Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Everybody saw this coming.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

This fight is for everything.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

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

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

In my day, never was longer.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

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

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

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Archives for April 2016

We’re New To This Whole Overton Window Thing

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Today in the comments and on twitter I have learned that my beloved Rosario Dawson is public enemy #1 for insufficient fealty to Obama and I think maybe Clinton, and both forums have erupted into what I think Anne Laurie coined as a “squid cloud of butthurt.” It’s kind of amazing watching the self described pragmatics* go apeshit over people on the progressive left.

First things first- pragmatic Democrat seems to have morphed into a new meaning the last eight years. Pragmatic meant in 2008 trying to advance the ball but being realistic about what could be accomplished- for example, pushing for health care coverage for all but agreeing that there were never the votes for single-payer, and realizing that ACA was still pretty fucking good for the country. That was my understanding of it- shoot for the stars, but accept you are going to probably fall short but still be able to realize you did some good. Now, the people I see describing themselves as “pragmatic” basically mean “Hillary is better than Trump and Cruz so shut the fuck up, yo.”

At any rate, in 2008, both Obama and Clinton were center left candidates, and now in 2016, we have a center left candidate and a left-wing candidate running. Obama was never a true lefty candidate, despite the fact that so many people misidentified his nature and approach (and many continue to do so to this day), but now we have a real live lefty who is pushing issues to the left, and instead of appreciating it, a lot of Dems are freaking the fuck out.

I think it’s because so many people are so used to the Overton Window only working in one direction, to the right, that they don’t understand how this shit works. When right wing candidates used to push issues to the right before they became so fucking crazy recently that there is no such thing as a right wing but instead an amorphous blob of fucking stupid, no one on the right criticized them, they just let them do their thing as they understood it was providing them room to maneuver. But when we push issues on the left, Democrats freak the fuck out and we learn that Rosario Dawson is a witch.

It’s stupid. Let them do it. They aren’t doing any damage to Clinton (I’d argue they are solidifying her base and helping set the stage for her as a moderate in the general), they’re giving her room to maneuver in the future. If we have a million people out screaming for free college, that’s a good thing. President Clinton can then do a whole helluva lot more to help fund education while still falling short of that goal. When we have people screaming about the banks, that’s a good thing. Let the left be the left. It’s a good thing.

Least that is how I view it.

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Failure to Communicate

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Yesterday in Pinellas County, FL three teenage girls stole a car from a man who had given them a ride (he foolishly left them in the running car while he went into a store, and they drove off). At some point in the early hours of the morning, the cops started following the stolen car, which the kids were driving with no headlights in pre-dawn darkness.

The cops say they weren’t in hot pursuit, simply following the car, but the kids were trying to get away and ran off the road into a weed-choked pond, where the car sank in 15 feet of water. The cops tried to get to the car but couldn’t save the girls, who all drowned.

All three girls had run-ins with the law before, including for auto theft, which is apparently a huge problem in the county. Here’s what Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said:

“We have been plagued for over a year with excessive auto thefts being committed by young, primarily black young people,” Gualtieri said. “There were 2,779 cars reported stolen in Pinellas in 2015. Between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015 juveniles in Pinellas county were charged with 1733 felonies.”

Gualtieri said there has to be a change in the system to keep young black kids from committing these types of crimes. According to their statistics, nearly half of the auto thefts in 2015 were committed by young black juveniles.

“Kids stealing them are using them for joy riding committing, other crimes like drug deals, the armed robbery, and then just dumping the cars… Law enforcement chasing these kids and arresting them is not solving a thing. The solutions need to come from deep within the community. Three dead teenagers is not acceptable.”

I agree that three dead teens isn’t acceptable. But here’s my question: What is the point of bringing the dead kids’ race into it?

Is the (white) sheriff trying to do the Bill Cosby shouty thing at the local black community, most of whose kids aren’t stealing cars? Does he think there are specific anti-auto theft techniques that would work with black kids that can’t be applied across the board to any kids who steal cars?

In short, what the actual fuck?

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Today’s Rorshach Test

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Hillary responding angrily to a Greenpeace activists who confronted her about donations from fossil fuel industry is your Rorshach test for the day. Over at Hillary’s personal Pravda (no, seriously, it is just that), Blue Nation Review, it’s bad news for Bernie, over at Red State they’re just enjoying a moment to trash Hillary, the Greenpeace activist herself is all “WTF I have nothing to do with the Sanders campaign,” one of the usual suspects at Salon details the “troubling” fossil fuel links, while Vox says it’s complicated.

My take- this sort of thing is inevitable when you take in heaps of cash from bundlers and why I was pissed at the DNC changing their rules (even though this is unrelated), and probably not worth yelling about, but I doubt it will change anyone’s opinion one way or another. It’s also an unfortunate confluence in events in that I doubt Clinton would have been so shouty had the music not been so damned loud.

You?

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Friday Mid-Day Open Thread

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Via Buzzfeed, a tweeted image that shows the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy:

Foretold

Damn, I’m glad it’s Friday. Got any big plans this weekend? We’re probably going to lay low since last weekend’s holiday forced us to be sociable. Maybe I’ll make a half-hearted attempt at getting some housework done. But probably not.

Open thread!

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Jobapalooza Open Thread

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jorbs

No April Fools joke on the country here, 215K new jobs in March and unemployment up a smidge to 5.0% even as more people entered the workforce.

The 215,000 gain in payrolls followed a revised 245,000 February advance, a Labor Department report showed Friday. Average hourly earnings increased 0.3 percent from a month earlier, while the jobless rate crept up to 5 percent as more people entered the labor force.

A still-robust pace of job creation represents a vote of confidence by employers that the U.S. will hold up against an anemic global economic backdrop. Additional tightening in the labor market that sparks bigger pay gains for American workers may convince Federal Reserve policy makers that the economy is more insulated to weakness overseas.

“We’re still in a really good spot with the labor market – – the fundamentals here are strong,” Thomas Simons, a money-market economist at Jefferies LLC in New York, said before the report. “ I have no reason to suspect we’re seeing a turning point in the labor market any time soon.”

Construction payroll growth accelerated in March, while manufacturing employment slumped. Other industries adding jobs included retail, health care, leisure and hospitality and professional services. Government hiring was the strongest since August.

The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 205,000 advance in total employment, with estimates ranging from gains of 100,000 to 250,000 after a previously reported 242,000 February increase. Revisions to prior reports subtracted a total of 1,000 jobs to overall payrolls in the previous two months.

Average private sector hourly wages up 7 cents to $25.43, black unemployment at 9.0%,  U-6 number coming in at 9.8%, headline should again read “Obama economy humming along despite Republicans crapping all over things.”

Open thread.

 

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Federalizing Medicaid funding

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And another story from Oklahoma:

Facing a $1.3 billion budget hole, the Oklahoma House has passed legislation that would cut 111,000 Oklahomans from Medicaid.

House members on Wednesday passed the bill 65-34 mostly along partisan lines and sent it to the state Senate for action.

The measure would instruct the Oklahoma Health Care Authority to seek a federal waiver allowing the state to exclude from Medicaid all able-bodied adults under 65 with dependents.

That bill failed in the Oklahoma Senate.

Oklahoma is heavily dependent on oil revenue to make their budget work. Oil prices have cratered so state revenues have crashed. At the same time as oil prices have collapsed, economic activity in the state is decreasing which means more people don’t have jobs, more people don’t have employer sponsored insurance, and more people have become Medicaid eligible. The Medicaid eligible pool is counter-cyclical. As the economy does well, the eligible pool shrinks, and as the economy does poorly, the pool grows. So the number of people who are eligible for Legacy Medicaid grows just as the state revenue needed to pay for Medicaid services drops.  This is a problem.

Legacy Medicaid is financed by the state and the Feds splitting the bill.  Oklahoma pays 41% of the cost of the medical services component of the program.  The Feds pick up 59% of the medical side and a bit more on the administrative side.  Oklahoma has a balanced budget constraint.  the Federal government does not.  That means the Feds are willing and able to spend money to meet increased Legacy Medicaid demand in a downturn but the state can not.  Instead, the state needs to cut expenses to meet its balanced budget constraint and Medicaid is a very large line item in every state budget, so that means Medicaid is often one of the major areas of cut-backs in either eligibility, services allowed or provider payments.

So what is the solution?

The long term solution is that the Federal government should take on more and more of the cost of Legacy Medicaid.  The Feds can spend in a downturn when the states have to be 50 mini-Hoovers who have to cut during a recession.  This does three things.  The first it makes sure that people can get the medical care that they need and that the continuity of care is maintained.  Continuous care is usually better and cheaper  than people getting dropped and then added back to insurance months or years later.  Secondly, it transforms Medicaid financing from a pro-cyclical activity into a counter-cyclical macro-economic stability policy.  One of the major components of the stimulus in 2009 was a Federal Match rate bump.  This moved $87 billion in Medicaid expenses from the states’ books to the Federal books.

The Stimulus bump was a short term solution that required massive supermajorities from a party that believes that the federal government faces a different budget constraint than a typical household.  The long term solution is to have the Feds continually increase their share of the costs until Legacy Medicaid is funded on the same bases as Medicaid Expansion. The Feds pick up 90% of the tab and the states pay 10%.  This will still allow for state control  which allows Massachusetts to cover different services than Mississippi but it allows for a much stronger counter-cyclical automatic stabilizer to be in place.

The attraction this should have to a significant number of Republican state level elites is that by taking Medicaid off of their books, it frees up a lot of money for easy to justify tax cuts.

 

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