction may be right. Mine may be right. Neither may be right.
But don’t pretend that you know anything. You know shit. You opine and draw lines based entirely on your own sacrosanct beliefs.
Mr Furious
@FlipYrWhig: The best scenario lies somewhere in the middle. Nobody can “get tough” on Lieberman or any other faux-Centrist with the current Senate rules in place.
Does Lieberman deserve a broken finger or two? Absolutely. But as long as he is allowed to be in a position of Mr. Sixty, he will hold the power, not the person(s) with the hammer.
Coming down on Lieberman would only be effective if the Senate were willing to: change the rules regarding filibusters—make them far harder and more painful to enact; or, aggressively pursue legislation through reconciliation.
Lieberman doesn’t derive his power from his Chair—hell he never even convenes that fucking committee. He holds cards in the game because he—and everyone else—knows it has to get by him to pass.
If you took every one of his toys away yet still allow him to hold veto power on every vote, you gain nothing.
jenniebee
@FlipYrWhig:
Odd, I don’t recall saying that. I’m not sure that there’s anything that Obama could have done that would have made a tremendous difference – the insistence on non-optimal policy choices in the Senate goes a lot deeper than Holy Joe.
But if the only choices are between having no reform at all on the one hand, and having no real reform that will spread the pain to a lot more people on the other, then it may be time to say that now isn’t the time for health care reform. And people will continue to die, but could a program that intentionally prices care out of their reach change that?
I believe in compromise, but I believe that it can’t be reached unless both sides are prepared to walk away if their basic concerns aren’t met. If you’re willing to swallow anything, poison pills and all – and this tax is a poison pill if ever there was one – then you aren’t compromising, you’re taking whatever you’re given. There’s a difference.
Jay B.
By the way, the amount of intellectual dishonesty on both sides of this issue has been immense. But I think the most dishonest is the “purity” claim. Few have been holding their breath over compromises. To claim otherwise is just a lie to make yourself feel better. There have been a million compromises floated. People are willing to deal. Armchair political consultants (including all of us) have said this is acceptable. This isn’t. This might be.
The thing is everyone has a different line. I don’t think those who are completely opposed to the bill are being too “pure” — most of them would much rather have a single-payer, government-run system, so it seems absurd to think they haven’t given in — their lines have just been crossed and if they feel if they don’t stick up for something what’s the point? They — we — may be wrong. It’s also at least equally possible that those incrementalists who want to pass anything and fix it along the way will be proven right. Or wrong. There are certainly valid claims on each side. And again, it’s the height of dishonesty to pretend otherwise.
The limitation of John Cole’s political imagination, however, doesn’t preclude the idea that it never had to come to Liberman’s whims. It MAY have, it may not. It’s a moot point, really. But to put it to the level of certitude many of the bill supporters give it is really mind-numbing.
The Raven
@cyntax:
Also a good point.
Do you have a good place to find more comprehensive Case-Shiller data, BTW? It’s not all public, so maybe I have to go to a library.
Mr Furious
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: That tasted good going down, to be sure. But everything you wrote was foreplay and afterglow to this:
I suppose as long as you and Obama the rest of the card-carrying Pragmatists™ are in agreement as to what was “possible,” screw the people you define as ideologues at either pole, and everything’s fucking jake. Is that about right?
Jay B is right. You are just drawing your line like everyone else. Only you draw yours after the dust has settled and then declare yourself the winner.
Tomlinson
@The Raven:
I wouldn’t call it massively inflated though. Historically (going back more than 100 years), real estate has appreciated at around 4% annually. If you apply that to a Case-Shiller of 100 in 2000, you’d get an expected Case-Shiller of 142 today.
That’s not terribly out of whack with where we are.
Which is not to say it won’t deflate further, but simply that it suggests that we’re possibly nearing bottom.
Corner Stone
@Brachiator:
I think your point is in the more general “you” sense and not specific to me. Because I have problems with how this bill came to be, and am including a whole lot of people in the calculus.
I have problems with what is represented as the final bill, and I have problems with how I believe negotiations started, progressed and ended.
cyntax
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Actually, identifying the flaws is paramount to being part of the solution. Just trying to steamroll people because you feel self-rightous about it (even if it’s under your self-defined banner of pragmatism) doesn’t improve anything. And simply reducing people’s objections down to the simplistic terms you named isn’t in anyway constructive and doesn’t speak to trying to make the situation better, but it does seem to stroke your ego.
It’s funny how you equate any criticism of your position (love the bill or leave it) as ideological purity. That’s a conveniently binary construction that let’s you off the hook for actually trying to do the harder work of having a dialogue and gives you more time on your pragmatic soap box.
Bravo.
kay
@Jay B.:
I think the difference is this: I was never sold on what I thought were completely unsupported claims on the efficacy and power of a public option. But I supported it, despite what I thought were pie in the sky claims on its beauty and majesty, particularly in the House bill.
I didn’t dig in, however. I stayed open, and I read.
The certainty of your predictions of disaster on this health care bill give me pause as to your confidence in your position and your ability to look at this without blinders on. Your complete rejection of every cost control as the nefarious work of “blue dog Democrats” allied with insurance companies gives me pause.
The opponents are dug in. I have heard absolute unsupported nonsense put forth as fact, like MILLIONS will lose their health insurance, or RATIONING will ensue.
I never, ever made statements like that on the liberal proposals, many of which had HUGE PROBLEMS.
I read and read on liberal blogs how Lieberman colluded with insurance companies to kill expanded Medicare, but you know what else I read? I read the head of the AMA’s statement at a press conference where he takes total credit for killing expanded Medicare. That makes sense. Insurance companies would love to foist 55 and over on Medicare, and capture the youngest.
I feel as if you’re dug in, and there’s no going back.
Jay B.
Here’s another concept to internalize: Do you think Insurance companies bitch endlessly about “what’s possible” or think in terms of incrementalism? I mean, do you ever think that they were worried about the end result of this legislation? If they did, when did it turn?
Their political imagination is vast and their commitment greater than yours.
Mr Furious
Who’s more delusional?
DFHs and Hope and Changers that thought Obama would ride in on the Unity Pony and change everything. And since he didn’t he’s a sell-out.
Or…
Self-appointed pragmatists who are willing to look at the results and stamp them “what was possible” and Obama and his 11-dimensional chess-playing knew it all along, got exactly what he set out for and kept his hands clean all at the same time.
That’s the fight I’m seeing all over the damn place, and BOTH positions are bullshit.
Tomlinson
No, they arrived at exactly where they thought they would. First get everyone covered, then attack costs. If the cost schedule got jumped up, it was because the state budget got absolutely totalled by the recession.
cyntax
@The Raven:
Do you look at calculatedrisk? That’s a really good place for RE info and he works the Case Shiller data into graphs but he doesn’t seem to archive them all in one place. If you’re handy enough with Excel you can just go the CS website (google “case shiller data download”) and graph it yourself.
kay
@Jay B.:
And I never got answers, either. I asked and asked. I said “do you know the House health care bill with the public option voids S-CHIP?” Seven million children. Off the rolls.
The answer I was given to that? “The public option”. Great, thanks. I’ll tell them to purchase on the exchange. With their lunch money.
I said “the House bill mandates employers to purchase insurance, so is in essence a hidden payroll tax, and will hit lowest paid hardest, because they don’t have health insurance. Concerned? “
The answer I was given? “It is cruel to tax my tax exempt health insurance plan”.
We’ve taken the Senate bill apart, and listed it’s deficiencies over and over. You know what we never did? An honest, tough comparison.
Edward G. Talbot
@slag we’ll have to agree to disagree that doing something beyond nothing is taking a risk when you’re a president. He has not taken any real risks of losing on legislation IMO.
As I said, some may agree with the strategy and some may not.
Mr Furious
@Edward G. Talbot: And if you’re willing to declare what you end up with as “what was possible,” so much the better!
Gay Veteran
“…one of the things I like about Obama is he understands the art of the possible and takes what he can get….”
Really? Like Obama’s initial stimulus proposal? The one that Krugman and others repeatedly pointed out was too small to begin with, and then was made even more ineffective by substituting tax cuts for spending in order to buy ReThug votes in the Senate?
If you need $1 trillion you don’t initially propose $1 trillion. Guess Obama never took Basic Negotiating 101.
burnspbesq
Anyone who wants to slam Obama for failures real and imagined is welcome to do so, provided they answer the following simple question:
“Do you sincerely think we would be better off with McCan or Palin in the White Houlse?”
That’s the bottom line, boys and girls.
kay
I feel as if the House bill had gone in, as written, with all its shaky premises and perhaps unintended consequences, qualities it shares with the Senate bill, by the way, and I had come back, and said “this House bill didn’t really help mass quantities of people, and there were some unintended consequences” all I would have heard would have been: ” Don’t blame me. I wanted single payer”.
You’ll forgive me, but it’s easy to be “right” all the time if you always have a policy to fall back on that was never enacted.
I’m having a hard time distinguishing how this position is any different than “conservatism can only be failed, it can never fail”.
Mr Furious
@burnspbesq: That’s easy.
Of course fucking not.
But that’s a pretty damn low bar. A more hot-headed AND incompetent ticket than the historic failure of an outgoing Administration? That’s our only choice, or STFU?
I’d like to be able to offer constructive (at times) criticism of my own side without having to answer a ridiculous base question like that.
Corner Stone
@Gay Veteran:
He got what was possible. You know how we know? Because we have an outcome. And that outcome was possible.
andrewtna
@ John Cole
Here starts my ramble…
So wtf has been your problem with DFH’s arguing for better policy? The mandate is going to be a political killer, and you recognize it. So why shit on the DFH crowd for trying to remove it? Is your problem with the kill-billers a matter of tone? That would be very McMegan of you.
I happen to enjoy this blog, I read it multiple times each day and find your snark to be mostly spot-on. But you’ve appeared to forget that progressives threw their shit fit after the health care bill had become so watered down and compromised to the point where it will be a gift to Pharma and the insurance industry, make little in the way of positive improvements, and be a real liability for Dems moving forward.
Your attacks have been misplaced.
You note that it will be difficult to get progressive initiatives through Congress – would it be any easier if progressives weren’t trying to exert pressure on Congress and the WH?
“OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!” is funny for a moment (I still prefer “Black Bush”) but it’s the product of wingnut picking.
So far, Obama is not the President I thought he would be, but by no means do I think he’s worse than Bush or than McCain would have been. I think that 99% of liberals and progressives would agree with me. But I think there’s certainly room for improvement and I bet you would agree with that, too.
And that’s why you shouldn’t concede defeat (“The problem is, I don’t see any way of getting that done”). You should be pushing him too, not reflexively skewering DFH’s for trying and patting Obama on the back for doing what’s expected of him.
Brachiator
@Corner Stone:
Yes, absolutely. Sorry if that wasn’t completely clear before.
The bottom line is how the bill, if finally passed, affects the majority of the citizens, not whether it has pleased or displeased those who have commented on it as it has made its way through the legislature. If the net effect is to increase the financial burden of people with insurance without any offsetting benefits, then the Democrats will have cooked their own goose.
jenniebee
@Jay B.:
Thank you.
Is it fair to say that we all acknowledge that our health care system is broken, that there are solutions more optimal than what has just passed the Senate, and that every one of us has some line we’re not willing to cross and still support this?
I can understand the anger from people who still want to hang on about potentially losing the coalition of support that we were all hoping could be put together on this, but it isn’t like progressives weren’t willing to compromise. Nobody on the left has been taking the Palin Fan position that if you’re right, compromising just makes you wrong.
There’s a lot of comparison between this and the Civil Rights Act. No, the CRA wasn’t perfect. It didn’t get everything. But it moved unequivocally in the right direction – maybe just a little step, but it didn’t demand a new degredation of non-whites in exchange for removing an old one. Medicare didn’t cover everything, but it didn’t diminish the coverage for some people in order to give it to others either. That’s the difference between those and this.
If I thought this bill was a robbing Peter to pay Paul policy, but the politics of it would empower better policy in the future, I’d support it. If I thought it was going to create a short term political loss but create a substantial good that would survive to become a long-term asset, I’d support it. This looks to me like a marginal gain in net utility at best, with a great many more people hurt by it through the diminishment of the level of care they are currently able to afford, and with the addition of a coercive individual mandate that is going to piss people off across the political spectrum because the only thing that people hate more than being forced to do something that they don’t want to do is being forced to do something that they were perfectly willing to do voluntarily in the first place. That makes people ornery and it’s bad politics. There’s no point in passing something bad on the theory that you’ll be able to make it into something good later if nobody gives you the chance to make it better since you’ve already clearly demonstrated that you are perfectly willing to pass bad laws. Thinking otherwise, I’m sorry to say, is just as magical as thinking that Obama has the ponies to turn the Party of Joe into something other than the self-serving turd he is.
Corner Stone
@burnspbesq:
And I like to use approved criticism of Obama by having people answer the following question:
Who would win in a fight between Godzilla vs Mecha-Streisand?
Because that question holds just as much relevance as yours at this point in our reality.
catclub
Schrodinger’s Cat and the research project:
How about connecting the dots between ACORN and Goldman Sachs, and how they wrecked the economy.
More natural allies you are unlikely to find.
jwb
@jenniebee: I hear kill the mandate line all the time and happen to agree that it’s a political loser, but I never hear an answer to the follow-up question: are you willing to give up covering pre-existing conditions in order not to have the mandate? Because that’s the trade-off. And to think otherwise is really magical thinking.
Corner Stone
@andrewtna:
Hmmm. And you say you read this blog everyday?
jwb
@jenniebee: “There’s no point in passing something bad on the theory that you’ll be able to make it into something good later if nobody gives you the chance to make it better since you’ve already clearly demonstrated that you are perfectly willing to pass bad laws.”
Except that’s not the logic being employed. The logic is that once you have a policy in place then you have demonstrable (rather than theoretical) problems to be solved and it’s much easier to legislate on demonstrable problems than on theoretical ones.
andrewtna
@Corner Stone
Yes, actually – though not the entire comments section
jenniebee
@jwb:
I’m sorry, but if 800,000 bankruptcies due to medical bills every year, 45,000 deaths a year due to inadequate coverage and ranking 19th out of 19 nations in survival rates for diseases amenable to treatment is theoretical to these CongressCritters, then the only way to make this demonstrable is to make those bankruptcies and deaths happen directly to them. And that’s not going to happen.
Corner Stone
@jwb:
This assumes:
1) There is agreement on what the actual “demonstrable” problem is
2) Someone has interest in resolving that actual issue
3) The art of the possible allows someone to make the needed changes
cyntax
@jwb:
Ulitmately, I don’t want the bill killed, but I do want to see the tax on cadillac plans fixed so that a few years after this thing is instituted we don’t have the average joe’s healthcare being hit with the tax (which will happen under the Senate’s plan); thus making their coverage crappier; thus making the mandate really unpopular.
To that end, I think the “Kill the bill” rhetoric is vital to actually getting some improvements out of conference. If the progressives go in demanding the PO, we might actually be able to fix a few things like the cadillac plan tax so that we get something that won’t completely blow up in our collective faces in a few years (or at the next election, depending). Better cost controls would help make the mandate palatable but I don’t know how possible that is on this go around.
Tomlinson
@jwb:
I hear this all the time, and wonder…why?
Something like 85% of the country is currently under a mandate. It’s called employer provided insurance and their situation does not change.
Of the rest, a good chunk of people will either get subsidies or will get medicare. Minimal hassles there.
That leaves people who are not insured today. Some of those cannot get insurance, and a lot of them now can. Big win for them. Some are indifferent but want insurance, because they know they should have it.
And some are not insured and do not want it – this (tiny) group are the only ones who are negatively effected by a mandate.
No big deal.
to think otherwise is really magical thinking.
The really magical thinking is that we could have a public option without a mandate. That is a recipe for disaster on all levels – political, fiscal and policy.
Cain
We seem to be going in circles on health care reform. Someone had a good comment further up the thread about having an honest look at both the house and the senate bill and take a look at it.
Can someone point to me an analysis of both bills by people who know what they are talking about in health care? I haven’t taken a particular position on either bill, but rather pointing out that if people are unhappy they are pressuring the wrong people. While I do expect leadership, I think it’s pretty poor when our nation by itself can’t seem to decide to take the reins and pressure their reps for a better future.
All politicians require some kind of pressure. If Obama can’t do it, then we need to step up and force congress to do it. Contribute money to politicians who take the right positions, contribute money to organizations doing the lobbying. Do what the teabaggers are doing, organize and get your ass out there and demand a better bill.
cain
Tomlinson
@cyntax:
I would rather that this putative “average joe” be made fully aware that something like a third of his annual income is going to pay for health insurance. Because then those costs will come FLYING down, or at least the pitchforks will be out.
I imagine that your average union worker, making $60K a year, would be more than a little pissed to learn that he’s paying $23K+ a year for health insurance, no matter how golden that coverage is.
Mr Furious
@jwb: There is a LOT of truth to that.
I fear, and jenniebee probably agrees, that the Dems get one big bite at this apple and that’s it, for a long while.
And by the time these trojan horse viruses in the bill come to pass, they will be out of power or weakened even more in will to make the improvements needed.
Incrementalism is fine if that’s the best you’re going to get, but they added too much into this legislation that does demonstrable harm—both in policy and politics.
And for those of you willing to sacrifice politics in some noble cause to bring 30 million people insurance and we need to celebrate THAT, need to remember that the politics and maintaining a majorit is necessary to enact the improvements you claim are coming later.
No Congress didn’t get everything right in Social Security, Medicare or Civil Rights right from the start…but they were handled in a time when 40% (and only growing) of the Senate wasn’t a guaranteed “NO.” And the Democrats maintained their power long enough to get it right.
That might not happen.
joe from Lowell
A double-dip in housing prices doesn’t necessarily mean a double-dip in the broader economy.
It isn’t like the housing sector is acting like a normal sector of the economy, tracking overall economic activity. There’s all sort of overhang, houses coming back onto the market that failed to sell a year ago, and screwiness in the mortgage industry.
Corner Stone
@Cain:
I’m not sure how this is relevant, IMO. We’re not getting the House bill, and Senators have told us they aren’t tinkering with their final compromise.
Maybe as a learning tool on the art of the possible?
Mr Furious
Not exactly.
If the coverage is excellent like I had at my last job working for a state college (not in a union, but I’d say the union force in Michigan set the bar for my coverage) and everything my family needs is covered and readily accessible, then Joe Union doesn’t give a shit how much his coverage costs because he’s not paying it. His employer is. And if his employer for some reason no longer does, he knows he’s not getting that $23K added to his salary.
Corner Stone
@Tomlinson:
I agree they’d be pissed. But when you then told them – you weren’t ever going to see one damn penny of that “extra” $23K in your pocket, so it’s the high value plan or the low value plan and Employer pockets the difference.
cyntax
@Tomlinson:
Well, here’s hoping that it plays out that way, and not with some serious backlash for the concept of improving this part of the safety net. It’ll be interesting to see if the unions can use their influence to eke out some improvements during conference… not holding my breath though.
Mr Furious
If you want to debate demonstrable v. theoretical, pitchforks is a good place to start.
For all the wailing and brandishing of pitchforks after the country took it in the ass from Wall Street, I’ve yet to see it effect anything in policy or even strategy in Washington.
jenniebee
@jwb:
The trade-off with covering pre-existing conditions is that insurance companies are allowed to price policies for sick people out of reach, keep annual and/or lifetime coverage limits and structure whatever’s left in the policy so that it doesn’t actually cover enough to make it possible for a sick person to be able to afford to live with their illness even with insurance anyway. Mandates are just the icing on the cake.
The idea that there’s a large pool of young healthy people who make oodles of money and don’t get health insurance because they’ve done all the math and figured out that they’ll come out ahead if they forego insurance and use their savings to hedge against kitten futures or what have you, it just doesn’t add up. There’s the odd McMegan acolyte who goes a few years without, but the vast majority of the young people who actually have money to spend on insurance get that money by working at a company that has the resources to hire young people at above-average wages, and those kinds of companies typically offer health insurance at employer-subsidized rates that change the math in favor of buying insurance anyway.
The young people I know who don’t have insurance, and I know a few and was one myself once, aren’t choosing between insurance and another annual subscription to Reason. They’re choosing between insurance and food. What’s the point of getting the insurance that still doesn’t make going to the doctor something you can afford, if it’s at the expense of getting the better nutrition that could keep you healthy in the future?
If there was a public option, I’d support the mandate. If the public fund is backing everybody, come rain or come shine, then everybody’s got to guarantee the public fund and that’s that. Private insurance is reserving the right to charge sick people more for less, and they still want the well to be compelled to participate in order to pay for the sick who are already paying for themselves and getting less for it.
Tomlinson
Maybe, maybe not. I doubt your average union worker realizes that leadership has bargained itself into a position where about half of his potential take home is going to healthcare – most of which he doesn’t use and dammit, he needs to make the mortgage – and I’m equally sure that you’ll see those same people demand some re-jiggering of the equation. Like right-the-fuck-now.
If I thought that a perfectly good insurance plan weren’t available for less, that would be one thing, but we just redid our insurance, in four of the most expensive states in the union, and I’m not exactly worried about hitting that $23K cap any time soon.
FlipYrWhig
@jenniebee:
This doesn’t square with my understanding of the bill. Is this a case of what _could_ happen?
Also, I shouldn’t have snapped at you or treated you as a proxy for all my frustrations with naysayers over the course of the year. /raises glass
jenniebee
@Mr Furious:
I think that if we took nibbles that we could probably come back again fairly soon. Passing only a medicare buy-in pilot program for people aged 55 and older, for instance, would lay a good foundation and set a precedent for expanding the Medicare buy-in to more and more people – people working for or owning businesses with less than 50 employees could be the next pool allowed to participate, and so on.
We’d all like to get automatic Medicare for all, but that’s not going to happen. What’s missing from this discussion of compromise is that there are different sorts of compromises. You can compromise quality or you can compromise scope (or, in this case, you can do both). My preference is that if you can’t do everything, do a little thing but do it well. My problem with this bill is that we’re still trying to do everything, but we’re willing to do it badly in order to do something. It’s the legislative equivalent of vapor-ware, and that’s not a good plan when your best political stock is that you’re the party that does government right.
cyntax
@jenniebee:
I think that’s a serious concern. And with some of the shortcomings of the bill being the kind that won’t affect people right away, I’ve a concern that this will sour people on this sort of reform a few years in, just when we’ll be trying to improve this. Now maybe that will provide more impetus for improvement (as Tomlinson was suggesting), but I’d be more confident of improving this bill if we could fix some of it now, in conference, which also gets back to why keeping up some pressure from the left makes sense to me.
General Winfield Stuck
@Mr Furious:
I am one of those folks who support the bill for the sole reason, that the end product will allow up to 30 million souls covered with affordable insurance, that aren’t now.
Now if what Jenniebee and you claim is accurate, then I would likely not support it, because you all say the bill contains provisions that will allow insurance companies to keep the mandate profit increases while also making insurance premiums too high for the now uninsured and sick to meet and still live and eat comfortably, or adequately.
Being not a wonk on health care weedism, I am not sure who to believe. The people I depend on like Ezra and a few others dispute yours and jenniebee’s analysis, among others, with other provisions and regs that force or direct insurance companies into providing that insurance to the now uninsured. Such as the provision requiring up to 90 percent of premiums for providing actual HC services.
And also people like Harkin and others who are unhappy about no PO or med. by in, but say about the same as Ezra.
I will choose for now to believe them and not commenters on blogs, and continue to support this flawed bill for the reason stated of covering more people.
Though I agree the mandate will not be a political winner for the young and healthy voters, but my decision to support it does not include good politics, therefore so be it the pol downside.
And your analysis of future loss of power by dems being able to change or correct flaws in a HCR bill, may well come true, but it also may not. It is very hard to predict the future and double so with politics.
jenniebee
@FlipYrWhig:
In the Senate bill, correct me if I’m wrong, but insurance companies are allowed to charge up to 300% more to people who have pre-existing conditions and there is no restriction on annual or lifetime caps. So yeah, this is anything but a panacea for people with pre-existing conditions.
Anybody know if the 40% tax on plans costing more than $23Kpa for a family figures that $23Kpa before or after the 3xCost multiplier? Because if that’s the case, basically anybody who has a kid with asthma or juvenile diabetes is going to be stuck in a bargain basement plan right from the get-go. Those are the kind that have deductibles and copays so high and annual caps so low that the insurance company doesn’t actually pay for anything, but you want to stay in-network anyway because otherwise you don’t get the rate the insurance company negotiates with the doctor, and paying the non-discounted rate for health care (which is ridiculously high because it’s the doctor’s starting position when negotiating with the insurers) is a whole new world of pain.
Brachiator
@jenniebee:
But ultimately, you have to go with the bill that you have, not the bill that you wish you had.
No Congress critter has offered an alternative, or even an outline of an alternative. At this stage of the game, there is really nowhere to go with the reservations to the bill.
Gravenstone
@John Cole:
It’s a useless fucking fucknut. Always has been, always will be. Worthy only of mockery and verbal abuse – or pie, depending upon your him.
Cain
@Corner Stone:
Well I think it’s mostly for a personal idea of what is bad and what isn’t. I’ve been relatively arguing based on people’s attitude towards the bill but I don’t think I’ve personally given the bills a hard look myself. People make all kinds of claims about it doing harm and it is a half assed bill. I’ve seen some stuff that was posted on the front page.
I’m trying to determine reality. If I don’t like something then I plan on calling my representative and ask that they tweak this stuff in conference.
cain
jenniebee
@General Winfield Stuck:
I don’t think that Ezra will deny that this bill, while it requires that insurance companies offer coverage to everybody, allows them to charge whatever they want and charge 3x more for the same coverage to people who have pre-existing conditions as they do to people who don’t.
On the plus side, the insurance companies have to offer you some kind of plan at 8% of your annual income, whatever that is, so if you’re making $40K, for instance, you are guaranteed to have some kind of insurance offered to you at $3200 a year, but there aren’t, of course, any requirements that that insurance has to do or be anything but the bare minimum with high deductibles, high copays, lab tests not covered, etc.
There are taxpayer-funded subsidies to help people who meet a means test to pay for insurance, but the likelihood of another “donut-hole” of people who make just barely too much to qualify and who are also sick, so get charged more than they can pay for coverage that they can’t afford to use because the copays and deductibles are so high seems pretty likely to me. Taking someone who’s sick and fining them 2% of their income for “refusing” to buy insurance is simply cruel.
Finally on the plus side, insurers would be required to spend at least 80% (last news report I heard was 80%) of their premiums on actual medical care. There is no limit to how much of the remaining 20% can be spent paying accountants to move premiums forward to the next FY to pay for medical losses that have not yet been realized, etc.
Ezra is indubitably right that this bill will result in more people being insured. My beef is that it will do this by moving the un-insured and a proportion of the adequately-insured to join the population of the under-insured.
Cain
@General Winfield Stuck:
I think there is some reasonable fear that if the bill is flawed and we lose democratic seats in the senate that it would be very difficult to fix them. I’m worried about that more than anything else. Mr. Furious (and thanks for bringing the level of this debate up!) and Jenniebee bring up some good points. If there are huge flaws and no way to fix it because of lack of seats, we are in trouble. Then it might be better to be more conservative in that case and not do too much.
cain
jenniebee
@Brachiator:
I agree. It’s silly to reject this bill because it could have been better. I don’t object because I think we can get better, I object because I think it’s likely to be bad policy and worse politics. In biz-speak: bringing a substandard product to market loses you money and damages your brand.
General Winfield Stuck
@jenniebee:
I have heard Ezra make similar complaints, and no doubt the insurance companies are not going to suffer much in the end. Though with the 80 percent or whatever the final percent is to provide real services, the insurance giants will have some constraints that they didn’t have before, plus some other regs to contain their insatiable greed.
My bottom line even with the warts you describe, is that a lot more people who need insurance and can’t get it now, will be able to and still be able to eat and put a roof over their heads. If this is not the case, then I will oppose this bill vehemently.
Like Brachiator said, this is the bill we have, and it is far from ideal, especially controlling long term cost. And I don’t necessarily agree that there won’t be pressure to fix it over time, even from the wingnuts whose voters get sick too.
One thing for sure, if there is no bill, and that is the stark choice we face, then there will be nothing to fix, and history has shown, we won’t get another chance like now for quite some time.
It is a shit sandwich for sure, but one with some real medicine in it for a lot of people who need that medicine. I will glady suffer being called an o-bot, which I am, and a sellout, or corporate whore, if more folks will stay above ground rather than below.
The baby boomer train is pounding down the tracks anyways, and when it fully arrives, radical change will not be a choice. but a necessity.
Batocchio
Well said. I think you articulated your take very well here (and more clearly than in some other recent posts, since I think many folks agree with this).
I understand why the Village dolts and scoundrels shill a corporatist, imperialist line, but it’s astounding they don’t even understand, or care, about running their empire competently. I mean, sure, when you’re in the corrupt, evil overlord business, ya just gotta punch some hippies, screw over the poor, defund education, the arts and social services, bomb brown people in exotic foreign lands, and beat Krugman with your USA! foam finger – but still. Certain practices and approaches hurt the empire. Basically all the practices and approaches of the past regime demonstrably devastated their empire overall – but they’re still shilling them. It’s probably because their standing in said empire mostly hasn’t been similarly devastated. But come on, aren’t there any far-sighted evil overlords among them? Evil men and women of vision? Sometimes, there’s a question of their stupid-to-evil ratio, but here (as with the eight years of Bush they’ve yet to repudiate) it seems short-term, stupid evil is beating out long-term, crafty evil.
The U.S. is a democratic republic where the majority get what the oligarchs deserve – and the oligarchs will fight to the death for the best stateroom on the Titanic.
Mr Furious
But the food in the staterooms is so fucking delicious!
Mr Furious
Stuck, Cain, etc and jenniebee, too:
Look, even as bad and flawed as it is, I’m not saying to torpedo the bill. This is better than nothing, and we will NOT have a chance to do something better if we start over.
What I am saying is what jenniebee has stressed: It’s one thing to come out with a bill that doesn’t go far enough — it’s another to come out with a bill that does too much to shoot itself and its sponsors in the face.
Since we’re talking medicine here anyway, think Hypocratic Oath: “Do no harm.”
The legislation as I am currently understanding it, doesn’t meet that. Yet. which is why i remain in favor of standing up and bitching about it.
FlipYrWhig
@jenniebee:
This is where my wannabe wonkishness fails, because I can’t point you to the right specifics with any confidence, but IIRC the 300% figure applies to age, and the pre-existing conditions problem is mitigated or solved by “community rating.” And I was fairly sure that a restriction on annual and lifetime caps survived the Senate bill. There’s definitely something that Ezra Klein, Jonathan Cohn, and Nate Silver have been talking up that reduces the exposure/downside risk. Here’s Silver, in part of a longer post:
FlipYrWhig
@jenniebee:
One thing that has bedeviled me throughout the debate, though, is that so many people are so convinced that the mandated insurance will be both too expensive and “crappy.” I’m not sure why either is self-evidently true. In fact, I’d think that health insurance companies should be willing to take a deal under which people get _good_ care fairly cheaply that makes them happy, especially primary and preventive care, because it costs the insurance companies little to provide that kind of coverage, saves them money in the long run, and wins them a lot of goodwill. IMHO it’s a bit like the way your electric company will perform an energy audit for your house, even though it’s in their ruthless self-interest to have you blast every appliance at once. Keeping you as a satisfied customer who can pay her bills is worth something.
Now, in my utopian society there would be no private insurance companies whatsoever, but in the present world this isn’t bad: you may be guaranteeing insurance companies some kind of profit margin, which on an absolute scale is an offensive notion, but it’s not money for nothing, it’s for actual services that help actual people.
I was saying on another blog that if the government issued everyone a coupon that could be used to buy a reusable water bottle, yes, that could be read as a “bailout” to water-bottle makers, who’d reap the benefits of a captive market and make millions in sales they otherwise wouldn’t. But on the other hand if everyone was using reusable water bottles instead of buying plastic and throwing it away, that would help in all kinds of ways. It’s not inconceivable that giving a private concern more money can in fact help the public good.
Ruckus
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
I always like to see home runs, in baseball and in blog commenting. Congrats on hitting out of the park.
Cain
@Mr Furious:
I’m with you 200%. Can’t make a better bill unless we analyze and bitch.
cain
schrodinger's cat
@catclub:
That would be a good skit for SNL
xian
@R. Johnston:
And how does this differ from the art of blog-commenting?
xian
@Jay B.:
right, because there’s a different way to get bills passed into federal law than through the Senate.
The Raven
@cyntax:
Thanks–S&P’s site overshadows Shiller’s in Google. No problem with Excel, none at all. I do look at Calculated Risk (and, if anyone else is reading this, it’s worth a look) from time to time, but I haven’t been reading it regularly. Perhaps it’s time to start, especially since McBride has just covered this ground. Click on the charts. (BTW, Tomlinson, he’s answered your remarks about historical pricing as well.)
xian
@jenniebee:
That’s false. The 3x multiplier is the max the can charge based on *age*. The only other factor that can increase a premium is being a smoker.
The Raven
@General Winfield Stuck:
The economic outcome of this plan is not predictable, since it depends on the overall economy, the phase of the moon, and Joe Lieberman’s liver. It will help some people and harm others. At the beginning, probably more medical help than harm. At the beginning, probably quite a bit of financial misery for a small group, but perhaps little change for a larger one. What is predictable is that this will advantage the insurance companies. I would prefer that it be the other way around: that the public be guaranteed healing and wealth, and the insurance companies see profits at risk. The bill’s history promises that, if these two goals come into conflict, insurance companies will be preferred over the general public, unless there is some major change in the composition of Congress.
jenniebee
@FlipYrWhig:
You’d think so, but if it actually worked that way, we wouldn’t need reform. The incentives line up a lot more toward short term gain than would actually work to help keep down costs and improve health. People change jobs and change health insurers too frequently for it to be worthwhile to an insurance company to pay now for preventative care that won’t pay off until two years after you’ve moved on. It’s one of the reasons that countries with universal coverage spend less on health care – everybody’s guaranteed to be in the system for life so it makes sense to spend now to realize savings later and the incentives to provide wellness care line up with the consumer’s best interests too.
FlipYrWhig
@jenniebee:
Oh, I totally agree, which is why I think the bill moves significantly in the right direction. The mandate is the way to make sure that people are in the system for life. I take your point that each of us may well be switching in and out of insurance companies as jobs come and go, which I hadn’t considered. But, still, I really do think it’s a decent bargain between people and insurance companies (and, yes, it’s pathetic that they have so much power that they are in the position to extract as many concessions as they have, but that’s what we’re dealing with, and crusading against them isn’t guaranteed to work) and moves towards that universality that makes a lot of systems function better.
General Winfield Stuck
@The Raven:
I am well aware that the insurance companies will do well with the provisions in this bill. And it doesn’t make me happy at all. But please don’t tell me it won’t work for a lot of people who now can’t get insurance, but will in an affordable way. The mandate is going to piss a lot of young healthy people off, but that is the tradeoff, it seems to me, that coupled with a law that requires IC’s to direct a large percentage of that extra money from premiums to go toward actually providing health care. It is a trade off for guaranteed higher volume of customers for the IC’s with more required spending more for medical services.
As a broad principle, this sounds like a good thing to me. Though in practice it will certainly need constant adjusting.
And it also sounds like some kind of odd internal form of competition by balancing these two provisions for the long term. And will mitigate insurance co’s from making out like bandits from a mandate, though likely doing as well or better than now.
I don’t hate corporations, I hate ones that monopolize a market for a vital service that morally must be purchased. And with the current situation of no real restraints on what they can charge, it gives them godly powers that is outrageous at best and evil at worst.
The Raven
@General Winfield Stuck:
I didn’t.
60% actuarial value is not a “large percentage.” Compare with the best current private plans which are over 90% AV. And, of course, Medicare pays something like 98% AV. (That may be low.)
General Winfield Stuck
then your problem seems to be just that the insurance companies will do well, and you don’t like that. Noted.
slightly_peeved
You’re wrong on both.
The ban on changing premiums based on pre-existing conditions is contained in Section 2701.
Section 2711 bans lifetime limits, and bans “unreasonable” annual limits. In the manager’s amendment, Section 2711 was amended to ban all annual limits after 2014.
Get the pdf from the senate website and take a look through it.