Reconciliation
—A note to readers: Full-text RSS has returned to Wonkblog. Huzzah!
—Meet the man who has a 102 percent effective tax rate.
—Animal poaching is on the rise, so zoos are tightening security.
—Wanted: a singer who can sing a note so low that it may have never been sung before.
—Potato-chip cookies: they’re real, and here’s a recipe.
About the Planned Parenthood chart
(Planned Parenthood)
Charlotte Allen says it’s misleading:
One way Planned Parenthood massages the numbers to make its abortion business look trivial is to unbundle its services for purposes of counting. Those 10.1 million different medical procedures in the last fiscal year, for instance, were administered to only 3 million clients. An abortion is invariably preceded by a pregnancy test — a separate service in Planned Parenthood’s reckoning — and is almost always followed at the organization’s clinics by a “going home” packet of contraceptives, which counts as another separate service. Throw in a pelvic exam and a lab test for STDs — you get the picture. In terms of absolute numbers of clients, one in three visited Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test, and of those, a little under one in three had a Planned Parenthood abortion.
Time for the Fed to double down
I’ve been meaning to write a longer post disagreeing with some of Matt Yglesias’s calls for a total “regime change” in how we think about monetary policy, but he’s right about this: The incipient strength in the economy strengthens the case for a surprise round of QE3, just as it does for extending the payroll tax cut and the expanded unemployment insurance benefits. This is the time for our fiscal and monetary authorities to show that they’re fully committed to making sure the recovery continues.
Komen’s accidental case against breast exams
It will be years until we know how the Komen/Planned Parenthood fight really ended. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has apologized, and promised to allow Planned Parenthood to apply for grants in the future, but they haven’t said whether they will fund them.
That’s really what matters here, and it’s entirely possible that, two years from now, when the cameras are off, almost every Planned Parenthood grant request will be denied. Which gets to one of the weirder wrinkles in this debate: The argument, made by Komen, that mammography counts as a cancer prevention service, but clinical breast exams don’t. If Komen sticks to that position, it could be a reason for them to refuse future grant applications from Planned Parenthood. But it would be a strange reason, given that Komen’s Web site currently recommends clinical breast exams for all women over 20.
Who wants to be an astronaut? Everyone!
Being an astronaut looks fun, right?
(SHAMIL ZHUMATOV - REUTERS)
The space shuttle program may be dead, and it’s hard to see how the United States is getting to Mars anytime soon, but the number of people applying to become a NASA astronaut is at near-record levels:
More than 6,300 individuals applied to become a NASA astronaut between Nov. 15, 2011 and Jan. 27, the second highest number of applications ever received by the agency. After a thorough selection process, which includes interviews and medical examinations, nine to 15 people will be selected to become part of the 21st astronaut class.
That’s the highest number of applicants since 1978. Who knows? Maybe a lot of people were inspired by Newt Gingrich’s moon colony vision.
(Hat tip: NASA Watch)
Is this duck delaying your highway?
To hear some Republicans tell it, pesky environmental rules are a major reason why it takes so long to build highways and bridges. That’s why the GOP’s transportation bill would speed up reviews for various projects. But is this theory true? The evidence, it turns out, is hard to come by.
For starters, according to a Congressional Research Service report from August, only about 4 percent of federal highway projects require an Environmental Impact Statement from federal agencies. (Since these tend to be the largest, costliest projects, they make up about 15 percent of all spending.) And it’s true that many of those projects are often delayed — but from what evidence is available, that’s usually not because environmental groups are complaining about wetlands or endangered species or excessive sprawl.
Lunch break: Mechanical principles
If watching gears and pistons move around all day is your thing, then this neat, short, avant-garde film by Ralph Steiner from 1930 is definitely for you:
Via Jason Kottke.
What Komen actually said
(Evy Mages for The Washington Post)
There’s a lot of reporting right now that the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation has “reversed” its decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood. All of that has come out of a statement that the organization issued this morning, which you can read here. And while that statement does indicate that Planned Parenthood will now be eligible to apply for Komen grants, it does not address other reasons Komen has cited for no longer funding the group.
Bernstein: How Obama can revive housing without Congress
We’ve asked experts to weigh in on President Obama’s new housing plan this week, and Jared Bernstein just sent along his thoughts. He notes that the Fed’s low-interest rates can help home owners, but only if some of the barriers to accessing them are lifted. Bernstein also flags at least one thing that Obama can do without Congress.
Is the Susan G. Komen Foundation backing down?
The Susan G. Komen Foundation has just released a new statement from CEO Nancy Brinker. The first line is a mea culpa: “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.”
But what does this mea culpa mean? Brinker goes on to make clear that they will amend their guidelines so only “criminal and conclusive” investigations affect their funding decisions. They will ensure that “politics has no place in our grant process,” and they will “continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”
Facebook: Government regulation is ‘costly’
Buried in Facebook papers for its initial public offering this week are concerns about the burden of government regulation. In the S-1 form submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook described how the rules and regulations governing public companies could affect the company:
As a public company, we will be subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (Exchange Act), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, the listing requirements of the [sic?], and other applicable securities rules and regulations. Compliance with these rules and regulations will increase our legal and financial compliance costs, make some activities more difficult, time-consuming, or costly, and increase demand on our systems and resources.
Earlier reports prove too pessimistic
Whenever the monthly payroll numbers come out, the media tend to pay a lot of attention. When the numbers get quietly revised — twice — in the months that follow, few people notice. But they should. Those revisions can matter a lot. Because, for the past year, the initial jobs reports have consistently been way too pessimistic.
For most of 2011, the initial jobs reports frequently seemed dismal. Who can forget that dreadful August, when headlines trumpeted zero net jobs? But when those numbers were revised months later, they turned out to be significantly better. If you paid attention only to the initial monthly estimates, the economy added just 1.38 million jobs last year. But if you paid attention to the final revisions, the economy actually added 1.82 million jobs last year — twice as much as 2010, and a difference of 440,000 jobs:
(BLS)
For 2012, the unemployment rate doesn’t matter. The change in it does.
How fundamental is the state of the nation’s economy to election outcomes? So fundamental that 75 percent of the time forecasters can correctly predict which party will win the general election without even knowing the candidates’ names.
In fact, they can do this months in advance of the election, before the party conventions. But they’re not looking at what many pundits and politicians think they’re looking at. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that the unemployment rate will likely decide the election. This even appears to be what Mitt Romney thinks. But it’s wrong.
The January jobs report: It’s all good
The strangest thing about January’s jobs report is that it’s pretty much all good. The headline numbers are great, of course: payrolls are up by 243,000 jobs. Unemployment is down to 8.3 percent. But the inside numbers are good, too.
Let’s start with where the jobs were created. Professional and business services added 70,000 positions. Manufacturing added 50,000. Leisure and hospitality was up by 44,000. Health care was up by 33,000. For comparison, in the December jobs report, more than 40,000 of the 200,000 new jobs were “messengers and couriers,” which seemed likely to be seasonal hiring. Not so this month.
Wonkbook: Yes, tax cuts increase the deficit
On Thursday, House Republicans unanimously rejected a resolution from Rep. Gary Peters stating, among other things, that the Bush tax cuts added to the deficit. If you read the text they were voting on, it's pretty clear that it wasn't built for bipartisanship: It's phrased to suggest that Bush was a liar and Republican governance was a fraud. That kind of thing doesn't pick up votes across the aisle.
Reconciliation
— A theory of why companies pay so much for consultants.
— New York’s abandoned leper colony.
— “Mr. Zuckerberg thus stands alone in exercising this degree of control over a very public technology company.”
— The worst polar exploration ever.
— Why prices for Super Bowl ads are rising at a shocking rate.
— The secret of ant transportation networks.
— Time to start paying attention to Portgual.
Seven California Komen affiliates oppose defunding Planned Parenthood
All seven California Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation affiliates have come out in opposition to the group’s new, national policies that bar them from funding Planned Parenthood. Here’s a statement they just sent to California’s congressional delegation:
The seven California Affiliates of Susan G. Komen for the Cure are strongly opposed to Komen National’s new grant making policy. This policy prevents Komen Affiliates from funding organizations under investigation at the regional, state or federal level. Planned Parenthood is currently the subject of an “inquiry” in Congress.
The GOP’s plan to spare defense, target federal workers
Even before the supercommittee’s demise, John McCain vowed to nullify the cuts to defense spending that would automatically go into effect if the group couldn’t come to a deal. Thursday, McCain took the next step toward making good on that promise.
Together with five other Republican senators — including minority whip Jon Kyl, a member of the dissolved supercommittee — McCain unveiled a bill to eliminate the triggered defense cuts for a year. The legislation would replace the $109 billion in cuts that are scheduled to happen in 2013 with cuts to the federal workforce instead: It extends the federal employee pay freeze through June 2014 and “restricts federal hiring to only two employees for every three leaving, until the size of the federal government workforce is reduced by five percent,” which is expected to save $127 billion within 10 years.
Komen speaks on Planned Parenthood
I just got off a call with Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure CEO Nancy Brinker and President Elizabeth Thompson, in which the two officials spoke at length about the group’s new policies that would bar the funding of Planned Parenthood. A few takeaways:
It’s now less clear why Planned Parenthood lost the Komen funding. Komen had initially told the Associated Press that Planned Parenthood could not receive funding because it was under government investigation. But today, in no uncertain terms, Johnson indicated that the decision actually had very little to do with an ongoing congressional probe.
Repost: What Planned Parenthood actually does, in one chart
(Planned Parenthood)
Judging from its unexpected jump into the most-read list, this graph showing the breakdown of care provided by Planned Parenthood’s health centers is proving useful to people. So here it is again, lifted from April. Note the light blue slice, which suggests that cancer screenings account for approximately one-sixth of Planned Parenthood’s activities.
With Planned Parenthood being either the major obstacle to a budget deal or one of the major obstacles to a budget deal, it’s worth taking a minute explaining what they do — and what they don’t do.
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