In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On November 14 2013 09:14 WhiteDog wrote: [quote] You're spouting nonsense, read the graph you are talking about is below in the article I linked, and it is not more "true" than the first graph.
Everything you say just shows how fragile your knowledge of economy is. All indicators are imperfect, and thus imperfectly reflect reality. For exemple, I could say that average wage or average compensation also is wrong as it is indirectly diminishing the fact that "people are not paid more when they work more efficiently" because one could think high income workers might hide part of this process (something median wage or compensation would be able to see). You can question indicator all you want, but even with a different indicator (labor compensation) the fact still remain : there is a gap between productivity gain and disposable income in most developped countries and this gap is specifically touching middle class worker.
Also the fact that inequality has "positive effect on the economy" doesn't mean shit too. It is just an ideological justification, but it says nothing about the degree of inequality nor about the type of inequalities. Some are acceptable, others are not, some might have positive impact on the economy, some certainly not. We're reaching the same point, were you cannot justify your arguments and your ideology just shows up, just like that time when you argued that market are efficient because market are efficient, without - I'm pretty sure of it - actually understanding what economists means when they say that market are "efficient".
There is supposed to be a link between productivity and compensation, not productivity and wages. The link should be expressed in apples to apples terms. That is, they should both be deflated using the same index.
Moreover, as I already stated if you use the correct terms, there is still a gap. Refuting me on the grounds that there is still a gap is not refuting me at all since I already pointed out that a gap remains!
As for my comment on the positive effects of inequality, I wrote that it has both positive and negative effects. Refuting me on the grounds that "some [types and degrees] are acceptable, others are not" is, again, not refuting me at all!
Really, is something lost in translation here? Read what I write.
Then what's the point of the discussion if you're only pointing out small things that doesn't contribute at all to the main point ? When you asses that there are "positive effect" to inequality, you stay vague and don't explain your point, while you go into the detail of the indicator when something does not go along with your own vision of "the economy". That's why I'm bothered by your answers, nothing is lost in translation.
To clarify, I'll just quote Krugman :
Larry Mishel has a systematic breakdown of the reasons for worker income stagnation since 1973. He starts with the familiar divergence: productivity up 80 percent, the compensation (including benefits) of the median worker up only 11 percent. Where did the productivity go?
The answer is, it’s two-thirds the inequality, stupid. [...]
What this says is that widening inequality makes a huge difference. Income stagnation does not reflect overall economic stagnation; the incomes of typical workers would be 30 or 40 percent higher than they are if inequality hadn’t soared.
WhiteDog, you made specific comments that I disagreed with on the grounds that I believed them to be factually inaccurate. The article you drew your graph from agrees with me, not you, on that point. If that's problematic to the "main point" you are trying to make - too fucking bad. Put on your big kid pants, admit the error, and stress that the main point is still valid.
I'm not sure where you are going with the Krugman quote. Average productivity increases for the entire economy aren't supposed to translate to compensation increases for every job or every industry or every income class. If your main point is that inequality has increased, you don't need to draw odd references to productivity to make that point - just point to the inequality itself.
What ? I'm sorry, but I showed post after post, that there is an income problem, that there are rising inequalities, and that there is indeed a correlation between low marginal taxation rate and inequalities. All you did was saying some nonsense about savings, argue indicators - I only quickly copy/paste a curve because, guess what, I'm french and my own curve are in french (and "compensation" doesn't mean anything to me as we use the term "revenue"). So all in all, you argued over nothing and now you're waving a flag like you've conquered the nothing we've been arguing.
Can we at least agree marginal taxation rate could lower inequality ? Can we at least agree that middle ground income are suffering ? That working more, when you are a middle class worker, doesn't equal in higher wage ? That mobility in the US is weaker than in most other more equal countries ? Because all those are the facts I have been talking about.
This discussion began with my replying to a graph on wealth inequality. You then jumped into an extremely antagonistic and rude discussion over income inequality. Great start. And contrary to your post here, savings does matter in a discussion of wealth accumulation. Way to continue being wrong.
I never disagreed that higher marginal tax rates can lower inequality. Why do you think I did? Did you not read my posts? I wrote that marginal tax rates weren't the whole story, that other tax code aspects matter as well. I'm not sure why that's a controversial statement. Does no one complain when the rich pay far less than the statutory rate?
I never disagreed that the middle class could be doing a whole lot better. Cyclical issues aside, I do disagree over the phrase "suffering" as middle class incomes have been rising.
I didn't disagree that mobility isn't lower in the US. I disagreed that comparing nations is perfectly apples to apples.
Again you are taking a stance on every subject disregarding not only factual evidence but also any of my analysis.
About the start, this was from my second post :
Not to mention your argument means nothing because if the poor actually consume most of the surplus they gain because of the redistribution and even if this money actually goes back in the hand of the rich, the rich will again be taxed and thus the money will go back to the poor : it's a circuit, of course rich gain money from poor's consumption, the goal is not to minimize this flux (because it is beneficial to the economy), but to minimize the accumulation of flux (saving rate, patrimony, etc.) and this is entirely possible if you tax enough.
Yes I'm talking about wealth and since the beginning. Don't make it seems like there are no canals between wealth and income. Your argument is just not enough, at least it's a little sentence one could add to clarify the limits of a short term marginal tax rate increase.
Yes saving does matter, but your point was just out of the picture. You were making a link between the low saving rate in the US and a possible increase in marginal tax rate, saying that one might have a bad influence on the other. Sure but... The saving problem in the US has nothing to do with taxation, and more to do with the high saving rate in some other countries, the financial system (that permit the mobility of global savings from countries with surplus and high savings to the US), the low interest rate, and the "culture" that has clearly shifted from building up giants to consumption for consumption. This argument about saving rate just shows how hard you're trying to find some meaningless facts to refute the idea of increasing taxation and this is where we leave economy and enter the world of ideology. But maybe we were already there since the beginning.
You are proposing to tax the rich to reduce their amount of wealth, or reduce their wealth buildup (reduce their savings via taxes). Are you just assuming that the loss of wealth will be made up for elsewhere or simply agnostic towards it?
Loss of wealth ? Wut ? Marginal taxation - on income - is made after the production, so after the wealth is created. It's a question of redistribution, and all wealth distributions are pareto optimal (there are no theoric distribution more economically optimal than the other). Now if by loss you are talking about the potential loss due to having less incentive to work, then I don't know what to say.
No, I'm not talking about a loss of income due to disincentives.
If you reduce from X you need to add to Y, otherwise there will be a net loss. Additionally, X and Y can save or dis-save and have different propensities to do so.
My question is how you take from X, which has a high propensity to save, give to Y, which has a propensity to dis-save, and wind up with no net increase or decrease in the amount saved.
Edit: An additional clarification - I don't consider wealth redistribution a success unless the poor and the middle class wind up with more wealth. There's value in holding wealth beyond the income derived from it.
Sorry, I didn't had the time to respond (too much work) but I already responded to you. To say it bluntly : you might be somehow right, but it doesn't matter. The low savings in the US is not linked to the bad habit of low to middle income range to barely save (the consumption function) in this case, but to other realities (like I said, some macroeconomic and global realities).
If you think it is a matter of concern, then just stick to Ramsey's rule and accept that every economic policy has one goal and one only, and that every economic policy is second best, always imperfect and always create distorsions : that doesn't mean we should not do anything. It basically mean that increasing marginal taxation rate has one goal which is facing inequalities. You could, for exemple, use the excess money you would gain through increasing the marginal taxation rate to incite people in saving (for exemple, by financing low savings, below 15 000 $, with a higher interest rate like in my country).
Also for people who are interested, there have been some really interesting debate in the IMF Research conference, especially Larry Summers' intervention on the macroeconomic problems we are facing today worldwide.
If another recession were to hit now or in the next couple of years, the Fed will have even less power to combat it since rates are already at zero. This is what Summers warned of in his speech at the IMF.
"Imagine a situation where natural and equilibrium interest rates have fallen significantly below zero," Summers said. "Then conventional macroeconomic thinking leaves us in a very serious problem because we all seem to agree that whereas you can keep the federal funds rate at a low level forever, it's much harder to do extraordinary measures beyond that forever, but the underlying problem may be there forever."
There are a couple of other ways we could attack this.
-- The Fed could allow for greater inflation, and thus incentivizing people to spend now if they're hoarding money.
-- We could also move to a cashless society where all money is electronic. This would make it impossible to hoard cash outside the bank, allowing the Fed to cut interest rates to below zero, spurring people to spend more.
Both ideas would theoretically overcome the problem of the zero lower bound.
Krugman's intervention is also really interesting for those who have some background in economy but it's not really about the US and more about the euro zone.
On November 18 2013 03:55 FallDownMarigold wrote: All the fuss about the "destruction of Obamacare on a huge level" stemming from crappy website rollout and "omg he lied I -- lost my old plan!" won't seem like much when the result down the line is a shift toward or perhaps even full change in health care structure into a system that covers everyone, leaves no one without insurance, and thereby avoids the inevitable "death spiral" path which plagues the patchwork and private system. Even those that "lost their legitimate and good plans" might come around to see it being a worthwhile sacrifice when the result is something that isn't putting the entire individual health insurance market at risk of death spiraled implosion.
Yes, you are absolutely right! Mr. Obama knows what's in my and my country's best interest, of course. How foolish of me to ever doubt him and his highly intellectual group of counsellors.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.
And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.
The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.
Ironically, it was Labor’s demanding standards that left the door open to manipulation.
Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews — meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.
Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I’m told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.
Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.
“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon told me.
On November 18 2013 03:55 FallDownMarigold wrote: All the fuss about the "destruction of Obamacare on a huge level" stemming from crappy website rollout and "omg he lied I -- lost my old plan!" won't seem like much when the result down the line is a shift toward or perhaps even full change in health care structure into a system that covers everyone, leaves no one without insurance, and thereby avoids the inevitable "death spiral" path which plagues the patchwork and private system. Even those that "lost their legitimate and good plans" might come around to see it being a worthwhile sacrifice when the result is something that isn't putting the entire individual health insurance market at risk of death spiraled implosion.
Yes, you are absolutely right! Mr. Obama knows what's in my and my country's best interest, of course. How foolish of me to ever doubt him and his highly intellectual group of counsellors.
might have misinterpreted this vague, sarcastic halfquip, but it's sort of interesting you think 'mr. obama' is responsible for devising 'obamacare' and that the aim to overhaul a bloated health care system and rescue a failing individual insurance market is not in the country's best interest
On November 16 2013 13:13 paralleluniverse wrote: The whole policy cancellation issue is completely overblown.
The ACA has a grandfather clause that allows plans that don't meet the minimum requirements to stay temporarily, as long as they don't change too much, including not raising the price sufficiently above medical inflation. Therefore, the plans that are now being cancelled both do not meet the minimum requirements and have changed in a way that is not covered by the grandfather clause. Not meeting the minimum requirements alone is not grounds for being disallowed under the ACA.
Other than the first line, this is all true. However, what's lost here is how limited and toothless the grandfather clause is.
Obama did not promise to freeze the insurance market--no changes to any policies. Policies naturally get changed and cancelled all the time. What's different here is that these policies have changed so they're not really the same policy (otherwise they could have stayed under the grandfather clause), they're subpar policies that don't meet minimum standards, and there's a relentless war to destroy Obamacare.
The devil is in the details. There's a difference between meeting Obamacare's fairly arbitrary standards and being a good plan. Of course, there always inevitably will be problems when a bureaucracy forces a "one size fits all" approach. What's been particularly fun has been seeing liberal media figures complain about their canceled coverage that was perfectly fine from their perspective.
This is exactly the problem Democrats are facing today. They are unable to persuade people that their plan was cancelled because it was so crappy. Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on. Liberalism thrives on the negative impact of social programs being invisible on the personal level and spread amongst the many. This is one case where they aren't getting away with it. Ordinary Americans, some who believed Obama's promise to not raise middle class tax rates, see increased costs and frustrations that can be laid directly at the feet of Obama and congressional Democrats. That's why both of their poll numbers are falling so low.
If you had told me a year ago that Bill Clinton would lead the Democratic revolt against Obama and Obamacare, I'd say you were crazy. It's just his status as something of a revered figure within the Democratic party that made it stick.
Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
--President Clinton on Tuesday
Clinton is not someone the media can dismiss as a Tea Party extremist, but the man that brought sex appeal to old school progressivism. Obama only had a weak response: essentially he would legislate from the executive using selective enforcement. Insurers could continue to offer illegal plans, because he would make sure his agencies and the judicial wouldn't punish them for doing so. Maybe this time around, Democrats are ready to write a law that won't be just a presidential promise. A law that will guarantee them a defensible position next time they have to appeal to voters to re-elect.
40 House Democrats defected from the Obama line today and voted to change Obamacare from the House. I think the Democrats won't easily recover their credibility on changing the face of American medicine. Eventually, the bungling can't be explained away.
(Reuters) - Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
Many good arguments can be made about the problems with Obamacare, but saying that the pre-Obamacare system "worked well" for Americans isn't one of them.
Let's talk about good arguments. The one the Democrats were banking on was that the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. That one blew up in their face. Americans were confronted with a more expensive plan with no choice to stay on their own plan. Their anger is now at the forefront and Democrats are left red-handed.
Two Problems with what you were saying. I'm not talking about the abstract notion of the system in general, in fact, employer based systems suffer from the problems with pre-existing conditions and that's currently enshrined in law with tax breaks on health insurance plans. We're talking about a universally bad step in the current system that is now under tremendous pressure to be reversed.
Second problem, I have no clue why you put "worked well" in quotes, since neither I nor anybody else you're quoting used that.
I think it's pretty clear that many of the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. If medical bills are going to force people to go into bankruptcy anyway they would have been better off not wasting money on crappy health insurance in the first place. However, you may be right that the new plans won't be any better, or that they will be too expensive. The jury's still out; we'll have to see how things work out when/if they get the stupid website working. It is still possible that people with dropped plans will be able to get better and/or cheaper coverage than they could previously.
First problem - the current system is not "universally bad." At least some people with preexisting conditions will be able to afford health insurance for the first time in their lives. Again, healthcare.gov is a travesty, but it is probably fixable. Once it is up and running we may find that Americans are satisfied with the new options they have.
Second problem - in the post I quoted you said "Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on." Neither the shitty cheap plans nor the system in general worked well, hence the bankruptcy statistics from the article I posted.
Since they couldn't get the website working on time, we don't know yet whether Obamacare will end up making the system better, but I doubt it could make things any worse.
I would expect to see widespread satisfaction and no political pressure on Democrats, even blue state Democrats, had the only plans cancelled been the ones that served their customers poorly. The reverse is indeed true. Their failure with the website is nearly matched with their failure to collapse the current system in a manner where insurance agencies get all the blame. If you liked your current plan, too bad, it's not grandfathered in ... it's now illegal. If you liked your current doctor, sorry, you can't be assured he'll be in your new plan. The trade offered by Obamacare is no good.
On November 16 2013 13:13 paralleluniverse wrote: The whole policy cancellation issue is completely overblown.
The ACA has a grandfather clause that allows plans that don't meet the minimum requirements to stay temporarily, as long as they don't change too much, including not raising the price sufficiently above medical inflation. Therefore, the plans that are now being cancelled both do not meet the minimum requirements and have changed in a way that is not covered by the grandfather clause. Not meeting the minimum requirements alone is not grounds for being disallowed under the ACA.
Other than the first line, this is all true. However, what's lost here is how limited and toothless the grandfather clause is.
Obama did not promise to freeze the insurance market--no changes to any policies. Policies naturally get changed and cancelled all the time. What's different here is that these policies have changed so they're not really the same policy (otherwise they could have stayed under the grandfather clause), they're subpar policies that don't meet minimum standards, and there's a relentless war to destroy Obamacare.
The devil is in the details. There's a difference between meeting Obamacare's fairly arbitrary standards and being a good plan. Of course, there always inevitably will be problems when a bureaucracy forces a "one size fits all" approach. What's been particularly fun has been seeing liberal media figures complain about their canceled coverage that was perfectly fine from their perspective.
This is exactly the problem Democrats are facing today. They are unable to persuade people that their plan was cancelled because it was so crappy. Americans are not that dumb and know that it worked well for them, whatever demonization of the insurance companies goes on. Liberalism thrives on the negative impact of social programs being invisible on the personal level and spread amongst the many. This is one case where they aren't getting away with it. Ordinary Americans, some who believed Obama's promise to not raise middle class tax rates, see increased costs and frustrations that can be laid directly at the feet of Obama and congressional Democrats. That's why both of their poll numbers are falling so low.
If you had told me a year ago that Bill Clinton would lead the Democratic revolt against Obama and Obamacare, I'd say you were crazy. It's just his status as something of a revered figure within the Democratic party that made it stick.
Even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.
--President Clinton on Tuesday
Clinton is not someone the media can dismiss as a Tea Party extremist, but the man that brought sex appeal to old school progressivism. Obama only had a weak response: essentially he would legislate from the executive using selective enforcement. Insurers could continue to offer illegal plans, because he would make sure his agencies and the judicial wouldn't punish them for doing so. Maybe this time around, Democrats are ready to write a law that won't be just a presidential promise. A law that will guarantee them a defensible position next time they have to appeal to voters to re-elect.
40 House Democrats defected from the Obama line today and voted to change Obamacare from the House. I think the Democrats won't easily recover their credibility on changing the face of American medicine. Eventually, the bungling can't be explained away.
(Reuters) - Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track.
More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
Many good arguments can be made about the problems with Obamacare, but saying that the pre-Obamacare system "worked well" for Americans isn't one of them.
Let's talk about good arguments. The one the Democrats were banking on was that the dropped plans weren't any good to begin with. That one blew up in their face. Americans were confronted with a more expensive plan with no choice to stay on their own plan. Their anger is now at the forefront and Democrats are left red-handed.
Two Problems with what you were saying. I'm not talking about the abstract notion of the system in general, in fact, employer based systems suffer from the problems with pre-existing conditions and that's currently enshrined in law with tax breaks on health insurance plans. We're talking about a universally bad step in the current system that is now under tremendous pressure to be reversed.
Second problem, I have no clue why you put "worked well" in quotes, since neither I nor anybody else you're quoting used that.
Nope. Cancelled plans are a good thing in states with exchanges running, for example in CA. This idea that there's no choice but to pay more isn't right. There's plenty of choices and low cost plans, with subsidies if you're poor, that meet the minimum requirements on the state exchanges that are running. The dropped plans weren't any good, because they didn't meet minimum requirements. So the problem isn't cancelled plans (which is good), it's that in combination with a screwed up federal website (which is bad), preventing people from seeing the alternative coverage options if they don't live in a state with their own working exchange.
Notice how Republicans offer no alternative to Obamacare. That's because any health reform that disallows insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, or disallowing them to drop people when they get sick, the starting point for most health reform discussions, will look like Obamacare or European-style universal healthcare.
If insurers must insure everyone, then to prevent adverse selection from collapsing the health insurance market, an individual mandate is necessary. And then to prevent insurers making a loophole around the mandate with dirt cheap policies that offer essentially no protection, minimum requirements on health policies are necessary (which is what all the recent furor comes down to). Therefore, disallowing subpar policies is a necessary implication of letting everyone get insured, and not fucking over sick people by letting them die or go bankrupt.
So there are a few choices with healthcare: (a) you let poor people who can't afford healthcare go bankrupt or get no healthcare when they get very sick, or (b) you continue to require hospitals to treat people in the ER even if they can't afford healthcare, thereby socializing the costs of catastrophic care, or you do health reform which will either be (c) an insurance-based reform that must look like Obamacare as explained above, or (d) European-style universal healthcare, i.e. medicare for all.
You're dead wrong for the very reasons Obama insisted time and time again that if you liked you plan, you could keep your plan. These cancelled plans riled up the people that were used to the affordable costs and used to their doctors. Now they're told the new plans are more expensive and their doctor is not on it while the old plan is unavailable. It has been decreed by the central planners that you must cover this and that and the other thing if you are to offer health insurance, and the reaction is more high prices that aren't necessarily defrayed by these wonderful governmental subsidies.
With all the damage Obamacare has already done to American medicine, the alternative now is wholesale repeal. How about not forcing people onto more expensive plans and releasing a website they spent 3 years on and $500 million that's a piece of work? You can't have meaningful debate on reforming employer-based largely-untaxed health insurance when the Democratic Party and Obama are hard at work destroying all private insurance. Let's have healthcare assistance for the poor done right, and tax reform and regulatory overhauls. Let's not have a government bureaucrat sitting down at the table with you and your insurance provider telling you what you must purchase under the law. The promises that only bad plans are gone are ringing hollow no matter how much the lie is repeated.
EDIT: Changed misstated figure
These cancelled plans are subpar plans, because the reason for cancellation is that they do not meet the minimum requirements set by Obamacare and the plans were changed in such a way that the grandfather clause does not apply. But this is moot now, it's been announced that they can be uncancelled.
You claim that they were affordable, that's because they offered less than minimum requirements. For example, insurance plans previously had capped benefits, which would have offered you little protection against going broke if you were hit with a serious medical emergency, like being diagnosed with cancer. The new Obamacare-compliant plans are all uncapped. No, affordable plans are not gone. There's plenty of affordable and cheap plans on the exchanges, at least the working ones, like in CA.
Next, you talk about how bad it is that people are now being forced on plans with minimum standards decreed by central planners. But as I had previously explained to you, this is a necessary implication of the fact that people can no longer be discriminated against based on medical history. No, Obama didn't include minimum requirements to provoke and aggravate right-wingers. For example, covering mental illness is also another minimum requirement. But not having it as a minimum requirement would allow health insurers from charging the mentally ill higher prices, despite it not being their fault that they're mentally ill. Medical history is often not the fault of the sick (when it is, like smoking, Obamacare care allows discriminating against smokers) and anyone could suddenly, of no fault of their own, be struck suddenly with a serious medical problem.
Therefore, your misguided rage against minimum standards decreed by central planners, implies that either: 1) You believe sick people should be discriminated against by health insurers, making health insurance unaffordable or simply unattainable for them, as was the case before Obamacare, despite many medical conditions not being the fault of the sick person, or 2) You simply do not understand nor appreciate the reforms necessary to fix health insurance in a way that solves (1), and one such reform is the necessity of having minimum standards.
Lastly, it's very hypocritical for you to say that Obamacare is destroying the health insurance industry, since most of this right-wing anger is directed at the mandate that everyone get health insurance.
No one party gets to set minimum requirements. They're choices and open to criticism. Or perhaps you would prefer them up to the Cadillac plans offered to company CEOs and the like? Obamacare is not concerned with minimum standards, it's only concern is politically advantageous requirements. You might remember contraceptive coverage in the news for that reason. A change in requirements is a change, not an improvement. It is still a government bureaucrat sitting alongside you and the insurer telling you what you have to buy. That setup will lead to nobody's satisfaction. It's a very shortsighted policy.
I don't even think you have a working idea of what insurance is. What you're discussing is straight welfare payouts for medical care. You can't insure against future risk if the payer can simply get it once they're diagnosed with it (pre-existing condition side effects). Calling it discrimination is demagoguery at its finest. You are literally saying that treatment for sick people being more expensive than treatment for healthy people is discrimination. We insure against these things to spread the cost and incidence across a long timeframe, not to make the treatment suddenly cheaper. It's fairy tale land and you live in it.
I doubt you read my previous posts, but the solution discussed there was allowing individuals to keep their health insurance across employers. Insurance companies can correctly adjust for risks across lengths of time. Getting sick and losing your job is no longer suddenly a pre-existing condition for the next policy ... you're still on the same policy. It's a form of income and should be taxed as such. The market inefficiency must be corrected (and not by adding on more inefficiencies). Decreeing prosperity by mandate is idiotic.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.
And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.
The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.
Ironically, it was Labor’s demanding standards that left the door open to manipulation.
Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews — meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.
Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I’m told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.
Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.
“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon told me.
And now there's an investigation from the Commerce Department
Truth About Jobs By PAUL KRUGMAN New York Times October 8, 2012 (edition) If anyone had doubts about the madness that has spread through a large part of the American political spectrum, the reaction to Friday’s better-than expected report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should have settled the issue. For the immediate response of many on the right — and we’re not just talking fringe figures — was to cry conspiracy.
Leading the charge of what were quickly dubbed the “B.L.S. truthers” was none other than Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, who posted an assertion on Twitter that the books had been cooked to help President Obama’s re-election campaign. His claim was quickly picked up by right-wing pundits and media personalities.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.
And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.
The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.
Ironically, it was Labor’s demanding standards that left the door open to manipulation.
Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews — meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.
Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I’m told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.
Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.
“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon told me.
Put it with all the news about things politicians in all countries do and things that everybody knows about.
On November 19 2013 22:54 Danglars wrote: my previous posts .. discussed allowing individuals to keep their health insurance across employers-
Employer-based insurance is extremely inefficient and obviously must be done away with one way or another, and this is something that both parties support...
On November 14 2013 10:08 JonnyBNoHo wrote: [quote] There is supposed to be a link between productivity and compensation, not productivity and wages. The link should be expressed in apples to apples terms. That is, they should both be deflated using the same index.
Moreover, as I already stated if you use the correct terms, there is still a gap. Refuting me on the grounds that there is still a gap is not refuting me at all since I already pointed out that a gap remains!
As for my comment on the positive effects of inequality, I wrote that it has both positive and negative effects. Refuting me on the grounds that "some [types and degrees] are acceptable, others are not" is, again, not refuting me at all!
Really, is something lost in translation here? Read what I write.
Then what's the point of the discussion if you're only pointing out small things that doesn't contribute at all to the main point ? When you asses that there are "positive effect" to inequality, you stay vague and don't explain your point, while you go into the detail of the indicator when something does not go along with your own vision of "the economy". That's why I'm bothered by your answers, nothing is lost in translation.
To clarify, I'll just quote Krugman :
Larry Mishel has a systematic breakdown of the reasons for worker income stagnation since 1973. He starts with the familiar divergence: productivity up 80 percent, the compensation (including benefits) of the median worker up only 11 percent. Where did the productivity go?
The answer is, it’s two-thirds the inequality, stupid. [...]
What this says is that widening inequality makes a huge difference. Income stagnation does not reflect overall economic stagnation; the incomes of typical workers would be 30 or 40 percent higher than they are if inequality hadn’t soared.
WhiteDog, you made specific comments that I disagreed with on the grounds that I believed them to be factually inaccurate. The article you drew your graph from agrees with me, not you, on that point. If that's problematic to the "main point" you are trying to make - too fucking bad. Put on your big kid pants, admit the error, and stress that the main point is still valid.
I'm not sure where you are going with the Krugman quote. Average productivity increases for the entire economy aren't supposed to translate to compensation increases for every job or every industry or every income class. If your main point is that inequality has increased, you don't need to draw odd references to productivity to make that point - just point to the inequality itself.
What ? I'm sorry, but I showed post after post, that there is an income problem, that there are rising inequalities, and that there is indeed a correlation between low marginal taxation rate and inequalities. All you did was saying some nonsense about savings, argue indicators - I only quickly copy/paste a curve because, guess what, I'm french and my own curve are in french (and "compensation" doesn't mean anything to me as we use the term "revenue"). So all in all, you argued over nothing and now you're waving a flag like you've conquered the nothing we've been arguing.
Can we at least agree marginal taxation rate could lower inequality ? Can we at least agree that middle ground income are suffering ? That working more, when you are a middle class worker, doesn't equal in higher wage ? That mobility in the US is weaker than in most other more equal countries ? Because all those are the facts I have been talking about.
This discussion began with my replying to a graph on wealth inequality. You then jumped into an extremely antagonistic and rude discussion over income inequality. Great start. And contrary to your post here, savings does matter in a discussion of wealth accumulation. Way to continue being wrong.
I never disagreed that higher marginal tax rates can lower inequality. Why do you think I did? Did you not read my posts? I wrote that marginal tax rates weren't the whole story, that other tax code aspects matter as well. I'm not sure why that's a controversial statement. Does no one complain when the rich pay far less than the statutory rate?
I never disagreed that the middle class could be doing a whole lot better. Cyclical issues aside, I do disagree over the phrase "suffering" as middle class incomes have been rising.
I didn't disagree that mobility isn't lower in the US. I disagreed that comparing nations is perfectly apples to apples.
Again you are taking a stance on every subject disregarding not only factual evidence but also any of my analysis.
About the start, this was from my second post :
Not to mention your argument means nothing because if the poor actually consume most of the surplus they gain because of the redistribution and even if this money actually goes back in the hand of the rich, the rich will again be taxed and thus the money will go back to the poor : it's a circuit, of course rich gain money from poor's consumption, the goal is not to minimize this flux (because it is beneficial to the economy), but to minimize the accumulation of flux (saving rate, patrimony, etc.) and this is entirely possible if you tax enough.
Yes I'm talking about wealth and since the beginning. Don't make it seems like there are no canals between wealth and income. Your argument is just not enough, at least it's a little sentence one could add to clarify the limits of a short term marginal tax rate increase.
Yes saving does matter, but your point was just out of the picture. You were making a link between the low saving rate in the US and a possible increase in marginal tax rate, saying that one might have a bad influence on the other. Sure but... The saving problem in the US has nothing to do with taxation, and more to do with the high saving rate in some other countries, the financial system (that permit the mobility of global savings from countries with surplus and high savings to the US), the low interest rate, and the "culture" that has clearly shifted from building up giants to consumption for consumption. This argument about saving rate just shows how hard you're trying to find some meaningless facts to refute the idea of increasing taxation and this is where we leave economy and enter the world of ideology. But maybe we were already there since the beginning.
You are proposing to tax the rich to reduce their amount of wealth, or reduce their wealth buildup (reduce their savings via taxes). Are you just assuming that the loss of wealth will be made up for elsewhere or simply agnostic towards it?
Loss of wealth ? Wut ? Marginal taxation - on income - is made after the production, so after the wealth is created. It's a question of redistribution, and all wealth distributions are pareto optimal (there are no theoric distribution more economically optimal than the other). Now if by loss you are talking about the potential loss due to having less incentive to work, then I don't know what to say.
No, I'm not talking about a loss of income due to disincentives.
If you reduce from X you need to add to Y, otherwise there will be a net loss. Additionally, X and Y can save or dis-save and have different propensities to do so.
My question is how you take from X, which has a high propensity to save, give to Y, which has a propensity to dis-save, and wind up with no net increase or decrease in the amount saved.
Edit: An additional clarification - I don't consider wealth redistribution a success unless the poor and the middle class wind up with more wealth. There's value in holding wealth beyond the income derived from it.
Sorry, I didn't had the time to respond (too much work) but I already responded to you. To say it bluntly : you might be somehow right, but it doesn't matter. The low savings in the US is not linked to the bad habit of low to middle income range to barely save (the consumption function) in this case, but to other realities (like I said, some macroeconomic and global realities).
If you think it is a matter of concern, then just stick to Ramsey's rule and accept that every economic policy has one goal and one only, and that every economic policy is second best, always imperfect and always create distorsions : that doesn't mean we should not do anything. It basically mean that increasing marginal taxation rate has one goal which is facing inequalities. You could, for exemple, use the excess money you would gain through increasing the marginal taxation rate to incite people in saving (for exemple, by financing low savings, below 15 000 $, with a higher interest rate like in my country).
Also for people who are interested, there have been some really interesting debate in the IMF Research conference, especially Larry Summers' intervention on the macroeconomic problems we are facing today worldwide.
If another recession were to hit now or in the next couple of years, the Fed will have even less power to combat it since rates are already at zero. This is what Summers warned of in his speech at the IMF.
"Imagine a situation where natural and equilibrium interest rates have fallen significantly below zero," Summers said. "Then conventional macroeconomic thinking leaves us in a very serious problem because we all seem to agree that whereas you can keep the federal funds rate at a low level forever, it's much harder to do extraordinary measures beyond that forever, but the underlying problem may be there forever."
There are a couple of other ways we could attack this.
-- The Fed could allow for greater inflation, and thus incentivizing people to spend now if they're hoarding money.
-- We could also move to a cashless society where all money is electronic. This would make it impossible to hoard cash outside the bank, allowing the Fed to cut interest rates to below zero, spurring people to spend more.
Both ideas would theoretically overcome the problem of the zero lower bound.
Krugman's intervention is also really interesting for those who have some background in economy but it's not really about the US and more about the euro zone.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.
And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.
The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.
Ironically, it was Labor’s demanding standards that left the door open to manipulation.
Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews — meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.
Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I’m told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.
Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.
“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon told me.
That has the potential to be a big scandal. The statistics agencies are supposed to be very reliable. The only manipulation I've heard of before was administrations accelerating spending / hiring plans in the run up to an election.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.
And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.
The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.
Ironically, it was Labor’s demanding standards that left the door open to manipulation.
Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews — meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.
Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I’m told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.
Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.
“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon told me.
That has the potential to be a big scandal. The statistics agencies are supposed to be very reliable. The only manipulation I've heard of before was administrations accelerating spending / hiring plans in the run up to an election.
I wonder how people think about it and the Bush 'victory' in Florida.
Lost my job on Thursday. Need to get insurance to cover myself until I get a new one. Trying out healthcare.gov right now. Will report how my experience goes. Kansas resident btw.
The John Doe investigation looking at the 2011 and 2012 recall elections in Wisconsin is heating up. Dozens of conservative groups, both local and national, have been hit with subpoenas demanding documents in recent weeks, and law enforcement officials have been conducting dawn raids, seizing computers and documents.
This news comes from an unlikely place: an unsigned Wall Street Journal editorial. In a piece first published Friday, and updated over the weekend, the Journal quoted Eric O'Keefe, the director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, who confirmed receiving a subpoena. As TPM has previously reported, John Doe investigations are generally secret, and parties involved are ordered not to discuss it publicly. O'Keefe came forward despite the "personal risk" because he "wants the public to know what is going on," according to the Journal.
O'Keefe told the Journal he received a subpoena in early October. According to O'Keefe, at least three other targets of the investigation had their homes raided at dawn.
Try #1: Authenticating... Please wait... Service is down.
Try #2: I'm in... but it's kind of a hassle and it says my coverage won't be available until January 1, 2014 which is a total dealbreaker.
Searching individual health insurance brought me to www.ehealthinsurance.com which seems ridiculously easy and fast sooo yeah. Also the plans are cheaper.
COBRA looks wayyy too complicated for me to bother with and I was only employed for 3.5 months so I doubt it.
It looks like I'd have to ask my past employer about it. They employ more than 20 people so it seems that should have to have COBRA, but I don't think it's worth my time. Better to just figure out the insurance quickly and apply to jobs.
EPT
