Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

This really is a full service blog.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Everybody saw this coming.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

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When The Law Gives A Fetus A Lawyer

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In the department of extreme new laws, Alabama takes the cake. The new law forces minors who want to abort a pregnancy without the consent of their parents to undergo a court trial to get permission. Included in the trial are time-consuming inquistions, witnesses to testify against the pregnant teen, and possible disclosure of the minor’s identity on a “need to know” basis. The unborn fetus can even be appointed a lawyer. Sadly, that last part isn’t even new:

But the practice of appointing attorneys to represent fetuses in judicial bypass hearings is not. An Alabama judge tried to appoint representation for a fetus in the state’s very first bypass hearing in 1987. A 1988 Ms. cover story on that case reported that the judge, Charles Nice, reassigned an attorney who wanted to represent the minor to represent the minor’s fetus instead. The attorney refused to cooperate, and Judge Nice dropped the idea.

As if abortions aren’t traumatic enough.

Team Blackness also discussed a four year old passing out heroin to her classmates thinking it was candy (we smell a parent of the year award!), Drone Gunboats, and more ugliness going down in Ferguson.


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Never mind the peanut gallery…

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Now the most famous peanut farmer of all weighs in on President Obama’s ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State strategy:

“[Former President Jimmy] Carter said it was hard to figure out exactly what President Obama’s policy is in the Middle East.

“It changes from time to time,” Carter said. “I noticed that two of his secretaries of defense, after they got out of office, were very critical of the lack of positive action on the part of the president.”

“First of all, we waited too long. We let the Islamic state build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria,” he said. “Then when [ISIS] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned.”

“We waited too long” may only apply to making the current strategy work, but absent that context, the implications are distressingly neo-connish: Does Carter mean the US should have gone into Syria with guns a’blazing as soon as ISIS reared its psycho head? Should we have SURGED MORE in Iraq? Carter doesn’t say, but it sounds like he may be in the tank for Hillary. (I kid!)

Carter sees some hope for the current American policy against ISIS in Iraq where troops on the ground will follow up after air strikes.

“If we keep on working in Iraq and have some ground troops to follow up when we do our bombing, there is a possibility of success.”

No such ground troops are available in Syria at the moment, he said.

“You have to have somebody on the ground to direct our missiles and to be sure you have the right target,” Carter said. “Then you have to have somebody to move in and be willing to fight ISIS after the strikes.”

I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean American ground troops, so I think the “possibility of success” he refers to is pretty much exactly what PBO is trying to achieve, i.e., providing air support and hoping the various players on the ground get their shit together enough to oppose the crazies. It’s a chump bet if you ask me, but no one did.

Also, Carter thinks drone strikes on Americans abroad are unconstitutional, that the oppression of women is the most pressing human rights issue on the planet and that Republicans are still tooting the same shopworn dog-whistle they first pressed to their moist, pursed lips in 1964. I think we can all agree the latter sentiment is true.

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Walmart thoughts

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A couple of thoughts on Walmart’s decision to stop offering employer sponsored health insurance for part time workers effective 1/1/15.

  • This is an obvious money saving move for Walmart as it gets them off the hook for some premiums.
  • For part time workers who live in Medicaid expansion states and make approximately average Walmart wages this is an unmitigated big win. Sarah Kliff at Vox explains:

    A small minority of part-time workers are currently offered health benefits at their company. ADP Research Institute estimated in 2013 that about 15 percent of part-timers had the chance to buy into their company plan. And, perhaps even more interesting, only about half of those who had the opportunity actually bought the coverage…
    Obamacare has introduced a new and big drawback to the employer insurance. Namely, anybody who gets access to affordable coverage at work is barred from getting subsidies through the new exchanges. This is even true for people who don’t buy insurance at work; just the act of getting offered employer coverage blocks individuals from using getting financial help.

    That financial help can be a big deal for those with lower incomes. Think of the 36-year-old Walmart employee here in Washington, D.C. who works 29 hours per week at the company’s average wage of $12.73 per hour. She earns just about $19,000 annually if she works every week of the year.

    If Walmart doesn’t offer her insurance, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s subsidy calculator shows that she qualifies for a $1,751 subsidy from the federal government to help buy coverage on the exchange. With that financial help, she can buy insurance for as little as an $7 per month…. Walmart’s plan, meanwhile, is way more expensive. The average premium there works out to $111 per month.

    You have to do some adjusting for plan characteristics as the basic Walmart plan is most likely not a Bronze plan, so like to like premium comparisons will be adjusted up a bit. But like for like in plan characteristics will have Exchange eligible individuals significantly better off in most states. And for Walmart part timers with near average Walmart wages but larger families, they become Medicaid eligible which is no premium in most states and low premium in the waiver states.

  • Walmart workers who earn less than 100% FPL in non-expansion states are fucked as they lost their employer sponsored healthcare and can not get on Medicaid expansion and can not get subsidies on Exchange. If they were already buying Walmart health insurance, they are probably sick, so they probably would have been looking to get Gold or Platinum coverage on Exchange which is now incredibly unaffordable. Fuck you Chief Justice Roberts et al.
  • Walmart’s full time workers should see their risk pool get significantly healthier and thus cheaper.   The part timers who were taking up Walmart ESI were probably sicker on average as that is the only case when a employee contribution towards premiums of $1,500 5,000 or more per year would make sense is if they knew they were going to have big claims due to general ill health, age, or chronic conditions. The Exchanges and Medicaid act as a defacto high risk pool for Walmart now.
  • Exchange subsidies go up but people are less tied to their employers for insurance — this is how the future will be, so we should see this type of logic happen at almost all large, low wage employers in the next two or three years.

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Your Wednesday Morning Moment of Zen

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This made my day:

A man practicing his open carry right was robbed of the gun he was openly carrying.

William Coleman III was robbed of his Walter- brand P22 just after 2:00 a.m. October 4 in Gresham by a young man who asked him for it — and flashed his own weapon as persuasion.

Coleman, 21, was talking to his cousin in the 17200 block of NE Glisan St., after purchasing the handgun earlier that day, when a young man asked him for a cigarette, police said.

The man then asked about the gun, pulled a gun from his own waistband and said “”I like your gun. Give it to me.”

Coleman handed over the gun and the man fled on foot.

The suspect is thin a black male, between 19 and 23 years old, clean cut with a small patch of facial hair on his chin, and short black wavy hair.

Just awesome.

Mark my words- this will not be the last we hear of Mr. Coleman, sadly. Thelesson he will “learn” is that he needs to be more aggressive while open carrying, not that open carry is moronic. Within a couple years we’ll hear about him involved in a shooting. In self defense, of course.

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Paying for externalities

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The Incidental Economist passes along an interesting study on the positive net social benefit of increased substance abuse treatment provided by expanded public health insurance:

A new NBER working paper by Hefei Wen and colleagues finds that public insurance expansions increases substance use disorder (SUD) treatment, and that treatment may reduce crime….

The study findings highlight that a relative 10 percent increase in the SUD treatment rate can reduce the robbery rate by 3 percent, reduce the aggravated assault rate by 4 to 9 percent, and reduce the larceny theft rate by 2 to 3 percent. […] A back-of-the- envelope calculation shows that a 10 percent relative increase in the SUD treatment rate at an average cost of $1.6 billion yields a crime reduction benefit of $2.5 billion to $4.8 billion.

Substance abuse treatment seems to produce a positive externality for society.  An externality is a benefit that is produced by an actor which is not captured by that particular actor.  There are lots of different externalities; Facebook benefits from network externalities as each additional person who goes on Facebook makes the entire network more valuable; I benefit from the externality of having a great bakery two blocks from my house and twenty feet from my bus stop as the fresh bread smell in the morning is an amazing pick-me-up.  There are negative externalities as well with pollution being the classic case.  Positive externalities tend to lead to the underproduction or underprovision of a good as the cost of production of the good can’t match up with the benefits it providers.  Negative externalities lead to too much of something as the producers don’t pay the full cost.  That is why there is such a strong argument for either cap and trade or a carbon tax from economists as it corrects a negative externality by appropriately pricing carbon dioxide to the damage it does. 

There are quite a few medical externality situations where the insurers don’t capture the full benefit of a treatment through reduced future claims so they don’t provide as much of a medical service as they should from a societal perspective.  The classic case is vaccination as a vaccine to an eighteen month old is unlikely to prevent the vaccinated disease within the benefit year.  Birth control is another classic example.  And now it is looking like substance abuse treatment could fall into this category.

For a society to capture the full benefits of effective treatment, there are a few policy options.  The first is to go to a single payer system where the shadow of the future is long and the scope of expenses and benefits are broad.  The VA has this incentive structure to some degree as they are responsible for life long medical costs, but their scope of concern is primarily limited to medical costs.  The VA can’t care too much about greater social costs. 

The second best step would be a quasi-single payer system with massive risk adjustments and transfer mechanisms between plans to discourage cherry picking and preserve a long shadow of the future.  PPACA has this to some degree as insurers are operating in a risk stabilized environment with large transfers to minimize cherry picking.  A healthier pool for insurer A benefits everyone including Insurer A.  However this is insufficeint as it may just bring treatment up to the net medical social benefit level not the net social benefit level.  And this is where essential health benefits comes into play.  EHBs are mandates that every pays for services that have large social and medical benefits even if those benefits don’t directly accrue to the payer.  It removes the stable negative social value equilibrium and should allow for society as a whole to capture the benefits of having more people who need substance abuse treatment get substance abuse treatment. 

 

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread

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Sooo not my demographic, but I’m sure the rest of you will be more than happy to explain what I’m missing. Remember, Dems – sharing is caring!

And kudos to the First Lady, per BloombergPolitics:

Michelle Obama campaigned for both Democrats and her husband’s legacy during a stop Tuesday in her hometown of Chicago, offering a vigorous defense of his presidency at a time when it has been stung by low approval ratings and global problems.

“Barack’s last campaign wasn’t in 2012,” she told a heavily black audience of more than 5,000 inside a half-full university arena on the city’s West Side. “Barack’s last campaign is this year, 2014.”…

The first lady is ramping up her appearances ahead of the midterm elections. The Nov. 4 balloting will determine control of the Senate and the political comfort level at the White House during the last two years of residence there by the Obamas.

Democrats are seeking her help, even as they avoid campaign appearances with her husband, whose job approval rating has dropped to the low 40s. In contrast, the first lady is viewed positively by roughly two-thirds of Americans…

“When we stay home, they win,” Michelle Obama said. “It’s on us to get this done.”

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Apart from rallying the troops, what’s on the agenda for the day?

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A New Low for Law Enforcement

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I swear to goodness, the feds work like the Sons of Anarchy MC, only more duplicitous and without a code of honor:

The Justice Department is claiming, in a little-noticed court filing, that a federal agent had the right to impersonate a young woman online by creating a Facebook page in her name without her knowledge. Government lawyers also are defending the agent’s right to scour the woman’s seized cell phone and to post photographs — including racy pictures of her and even one of her young son and niece — to the phony social media account, which the agent was using to communicate with suspected criminals.

The woman, Sondra Arquiett, who then went by the name Sondra Prince, first learned her identity had been commandeered in 2010 when a friend asked about the pictures she was posting on her Facebook page. There she was, for anyone with an account to see — posing on the hood of a BMW, legs spread, or, in another, wearing only skimpy attire. She was surprised; she hadn’t even set up a Facebook page.

The account was actually set up by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Timothy Sinnigen.

Not long before, law enforcement officers had arrested Arquiett, alleging she was part of a drug ring. A judge, weighing evidence that the single mom was a bit player who accepted responsibility, ultimately sentenced Arquiett to probation. But while she was awaiting trial, Sinnigen created the fake Facebook page using Arquiett’s real name, posted photos from her seized cell phone, and communicated with at least one wanted fugitive — all without her knowledge.

More of Scalia’s new professionalism. Is it wrong that the only chance there is for the special agent paying a price for this is at the hands of Anonymous?

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