.jpg)
Reconciliation
— Four scenarios for an end game in Greece.
— A five-year investigation concludes that a man was wrongfully executed in Texas.
— Study: 29 percent of Americans will sleepwalk in their lifetime. (Seriously?)
— The NRCC is banking on an openly gay Republican to win in Massachusetts.
— A weirdly moving short film about plywood.
READ: Mitt Romney’s remarks on the debt
Today, in Des Moines, Iowa, Mitt Romney delivered a speech his campaign billed as a significant address on the national debt. His prepared remarks — minus some introductory material about the greatness of Iowa — follow:
Today America faces a financial crisis of debt and spending that threatens what it means to be an American. Here in the heartland you know in your hearts that it’s wrong.
The history of the filibuster, in one graph
I want to spend another moment on this great graph Todd Lindeman worked up for my column on the constitutionality of the filibuster.
.jpg?uuid=GzpEUJ7LEeG8pnJ7y9v4Zg)
(Graph: Todd Lindeman; Data: Senate.gov)
What you’re seeing here are the number of “cloture” motions in every congressional session since 1919. Cloture is the procedure used to break a filibuster. Between 1919 and 1975, a successful cloture motion required two-thirds of the Senate. Today, it requires three-fifths, or, in cases where all 100 senators are present and voting, 60 votes. As you can see, the majority is having to try and break many, many, many more filibusters than ever before.
Just how big can car-sharing get?
About 560,000 Americans use some form of car-sharing service — mostly Zipcar — where they can rent vehicles from neighborhood lots by the hour. That sounds like a lot of people, but it’s only about 0.27 percent of all drivers in the United States.
Not living up to its potential.So what would happen if car-sharing really caught on? Tanya Snyder points to a new study (pdf) by the RAND Corporation that, in part, looks at the potential for car-sharing in the United States. Realistically, the RAND authors argue, we could see as many as 7.5 million Americans — or 4.5 percent of all drivers — use car-sharing services at some unspecified point in the future. That would be a huge, huge shift, the study notes, but it’s not infeasible. Surprisingly, though, it would have only a modest impact on energy use and carbon emissions.
Obamacare repeal would cost insurers $1 trillion
Next month, America’s health insurance plans may lose $1 trillion in revenue.
It won’t have anything to do with a business deal gone awry, or 
No Obamacare? That would cost health insurers $1 trillion.
(Alex Wong - Getty Images)
Americans dropping health coverage during the recession. Instead, $1 trillion is the amount of revenue that health insurance plans can expect to lose if the Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act. The Court is expected to issue its opinion in late June
The figure comes from Bloomberg Government, where number crunchers have taken a look at what happens if the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act and its expected expansion of health care coverage to 32 million Americans. They find that, should the Affordable Care Act be found unconstititional, insurance companies will lose $1 trillion in revenue between 2013 and 2020.
To put that in perspective, $1 trillion accounts for about 9 percent of all revenue that health insurers are expected to earn in the same period. It’s one-half of a percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. Add up the annual revenues of America’s five largest banks - Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, Wachovia and U.S. Bancorp- and you’re still about $500 billion short of what health plans can expect to lose if the Supreme Court decides against Obamacare.
Sen. Tom Coburn, part one: Defusing the debt bomb
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) speaks during a news conference July 18, 2011 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Coburn held the news conference to unveil a $9 trillion deficit reduction plan.
(Alex Wong - GETTY IMAGES)
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) served on the Simpson-Bowles commission, is a member of the Gang of Six, and just published “The Debt Bomb: A Bold Plan to Stop Washington from Bankrupting America.” We spoke last week in his office. This interview, which focuses on America’s debt and growth problems, is the first in a two-part series. The second interview, which focuses on health care, will be published later this week.
Ezra Klein: So ‘taxmageddon’ is coming at the end of the year. Depending on how you look at it, it’s an opportunity for Congress to trigger a massive and unnecessary fiscal crisis, or to actually get some serious legislating done on our long-term fiscal issues. Are you optimistic about the outcome?
Tom Coburn: No. But it depends on what the mix is. If President Obama is still president and we’re in control of the Senate, I think you’ll see significant attempts to get something done. But I don’t think they’ll be much more successful than what we saw in August. And I wouldn’t consider that very successful. If Romney wins and we win control in the Senate, we have to send a signal that we’re going to fix it in order to take away all that potential risk to the economy. You have to say we’ll work all over the Christmas holidays to get it fixed.
EK: When you look at the Romney scenario, it seems Republicans have spent a few years now learning how to take tough votes on the budget, particularly on the Ryan plan. So if Republicans control the House and Senate, it seems to me that you’d see quite dramatic action on those issues, as they can be passed with 51 votes through budget reconciliation.
California’s political crisis — and ours
With California’s worsening fiscal condition back in the news, I’m reposting this 2010 column on the political dimensions of California’s problems — and the way they could spread to the rest of the nation.
California Gov. Jerry Brown introduces his state budget proposal at the State Capitol in Sacramento.
(Max Whittaker - Reuters)
California’s fiscal crisis will look sadly familiar to close watchers of the national checkbook. That’s because California is not having a fiscal crisis so much as a political crisis. The trigger may have been the recession, but the root cause was written into the state Constitution, and it was visible long before the housing boom went bust.
Lunch break: Where good ideas come from
Author Steven Johnson lectures — alongside some helpful illustrations — on where good ideas come from.
What LBJ knew about the Senate
President Lyndon B. Johnson is often used as evidence that a sufficiently persuasive president can force Congress to do what he wants. But it turns out Johnson wasn’t a big fan of the great-man theory of presidential bullying. The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s biography quotes Johnson explaining to his aides why they couldn’t steamroll Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.):
Why Dodd-Frank could be a harder sell than Obamacare
On Monday morning, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney tried to put a positive spin on the news of JPMorgan’s $2 billion loss. It didn’t represent a failure of the new Wall Street regulation under Obama, he insisted. It was a vindication of the law’s existence.
But how do you defend a law that’s barely come into effect? The biggest changes under Dodd-Frank to curb risky trading haven’t even been finalized, much less enacted. And, as Politico’s Ben White notes, that could make it harder for the White House to sell its achievements to the public and easier for critics to use conjecture to attack the consequences of yet-to-be-finalized legislation.
Why isn’t Obama getting crushed right now?
“If you look at the fundamentals,” writes David Brooks, “the president should be getting crushed right now.”
The rest of the column is an attempt to explain why President Obama isn’t getting crushed right now. Brooks settles on Obama’s “version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence.” But the premise of the column is wrong: If you look at the fundamentals right now, the president should not be getting crushed. In fact, he should be slightly ahead, which is pretty much where he is in most polls.
Will America’s labor-force dropouts ever come back?
As we’ve discussed before, the number of Americans in the labor force — that is, the people who either have jobs or are actively looking for work — has been dwindling in recent years. Some of that’s been due to ordinary demographics: America’s getting older and more people are retiring. Some of it’s been due to the grim economy, which has dissuaded many people from even bothering to look for jobs.
And now we can see this in glorious chart form, thanks to Dave Altig of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Since the recession began, the “labor force participation rate” has fallen from 66 percent to 63.6 percent. Altig estimates that about 0.9 percentage points of the drop was due to demographic factors, while about 1.5 points was due to the horrible economy. In other words, if the recession had never happened, the labor force participation rate would probably be about 65.1 percent:
Gay marriage is a health-care issue, too
In this morning’s Wonkbook, Ezra looks at same-sex marriage as an economic issue. Research suggests that same-sex marriage is a health-care issue, too, with legalization shown to reduce some health-care risks for gay men.
A team of public health researchers looked at health-care patterns among gay and bisexual men before and after Massachusetts legalized same-sex unions in 2003 (this was prior to the state’s health insurance expansion). Health-care research has increasingly looked at how policy interventions that change the larger environment impact health-care outcomes. In this case, they wanted to know whether legal same-sex marriage — which had the potential to reduce risk factors such as stress — might have an impact.
Is the filibuster unconstitutional?
According to Best Lawyers — “the oldest and most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession” — Emmet Bondurant “is the go-to lawyer when a business person just can’t afford to lose a lawsuit.” He was its 2010 Lawyer of the Year for Antitrust and Bet-the-Company Litigation. But now, he’s bitten off something even bigger: bet-the-country litigation.
Bondurant thinks the filibuster is unconstitutional. And, alongside Common Cause, where he serves on the board of directors, he’s suing to have the Supreme Court abolish it.
(Graph: Todd Lindeman; Data: Senate.gov)
In a 2011 article in the Harvard Law School’s Journal on Legislation, Bondurant laid out his case for why the filibuster crosses constitutional red lines. But to understand the argument, you have to understand the history: The filibuster was a mistake.
Romney wants defense spending to be much, much higher. The public doesn’t.
There’s a yawning gap between how much the average American wants to cut defense spending in 2013 (18 percent) and how much Washington lawmakers want to cut (zero, or pretty close to it). But the gap between public opinion and Mitt Romney’s plan is much, much bigger.
Travis Sharp, a budget analysis at the Center for a New American Security, ran the numbers based on Romney’s plan for defense spending for CNNMoney and found that the presumptive GOP nominee would increase Pentagon spending in 2013 by $96 billion. That’s about a 17 percent increase over 2012 spending levels—nearly the same amount by which the public wants to decrease the defense budget, according to the Stimson Center’s recent study.
Wonkbook: The economics of gay marriage
Don't think of gay marriage as a cultural issue. Don't think of it even as an equality issue. Don't even think of it as a political issue. Think of it, just for a moment, as an economic issue.
In the traditional view of marriage, write economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, "the joining of husband and wife yields a more productive firm, because it allows one spouse to specialize in earning income from working in the market, while the other specializes in the domestic sphere. The division of labor allows for greater productivity, just as it does in the workplace. The different skills required for these separate roles provide an economic rationale for the advice your grandmother may have offered, that 'opposites attract.'" Romantic, right?
Reconciliation
— The Guardian brings you the key charts you need to understand the euro zone crisis.
— “Simply stated, once you are the market, you are no longer a hedge.”
— Bet you’ll never guess the world’s busiest airline route.
— An investigation into how Louisiana built the world’s prison capital.
— The economics of NHL teams in the Sun Belt.
— An interview with a safecracker.
The politics of...baby names
Jacob and Sophia took the top spot for most popular baby names in 2010, according to data out Monday from the Social Security Administration. NPR’s Alan Greenblatt digs deeper into the data and finds a split between blue and red states when it comes to baby-naming, albeit a surprising one:
More progressive communities... tend to favor more old-fashioned names. Parents in more conservative areas come up with names that are more creative or androgynous.
FAQ: Why is Greece in such trouble? And can it be fixed?
Ever since the Greeks went to the polls on May 6, the country has been gripped by political paralysis. The Greek parliament can’t form a new government, and Greece now faces the risk of being booted from the euro zone — with potentially horrific consequences. Here’s a look at how Greece reached this point and whether there’s any way out of this mess.
What, exactly, are Greek politicians bickering about these days?
A rocky relationship.
(Simon Dawson - Bloomberg)
Recall Greece’s basic problem: The country racked up many billions of dollars in debt that it can’t repay without help, and the Greek government doesn’t have enough cash to cover all of its own obligations. In February, the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the IMF (known as the “troika”) agreed to renegotiate Greece’s debts with lenders and give Greece a €130 billion ($170 billion) bailout. In return, Greece agreed to shrink its deficits with a series of spending cuts and tax hikes.
Here’s the dilemma: These austerity measures are spectacularly unpopular, and Greek voters keep punishing any party that tries to implement them. That puts the whole bailout deal at risk. Under the terms of the deal, the Greek government is supposed to pass an additional €11 billion in spending cuts this summer before it receives its next bailout payment of €31 billion. If those cuts don’t happen, Greece won’t get its bailout money. It will then default on its debts, and the country would likely have to leave the euro. That could be bad.
Will Smith is not moving to France
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who moved to the United States at age 13 in order to escape being kidnapped by Brazilian gangs, has been in the news this week for renouncing his American citizenship in order to dodge taxes on his Facebook stock. He’s headed to Singapore to keep being rich in a place where he’s (a) safe, (b) can speak English, and (c) doesn’t have to pay a capital gains tax.
But there aren’t that many Singapores. Consider this interview with Will Smith. He’s explaining to a French interviewer why he’s willing to pay higher taxes. Then, at 1:20, the interviewer tells him that the Francois Hollande wants to raise the top marginal tax rate in France to 75 percent. Hilarity ensues.
More from PostBusiness:
The Post Most: BusinessMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
Blog Contributors
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
Suzy Khimm
Suzy Khimm covers the budget, economic policy, and financial regulatory reform. Before coming to Washington, she was based in Brazil and Southeast Asia, where she wrote for the Economist, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal Asia. Follow her on Twitter here, and email her here.
Sarah Kliff
Sarah Kliff covers health policy, focusing on Medicare, Medicaid and the health reform law. She tries to fit in some reproductive health and education policy coverage, too, alongside an occasional hockey reference. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, Politico, and the BBC. She is on Twitter and Facebook.
Brad Plumer
Brad Plumer is a reporter focusing on energy and environmental issues. He was previously an associate editor at The New Republic. Follow him on Twitter. Email him here.
.jpg)
