Minor Thoughts from me to you

This article from U.S. News is pretty scary—and depressing.

Today, over 14 million people are unemployed. We now have more idle men and women than at any time since the Great Depression. Nearly seven people in the labor pool compete for every job opening. Hiring announcements have plunged to 10,248 in May, down from 59,648 in April. Hiring is now 17 percent lower than the lowest level in the 2001-02 downturn. One fifth of all men of prime working age are not getting up and going to work. Equally disturbing is that the number of people unemployed for six months or longer grew 361,000 to 6.2 million, increasing their share of the unemployed to 45.1 percent. We face the specter that long-term unemployment is becoming structural and not just cyclical, raising the risk that the jobless will lose their skills and become permanently unemployable.

Don't pay too much attention to the headline unemployment rate of 9.1 percent. It is scary enough, but it is a gloss on the reality. These numbers do not include the millions who have stopped looking for a job or who are working part time but would work full time if a position were available. And they count only those people who have actively applied for a job within the last four weeks.

Include those others and the real number is a nasty 16 percent. The 16 percent includes 8.5 million part-timers who want to work full time (which is double the historical norm) and those who have applied for a job within the last six months, including many of the long-term unemployed. And this 16 percent does not take into account the discouraged workers who have left the labor force. The fact is that the longer duration of six months is the more relevant testing period since the mean duration of unemployment is now 39.7 weeks, an increase from 37.1 weeks in February.

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These two charts are very scary. "The first shows the rise of antibiotic resistance in various common infections. The second shows the decline in the approval of new antibiotics."

These are not two trends you want to see moving in opposite directions.

There are a lot of reasons for the decline of new antibiotics--the market incentives are hopelessly misaligned, we've already picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit, and we're using way more antibiotics than we should in both humans and in animals. But anything we do to reduce overusage actually makes the problem of new antibiotic development worse, because it reduces the potential profit. At any rate, there's no clear way to solve this terrible divergence.

I've been talking about this problem for a while, but I've mostly thought about things like the ear infections that would have left me deaf before the advent of penicillin, or people dying in childbirth. I didn't start to understand the radical implications that antibiotic resistance has for health care practice until I read the absolutely gripping Rising Plague, by an infectious disease specialist who points out just how much of modern medicine is dependent on being able to control bacterial infection.

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Infectious mortality will go up, reducing our costs for longer, more expensive diseases--and making people less willing to undergo marginal surgeries.

On the other hand, when the first-line antibiotics fail, the second line means admitting people to the hospital for intravenous antibiotics. This is obviously much more expensive than giving them a pill, even if we make all the doctors take pay cuts and use the awesome monopsony power of the federal government to buy all our antibiotics at a discount. We might be able to worry less about those huge health care costs in 2060--but we might need to worry a lot more about our health care costs in the next twenty or thirty years.

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Of course, the most worrying thing is not the effect on the budget. It's the effect on the people. A world without antibiotics is a world of vast suffering and early death.

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Who says we don't make anything anymore?

What's most impressive is that the U.S. produced almost as much manufacturing output as the manufacturing sectors of Germany (#4), Italy (#5), France (#6), Russia (#7), U.K. (#8), Brazil (#9) and Canada (#10) combined ($2.44 trillion).

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Congratulations, you're Medicaid eligible! You now have health insurance. What's that? You actually wanted health care? Oh, well, that's something different. Why didn't you say so?

Children with Medicaid are far more likely than those with private insurance to be turned away by medical specialists or be made to wait more than a month for an appointment, even for serious medical problems, a new study finds.

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The study used a “secret shopper” technique in which researchers posed as the parent of a sick or injured child and called 273 specialty practices in Cook County, Ill., to schedule appointments. The callers, working from January to May 2010, described problems that were urgent but not emergencies, like diabetes, seizures, uncontrolled asthma, a broken bone or severe depression. If they were asked, they said that primary care doctors or emergency departments had referred them.

Sixty-six percent of those who mentioned Medicaid-CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) were denied appointments, compared with 11 percent who said they had private insurance, according to an article being published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

In 89 clinics that accepted both kinds of patients, the waiting time for callers who said they had Medicaid was an average of 22 days longer.

Health insurance isn't the same thing as health care. Not by a long shot. By focusing the national debate on who has health insurance we're missing the far bigger problem of who actually has access to care. That's what we should be focused on instead of obsessing over how many people are subscribers to a particular type of insurance product.

I was thinking today of just how racist and reactionary the Tea Party really is. Why, when you think about it, this is an amazingly "whites only club". Just look at this off the top of my head list of people they've supported recently.

• Senator Marco Rubio
• Governor Bobby Jindal
• Governor Nikki Haley
• Congressman Allen West
• Presidential Candidate Herman Cain
• Senate Candidate Ted Cruz
• Former Congressman Van Tran

Yessiree Bob, in the Tea Party we definitely have a group of people who can't stand the site of people who don't look just like them.

Matt Ridley makes a few good points, I think.

It turns out that the great majority of this energy, 10.2% out of the 13.8% share, comes from biomass, mainly wood (often transformed into charcoal) and dung. Most of the rest is hydro; less than 0.5% of the world's energy comes from wind, tide, wave, solar and geothermal put together. Wood and dung are indeed renewable, in the sense that they reappear as fast as you use them. Or do they? It depends on how fast you use them.

One of the greatest threats to rain forests is the cutting of wood for fuel by impoverished people. Haiti meets about 60% of its energy needs with charcoal produced from forests. Even bakeries, laundries, sugar refineries and rum distilleries run on the stuff. Full marks to renewable Haiti, the harbinger of a sustainable future! Or maybe not: Haiti has felled 98% of its tree cover and counting; it's an ecological disaster compared with its fossil-fuel burning neighbor, the Dominican Republic, whose forest cover is 41% and stable. Haitians are now burning tree roots to make charcoal.

You can likewise question the green and clean credentials of other renewables. The wind may never stop blowing, but the wind industry depends on steel, concrete and rare-earth metals (for the turbine magnets), none of which are renewable. Wind generates 0.2% of the world's energy at present. Assuming that energy needs double in coming decades, we would have to build 100 times as many wind farms as we have today just to get to a paltry 10% from wind. We'd run out of non-renewable places to put them.

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This is good news because milk is my daughter's favorite drink even (especially?) when she's sick. We used to tell her that drinking milk would make her cough worse. Now, we won't have to.

“The question has been formally investigated in studies, which demonstrated no increase in mucus production,” Dr. Sulica said, “although subjects who believed in the phenomenon reported that they did feel more mucus” when they ate dairy products.

The corollary to this finding is that dairy products have no effect on cough, he said.

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Georgia Governor Nathan Deal recently signed a bill that removed state regulations that prevented small business owners from buying out of state insurance. Giving business owners more choices will do a lot to provide healthcare competition and help to bring down prices. More states should pass legislation like this and Georgia should open this up to all state residents, not just small business owners.

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The Munchkin Wrangler had a great rant recently.

You know what I can’t stand to hear about anymore? That we Americans are addicted to oil. It’s a smarmy term that tries to couch an economic and environmental argument in pathological terms.

I’m not addicted to oil. I’m addicted to being able to drive into town on my own schedule. I’m addicted to being able to haul home a week’s worth of groceries with two little kids in tow without having to wait for the fucking bus with eighty pounds of filled plastic bags in my hands. (That’s disregarding the fact that I live out in the sticks, and the nearest bus stop is four miles away, which is one hell of a hike with the aforementioned two little kids and week’s worth of groceries.)

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Until then, shut the fuck up about my addiction to oil. It does nobody any good to try and debate economic and logistical necessities while using terminology to imply people who disagree with your view are mentally ill.

On a related note, I get frustrated whenever I hear someone say that buying oil is bad for the U.S. economy. For instance:

That’s money taken out of our economy and sent to foreign nations, and it will continue to drain the life from our economy for as long as we fail to stop the bleeding.

Really? That money is just taken out of our economy? And we get nothing from it? And it "drains the life from our economy"? Foreign oil is the vampire that's sucking our economy dry? Really?

I get quite a lot out of foreign oil. For instance, the ability to drive to work every day. I don't know about you, but that does quite a lot for my personal economy. I get to have plastics that keep my food fresh and uncontaminated—keeping me healthy. I get to have UPS delivery trucks that bring me products—saving me multiple trips to the store each week.

I’ll tell you what: I get far more benefits from foreign oil than I pay in costs. The cost of foreign oil is dirt cheap. Far from draining the life from our economy, oil pumps life into our economy each and every day.

Firstborn by Brandon Sanderson

My Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dennison has spent his entire life watching Varion, his older brother by 20 years, win battle after battle. Varion has fought his battles flawlessly, perfectly, never losing. Dennison has fought his own battles valiantly, but hopelessly, never winning. And, yet, his father and his Emperor refuse to release him from military service. Why? What good does it do anyone for him to stay in arms? Especially when his brother is loyally advancing the Empire's cause at every turn?

This was a pure impulse buy for me. I saw it listed as "customers that like this also like this" item on Amazon.com. I'm a fan of Brandon Sanderson and it was only $0.99, so buying it was an easy decision. (Sure, I know it's on Tor.com, but I like supporting my favorite authors and I prefer reading things on my Kindle whenever possible.)

This was one impulse buy I don't regret. As always, Brandon Sanderson is enjoyable and he knows how to tell a story with a twist. For a $0.99 short story, I definitely got $5 worth of enjoyment.

The Tax Foundation crunches the numbers to see if it’s true that “the economic downturn, President Bush's tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.”

1) Tax revenues have fluctuated largely with the economy, dropping precipitously in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, but are projected to remain close to historical norms with or without expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2012.

2) Entitlement spending has roughly doubled in the last 40 years as a percentage of GDP and is projected to remain there through 2021, pushing total spending well above any historical precedent. Thus, the CBO projects deficits as far as the eye can see.

Should we blame Bush (or rather, all that happened during his presidency) for this? In a sense, yes, but not for the reason the CBPP would have us believe; the role of Bush-era policies in the projected deficits is mainly on the spending side of the equation, not the tax side.

We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

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Sure, under parenting your children is dangerous. But so is over parenting. It seems that the trick with parenting is to back off, beyond what your first instinct might be. Just don't get so far back that you can't see your kids anymore.

Which might be how people like my patient Lizzie end up in therapy. “You can have the best parenting in the world and you’ll still go through periods where you’re not happy,” Jeff Blume, a family psychologist with a busy practice in Los Angeles, told me when I spoke to him recently. “A kid needs to feel normal anxiety to be resilient. If we want our kids to grow up and be more independent, then we should prepare our kids to leave us every day.”

But that’s a big if. Blume believes that many of us today don’t really want our kids to leave, because we rely on them in various ways to fill the emotional holes in our own lives. Kindlon and Mogel both told me the same thing. Yes, we devote inordinate amounts of time, energy, and resources to our children, but for whose benefit?

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Everyone thinks that we needed to bail out the failing U.S. banks lest they collapse and, in their collapse, take down both the U.S. economy and the international economy, plunging the world into a new Great Depression and (potentially) a new Dark Age.

As it turns out, maybe not. Ásgeir Jónsson explains that Iceland allowed their banks to collapse for the simple reason that they couldn’t afford to bail them out and no one else was interested in taking on the job. Today, Iceland’s economy is growing and Iceland’s banks are healthy once again.

Three years ago, Iceland forced its over-leveraged financial sector into a painful debt restructuring instead of bailing out its banks. The government had no other choice: Icelandic banks' assets totalled roughly 1,000% of GDP, and in the world's smallest currency area, no less. The central bank could not take on the role of lender of last resort without igniting a currency crisis.

Critics dubbed this response disastrous, and Iceland served as the cautionary tale of an "Icarus economy" whose banks had grown too big to save.

I remember this. I distinctly remember being in a doctor’s office, reading an article about the Icelandic economy, the massive levels of money in the banks, and the complete inability of the government to deal with the looming crisis. The tone of the article (probably in either Time or Newsweek) was apocalyptic.

Instead, we see now that Iceland and its banks both recovered. The medicine of bankruptcy didn’t taste good but it worked.

It is becoming clearer by the day that too many of Europe's banking crises were initially misdiagnosed as liquidity, rather than solvency, problems. For some countries, most notably Ireland, the policies prescribed for that misdiagnosis have transformed banking crises into sovereign-debt crises.

Europe's bailout path has only diverted ever-more resources to failing enterprises, postponing and deepening the problem. Iceland's restructuring was both painful and costly for the population, but the government did not throw good money after bad, and the taxpayers were spared a nationalization of private debts. Is it any wonder that forward-looking financial markets are now betting on the Icelandic recovery?

It’s hard not to think that we’d be in a better place if we’d done the same thing.

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"He's Lots-o-Huggin Bear from Toy Story 3, without the abandonment issues."

Esquire profiles Pixar's (and Disney's) chief creative genius.

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Alan Reynolds is great in explaining the income tax facts of life. Higher tax rates on the rich do not bring in nearly as much revenue as lower tax rates. It’s important to emphasize that tax rates are not the same as tax revenues. Higher rates do not automatically bring higher revenues. In fact, historically, the opposite has happened.

Moreover—and this is what Mr. Reich and his friends always fail to mention—the individual income tax actually brought in less revenue when the highest tax rate was 70% to 91% than it did when the highest tax rate was 28%.

As the nearby chart shows, however, those super-high tax rates at all income levels brought in revenue of only 7.7% of GDP, according to U.S. budget historical data.

President John F. Kennedy's across-the-board tax cuts reduced the lowest and highest tax rates to 14% and 70% respectively after 1964, yet revenues (after excluding the 5%-10% surtaxes of 1969-70) rose to 8% of GDP. President Reagan's across-the-board tax cuts further reduced the lowest and highest tax rates to 11% and 50%, yet revenues rose again to 8.3% of GDP. The 1986 tax reform slashed the top tax rate to 28%, yet revenues dipped trivially to 8.1% of GDP.

The rest of the article is chock full of interesting facts on the link between tax rates and tax revenue.

I don’t think it can be repeated nearly often enough: if you want the rich to pay a lot of taxes, you should probably keep their rates low. Ignore what Warren Buffet says in favor of watching what Warren Buffet does. If you raise his tax rates, he’ll probably just shift his money and income around, so that his effective rate of taxation remains nearly the same.

(And, if he really wants to pay more in taxes, he can cut a check to the IRS anytime he wants to.

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America, we had it good. We may have had to suffer through Bill Clinton's problems with women but at least we didn't have to suffer through Silvio Berlusconi, the man the hapless Italians have as Prime Minister.

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Very good advice, from Megan McArdle.

If you think that they really need the money, and that you're not just helping someone dig themselves even deeper into financial irresponsibility, then my advice is to just give them the money.

Give them the money?  I can't possibly afford to do that!

Well, my friend, given the default rates of primary borrowers, that is what you're doing when you cosign--with the additional cost of origination fees, interest payments, late fees, collection fees, a black mark on your credit report, and probably, a destroyed relationship.

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William Voegeli takes on the idea that “it’s absurd to cut spending because we tax the wealthiest Americans less today than we did in 1955”.

First he illustrates that today’s rich pay more in taxes than the rich of 1955 did. (They pay more in real dollar terms, even if they do pay less in percentage terms.) Then he cuts to the core of the moral argument.

If the principle is that the rich should pay higher taxes because they can more easily bear the rates, then we should keep raising tax rates until the rich can no longer bear them—until, that is, they're no longer rich. One need not be rich to find this prospect disquieting. A government that can take whatever it wants strikes a lot of people as unfair, and unfree.

He also points out that (many) blue states are net federal taxpayers while (many) red states are net federal tax recipients because “states with wealthier residents pay higher federal taxes per capita thanks to the progressive structure of the income tax”. If you don’t like the idea of states subsidizing each others’ residents, you need to scale back (or eliminate) the progressivity of the federal income tax.

I like this welfare reform idea too.

Buckley would confine eligibility for [Federal] welfare state programs to Americans living in states whose median income was below the national average. Because Buckley thought it was economically and politically debilitating to "turn the skies black with criss-crossing dollars," his reform would ground a lot of those dollars. Federal welfare expenditures would shrink, as the number of people eligible for them was limited, and prosperous states would pay for their own welfare programs without the transit and administrative fees of sending them on to Washington and then back to the states.

This reform would do much to take power away from Washington, D.C.

Only the poorest states would receive moneys from Washington. The more well to do states would spend their own money on welfare programs. Of course, they do that today too. But right now, that money goes through Washington (in the form of federal income taxes), where policitians get to attach rules and conditions to it, before sending it back to the states (as Medicaid payments or transportation funds or something else). If this reform were implemented, policitians would have many fewer opportunities to meddle and states would have a much greater freedom of action. That’s what I call a win-win scenario.

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I was disappointed to see that state Representative Robin Vos is undoing one of the good reforms that Governor Doyle put into place.

In the bad old days, Milwaukee police officers had cut a sweet deal that allowed them to keep collecting paychecks and benefits when they were fired by the police chief until a final ruling on the dismissal was made by the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission.

That meant, of course, that it was in the best interest of a fired officer - even a guilty one - to challenge and delay a dismissal as long as possible. Keep those paychecks rolling in, pardner.

And it was like that for a quarter of a century, under a law that treated Milwaukee cops differently from those in the rest of the state. When they were fired, Milwaukee police officers appealed - 96 percent of the time. And they collected salaries and benefits during that appeal time - appeal time that was dragged out. For the 26 years that the law was in effect, the appeal time for police officers in Milwaukee was double that of fired firefighter dismissals.

Back in October 2004 that cushy deal blew up, after off-duty Milwaukee police officers viciously beat Frank Jude Jr. at a house party, and three fired officers collected more than $500,000 in pay while awaiting trial. The Legislature cut off the continued pay for police accused of felonies and Class A and B misdemeanors, and in 2009 extended the cutoff of salaries and benefits for all fired officers.

That did not mean that officers who were mistakenly fired were without recourse: if they appealed their dismissals and won they were entitled to back pay - in a lump sum. That has been the standard for the past three years. It is a fair standard.

So why, early in the morning last week, did Vos and the Joint Finance Committee move to reinstate the 2008 law that would keep officers fired for things other than felonies or Class A and B misdemeanors on the payroll during the appeals process? In 2006, we noted that over the years the City of Milwaukee had paid out more than $2.5 million to officers who were ultimately fired.

Bad move, Representative Vos. It's wasteful and it assumes the wrong that: that police are blameless, that complaints are generally baseless, and that police need to be protected against the general public. Those assumptions aren't always right and acting as those they were is a good route to making sure that the police and the public view each other with hostility and distrust.

Jeff Greason, President of XCOR Aerospace, talks at TEDx about being a rocket scientist and making space pay — and why he got into commercial space travel in the first place.

"Daddy, is it really true that they used to fly to the moon when you were a boy?" That shook me and it still does. It shook me because that's how a dark age begins. A dark age is not just when you as a civilization have forgotten how to do something. It's when you forget that you ever could.

... We have done fewer than 500 space flights since the 1960s. The Wright Brothers did more than 700 glider test flights, in preparation for their first powered flight. The space age has not yet opened. We are at the very beginnings of it.

I think commercial space travel, research, and development is one of the coolest things to happen in a long, long time. The resources in space are limitless — water, minerals, metals, energy and more. Let's get out there and get it. There's no reason that earth's billions have to remain poor.

I can't wait until I can book a flight on a rocket.

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