Wonkblog: Master Archives
Reconciliation
- Only 2 percent of Canadians doubt climate change.
- Andy Kroll profiles Harold Ickes.
- Is there a drag on the U.S. economy with the uncertainty of the fiscal cliff? It’s…uncertain.
- “Stay away from curveballs, hardballs…slam-dunks, Hail Mary passes, and full-court presses.”
- Giant catfish burgles couple’s home.
The one part of Obama’s stimulus that Romney loves
Mitt Romney’s assault on President Obama’s stimulus is a central pillar of his campaign: In ads, statements, and speeches, he’s attacked the law as a giveaway to the president’s “friends, donors, campaign supporters, special interest groups.” But buried inside Romney’s 59-point, 160-page economic plan is a promise to invest federal money in a new energy R&D program that was one of the stimulus’s biggest success stories.
Romney says he paid 13 percent in taxes for the last 10 years. That doesn’t tell us much.
I’m not hugely interested in the question of Mitt Romney’s taxes. On the one hand, I think he should release them. On the other hand, there’s no law that requires him to release them, and if he’d prefer to endure continuing criticism over his secrecy, that’s his right. If we want to pass a law saying future presidential aspirants have to release their taxes, that’s our right. But this sort of thing isn’t helping:
Merkel: Europe should be more like Canada! Is that realistic?
At a reception in Ottawa on Wednesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the euro zone should look to Canada for inspiration on how to deal with its ongoing debt crisis. According to Bloomberg, she hailed Canada’s efforts to trim its deficits and practice fiscal discipline, saying, “This is also the right solution for Europe.”
College graduates’ non-recession
It’s common knowledge by now that the recession has hit college graduates and non-graduates differently, but the size of the gap is dramatic. A new report from Anthony Carnevale, Tamara Jayasundera and Ban Cheah found that while employment fell for people with high school and associates’ degrees, it actually rose during the recession for college graduates:
Paul Ryan: For Medicare cuts before he was against them?
Here’s what Paul Ryan used to say if you asked him why his budget keeps the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts:
Well our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.
Here’s what he says if you ask him now:
How much Obama and Ryan would spend on health care (in one graph)
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Loren Adler posts this graph looking at how much various deficit reduction plans would spend on health care. One of these things, you can pretty easily see, is not like the other:
Most of that difference is not related to Medicare, even though Medicare cuts are the ones we’ve been talking about a lot lately. Instead, Adler says, “the difference stems almost entirely from less spending on Medicaid, CHIP, and [Affordable Care Act] subsidies.” (CHIP refers to the Children’s Health Insurance Program, jointly funded by the federal government and the states.)
Ryan’s is the only plan here that would repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would eliminate a lot of spending on insurance subsidies. Combined with the GOP vice presidential nominee’s big Medicaid cuts – you can read more on that from Suzy Khimm here – that pretty much explains why Ryan would be spending a lot less on health-care programs than would Obama.
The great red crab migration
Every year, more than 150 million red crabs move across Christmas Island for mating season. Mayhem and hilarity ensue:
Economists to Romney campaign: That’s not what our research says, part II
Two of Mitt Romney’s key economic advisers, Kevin Hasset and Glenn Hubbard, have an op-ed in this morning’s Washington Post making the case that the Obama recovery has been slower than the recession can explain and that Obama’s policies were the reason.
The first part of the op-ed reprises the argument from an earlier paper Hasset and Hubbard released on behalf of the Romney campaign: While financial crises might lead to slow recoveries internationally, they don’t lead to slow recoveries in the United States. Again, the citation goes to ”an extensive study of recessions in the United States” by Michael Bordo of Rutgers University and Joseph Haubrich of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which found that the recovery from this recession has been unusually slow.
Want to get people to vote? Write a compelling work of fiction
“Losing yourself” in a good book can actually change your behavior in real life, according to researchers at Ohio State University. The effect takes hold when people find themselves completely absorbed in a fictional character — “feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own” — and subsequently mirror that character’s behavior afterward, the study finds.
A brief history of U.S. corn, in one chart
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicted that American corn farmers would have their worst season since 1995, thanks to the historic drought and sweltering heat that’s seized much of the Midwest. Corn yields were expected to sink down to 123.4 bushels per acre. Global food prices are expected to jump.
Mitt Romney’s budget is a fantasy, Part II
In an interview with Fortune earlier this month, Mitt Romney responded to the Tax Policy Center’s analysis of his tax plan:
I indicated as I announced my tax plan that the key principles included the following. First, that high-income people would continue to pay the same share of the tax burden that they do today. And second, that there would be a reduction in taxes paid by middle-income taxpayers. Those are the key principles of my plan that the Tax Policy Center chose to ignore.
Bill Clinton tried to limit executive pay. Here’s why it didn’t work.
You probably know that executive compensation has skyrocketed over the past 20 years. In 1991, the average CEO took in $2.6 million in total compensation. By 2011, that number had risen to $9 million. What you probably don’t know is that this rise occurred in spite of changes in the tax code meant to stop it.
Medicare trustees: Repealing Obamacare cuts would hasten insolvency
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s $716 billion in Medicare cuts, returning those funds to the trust fund.
“I’m going to restore that $716 billion to the Medicare trust fund so that current seniors can know that trust fund is not being raided and get Medicare on track to be solvent on a long term basis,” he told “CBS This Morning” on Wednesday.
Wonkbook: For 2 million illegal immigrants, change has come
Not too long ago, I sat down with a senior member of President Obama’s political team. Talk turned, as it often does, to the election, and the official said something that surprised me: If the president wins, this official thought that we would look back after the election and pinpoint the day the administration announced their new policy on deportations as the day the election was won.
An apology to our RSS readers
As you’ve probably noticed, we’re having some RSS problems. By which we mean our RSS feed is a totally annoying mess with posts showing up over and over again. We’re sorry! And we should have it fixed soon. It’s just taking a bit longer than we’d hoped. The intertubes are complicated like that. Here’s a picture of a sad panda to make it up to you.
Sad panda wishes our RSS feed was fixed. (Photo credit: )
We’re having a ‘serious conversation’ over the issues!
Part of my job involves going on TV to talk about American politics. And so I’ve been present for a number of discussions about the impact Paul Ryan is going to have on the 2012 presidential race. So far, they’ve mostly played out according to the same basic script: “We can finally have a serious conversation about the issues!”
Obamacare won’t cut Medicare benefits. It could hit quality.
Back in 1997, the Balanced Budget Amendment made some pretty big cuts to Medicare– $40 billion over the course of four years. One-third of hospitals saw their profit streams go negative. And economists Vivian Y. Wu and Yu-Chu Shen saw a great natural experiment: They could use the BBA cuts to understand what happens to the quality of Medicare when reimbursement rates go down.
Auto bailout price tag rises to $25 billion. How high will it go?
During the depths of the financial crisis, the U.S. government spent some $85 billion to rescue Chrysler, GM, and a few of their suppliers, in order to prevent the two large automakers from imploding. According to the latest U.S. Treasury report, taxpayers will now lose $25.1 billion on those auto bailouts. That’s $3.3 billion more than previously estimated. And it’s not even the final price. So how costly could the bailout get, anyway?
It’s not clear what Romney would actually cut to make his budget add up
Mitt Romney has promised vast reductions in federal spending while also balancing the budget, which would mean a whopping $9.6 trillion in non-defense cuts by 2022. He’s largely avoided specifying what he’d actually cut to achieve such fiscal feats. But under questioning from Fortune magazine, Romney provides a few more details.
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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.
