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Friday, January 31, 2014

POTUS Disparges Art History Degrees

President Obama found common ground with Republican politicians Thursday -- in arguing that some liberal arts degrees offer poor preparation for a job. Obama took on art history, following in the footsteps of Republicans who have in recent years questioned the value of degrees in anthropology, English, philosophy and women's studies. (See chart below to keep track of which politicians have dissed which fields.)
The president's remarks came on a trip to Wisconsin, where he was promoting his proposals on job training and efforts to revitalize American manufacturing. Art history came up as a contrast, and the president's remarks suggest that -- almost as soon as he said the words -- he realized not everyone would appreciate them.
Here's what he said: "[A] lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree -- I love art history. So I don't want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. I'm just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need."
There are all sorts of ironies about the president selecting art history as a discipline to question. He is a graduate of Columbia University, whose undergraduate college is rare in American higher education (outside of art schools) in requiring study of art history.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Lobbying Expenditures

For the third straight year, spending on K Street is down, with only a handful of industries spending more on lobbying in 2013 than they did in 2012.

Overall total spending on federal lobbying dropped 2.9 percent, from $3.31 billion in 2012 to $3.21 billion in 2013, according to a new analysis by OpenSecrets.org -- even though K Street was paid $805.7 million in the fourth quarter of the year, an increase over the third quarter's total of $779 million. Still, spending even in those three months was less than in the same period a year earlier.

Of the 92 industries that OpenSecrets.org tracks, 40 increased their spending.Topping the list, percentage-wise, were a handful of liberal-leaning interest groups. Gun control interests were No. 1, spending 824 percent more than they did, as a group, in 2012. That number is deceptive, however, since the interest group spent so little -- just $240,000 -- in 2012. In 2013, that jumped to $2.2 million.
But their counterparts, gun rights groups, were No. 3 on the list of those showing the most growth in their spending, and spent far more to begin with. In 2012, gun rights advocates spent $6.1 million on lobbying, and in 2013, they spent $15.1 million, for an increase of 147 percent.

Two other industry groups with big increases in their spending on lobbying were liberal/Democratic and pro-abortion rights interests; they increased their outlays 437 percent and 55 percent, respectively. The liberal/Democratic groups went from $938,000 in 2012 to just over $5 million in 2013. Much of that increase was driven by the Advocacy Fund, a nonprofit group with ties to liberal organizations that essentially takes donations to lobby on specific issues.
There is a big caveat to these numbers.  Interest groups are increasingly turning to "un-lobbying," "shadow lobbying," or "non-lobbying lobbying" -- advocacy practices that do not require disclosure.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Deport Justin Bieber?

As we point out in our chapter on citizenship, there is a key distinction between aliens and citizens.  The government can deport aliens.  A case in point is Justin Bieber, as Politico reports:
Washington may be buzzing about Tuesday’s State of the Union, but many Americans are concerned about another issue facing the nation: the immigration status of Justin Bieber. 
A petition to deport Bieber and revoke his visa on the White House’s citizen portal reached 100,000 signatures Wednesday morning, the threshold needed for the White House to be required to respond.

The young pop star, who is Canadian and in the country on a temporary work visa, was arrested last week on charges of driving under the influence and resisting arrest. A petition was created the same day, urging the White House to revoke his permission to be in the country.

“We the people of the United States feel that we are being wrongly represented in the world of pop culture. We would like to see the dangerous, reckless, destructive, and drug abusing, Justin Bieber deported and his green card revoked,” The petition reads. “He is not only threatening the safety of our people but he is also a terrible influence on our nations youth. We the people would like to remove Justin Bieber from our society.”
Two competing petitions to not deport Bieber had a little more than 1,800 signatures combined as of 9 a.m. Wednesday, as the deportation request neared 101,000.
The White House’s petition site has been used plenty of times for off-beat requests. After a petition to build a Death Star like in “Star Wars” and another to deport CNN host Piers Morgan reached previous thresholds of 25,000 signatures, the White House raised the requirements to 100,000 signatures in 30 days to merit a response.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

The State of the Union Address: Meh!

Will the State of the Union address make any political difference? Nope, says Gene Healy at The Washington Examiner:
The few enduring lines from past SOTUs stick out for irony value (Bill Clinton in 1996: “the era of big government is over”); because they herald a looming policy disaster (George W. Bush in 2002: “Axis of Evil”) -- or for the rare outbreak of candor (Gerald Ford in 1975: “the state of the union is not good”).
But most years, the speech gets submerged in the churn of the news cycle, little noted and not long remembered. It’s unlikely that 2014 will be any different. In its modern form, the SOTU is a meaningless ritual that rarely even does the president — let alone the public — any good.
That's bad news for a chief executive whose chief talent is speechifying. “I have a gift, Harry,” then-Sen. Obama unhumblebragged to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., some years ago, in the afterglow of a well-received speech. But according to the polling data and the political science research, it's a gift that won't keep on giving.

“There is overwhelming evidence that presidents, even ‘great communicators,' rarely move the public in their direction,” writes George C. Edwards III, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. “Going public does not work.” In a 2013 analysis of SOTU polling, Gallup found that “most presidents have shown an average decrease in approval of one or more points between the last poll conducted before the State of the Union and the first one conducted afterward.”

Monday, January 27, 2014

Agriculture Lobbying

At The Atlantic, Molly Ball explains agriculture lobbying:
The farm lobby's main concern is with the agricultural subsidies in the farm bill. But it also opposes the food-stamp divorce performed by the House. This is partly a matter of political necessity. Just 35 of the 435 congressional districts have agriculture as their dominant industry. "In our opinion, if you separate the two, you would no longer have a farm bill," Bob Stallman, the president of the Farm Bureau, told me. Farmers have another interest in continued food-stamp funding. The SNAP payments constitute another massive subsidy to food producers, giving consumers the money to buy their products. "Food stamps have become a large part of the demand for the food that we raise as farmers," Don Villwock, the white-mustached president of the Indiana Farm Bureau, told me. "When you have one in five Americans on food assistance, that's 20 percent of the demand for food in this country."
In favoring a farm bill that combines agriculture supports with food stamps, the farm lobby parts ways with the GOP's ideological right wing, and sides with the Obama Administration, which has disappointed environmentalists by not aggressively seeking farm-policy reforms. (The agribusiness sector spent $112 million lobbying Congress in 2013, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—more than the defense industry. The Farm Bureau alone employs 52 Washington lobbyists.)
The dynamic is similar when it comes to immigration reform to legalize the millions of illegal workers currently living in the U.S. and create new guest-worker programs. The Heritage Foundation and a hard-right faction in Congress oppose such a policy. But farm leaders paint a grim picture of crops rotting on the vine, and even farmers giving up their land, because of a shortage of workers. In a survey conducted by the California Farm Bureau, 71 percent of tree-fruit growers and nearly 80 percent of raisin and berry growers couldn't find enough pickers.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Mixed Messages on Executive Orders

President Obama has sent mixed messages on executive orders and the separation of powers.

During a speech on November 25, 2013, an audience member called on him to act unilaterally:
Audience member. Executive order.
The President. And that—[applause]. And somebody keeps on yelling, "Executive order." [Laughter] Is this the—well, it turns out—[laughter]. The reason—I'm going to actually pause on this issue because a lot of people have been saying this lately on every problem—[laughter]—which is, just sign an Executive order, and we can pretty much do anything and basically nullify Congress. And unfortunately——
Audience member. Yes!
The President. Well, wait, wait, wait, before everybody starts clapping—[laughter]. That's not how it works. We got this Constitution. We got this whole thing about separation of powers and branches. And so we got to—there is no shortcut to politics. And there's no shortcut to democracy. And there's—we have to win on the merits of the argument with the American people. As laborious as it seems sometimes, as much misinformation as there is out there sometimes, as frustrating as it may be sometimes, what we have to do is just keep on going, keep on pushing. And eventually, we move in a better direction.
On January 16, 2014, he said:  "Now, I'm going to be working with Congress where I can to accomplish this, but I'm also going to act on my own if Congress is deadlocked. I've got a pen to take executive actions where Congress won't, and I've got a telephone to rally folks around the country on this mission."


Saturday, January 25, 2014

The Real Story of the Big Block of Cheese

The White House reports:
Big Block of Cheese Day: Fan of The West Wing? Next Wednesday, January 29th the White House will be hosting “Big Block of Cheese Day” – just like they did in President Jackson’s day. In homage to President Jackson keeping the White House “The People’s House,” we are hosting the first-ever virtual “Big Block of Cheese Day,” as a way to let citizens interact with White House officials in real-time on social media. Be sure to stay tuned for a complete schedule of events.



The real story of the big block of cheese is a bit different. Getting policy opinions from rank and rile Americans had nothing to do with it.

In 1835, an upstate New York dairy farmer named Thomas Meacham gave President Andrew Jackson a 1400-pound block of cheese, to show his support for the administration -- and to tout his own product.

Eleven days before he was to leave office in 1837, Jackson decided to get rid of the stuff by inviting normals to the White House and having them eat it.  The plan worked, but the stench of the cheese lingered in the White House well into the Van Buren administration.


Thursday, January 23, 2014

Polarization and Approval Ratings

Gallup reports:
The partisan gap in President Barack Obama's job approval rating was 71 percentage points during his fifth year in office, with 82% of Democrats and 11% of Republicans approving, on average. That is down from a 76-point gap during his re-election year, but continues to reflect the high degree of political polarization in presidential job ratings during his time in office.
The results are based on more than 175,000 Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted throughout Obama's fifth year in office, from Jan. 20, 2013, through Jan. 19, 2014.
Obama's fifth year in office ranks as the fourth-most polarized presidential year in Gallup's records, which date back to the Eisenhower presidency. In fact, all five of Obama's years in office rank among the 10-most polarized, with his fourth year edging out George W. Bush's fourth year in office for the top overall spot. Four of Bush's years in office rank among the 10-most politically polarized in terms of presidential job approval.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Dissatisfaction with Government

Gallup reports:
Sixty-five percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the nation's system of government and how well it works, the highest percentage in Gallup's trend since 2001. Dissatisfaction is up five points since last year, and has edged above the previous high from 2012 (64%).
These findings are from Gallup's annual Mood of the Nation poll, conducted Jan. 5-8, 2014. The trend line on this measure shows remarkable change over time, rising from fewer than one in four Americans expressing dissatisfaction in 2002, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to the current situation in which almost two-thirds are dissatisfied.
...
One reason Americans are dissatisfied with how the government system is working is that they believe it is too big and powerful. Two-thirds of Americans (66%) are unhappy with the size and power of the federal government. These views potentially hamper President Barack Obama's ability to propose large-scale government solutions in his State of the Union speech next week. However, this problem is not a new one for the president. Roughly two-thirds of Americans have expressed this view consistently since at least 2011, after the measure jumped a full 10 points between 2008 and 2011.
Trend: Americans' Dissatisfaction With the Size and Power of Federal Government

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Interest Groups: Silicon, Potatoes, and Ski Trips

Alex Byers and John F. Harris write at Politico:
Washington types often refer to “the Valley” or “the tech community” as though it were a group of people with a unified agenda.

It’s more complicated than that. That’s one reason that both parties have been striking rich veins of tech money, even though the most famous names in tech are more associated with Democrats.
Different audiences respond to a different message. CEOs and top-level execs tend to want to hear most about hard-core economic issues, corporate tax reform and specific items that will affect their bottom line. Rank-and-file tech workers, in contrast, tend to be socially liberal and are more open to an avowedly progressive message.
This trend is backed by data. Disclosure records show that technology industry money broadly tilted 60 percent to 40 percent to the Democrats in the 2012 election. Technology corporate political action committees, on the other hand, favored Republicans 55 percent to 45 percent, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
“PACs give on business issues of relevance to the company whose PAC it is, and individuals vote on personal issues that matter the most to them as an individual,” said Technology CEO Council Executive Director Bruce Mehlman.
Some issues, of course, have nearly universal support in the Valley. Both ends of the political spectrum believe immigration reform is an urgent priority — and the failure to advance it a glaring example of Washington dysfunction.
Potatoes have interests, too.  The Wall Street Journal reports:
Tucked into the 1,582-page 2014 spending bill passed by Congress this week are 85 words that aspire to end the government's decadelong war on the potato.
The language is aimed at reversing a ban on white-potato purchases by 8.7 million monthly participants in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Women, Infants and Children food program. "White potatoes," in this case, refers to all potatoes—except the sweet version—no matter their skin or flesh color.
To the nation's potato growers and processors, it is about much more. Years of low-carb, whole-grain, antioxidant trends have taken a toll on the humble white potato, whose very color has come to symbolize empty calories: Americans each put away more than 100 pounds of potatoes a year, but the tonnage has fallen steadily over the past decade. The bill language strikes a blow for reversing "general animosity" toward the spud, said John Keeling, chief executive of the National Potato Council, which leads the pro-tater charge in the capital.
The New York Times reports:
Congress, after a corruption scandal that involved golf trips to Scotland and other getaways paid for by lobbyists, passed legislation in 2007 prohibiting lobbyists from giving lawmakers gifts of just about any value. But as is the norm in Washington, the lawmakers and lobbyists have figured out a workaround: Political campaigns and so-called leadership PACs controlled by the lawmakers now pay the expenses for the catering and the lawmakers’ lodging at these events — so they are not gifts — with money collected from the corporate executives and lobbyists, who are still indirectly footing the bill.
Even if no explicit appeals for help are made, the opportunity to build a relationship with the lawmakers, staff members and family — far from the distractions of Washington — is worth the price of admission, the lobbyists said. The donors and lobbyists, 50 to 100 of whom typically attend the events, generally donate individually or through a corporate political action committee between $1,000 and $5,000 apiece, in addition to paying their own hotel bills and airfare. There is no public disclosure that specifically shows how much is raised at each event, and lawmakers are generally unwilling to say.
“An informal setting is an effective way to build a better relationship,” said a health care lobbyist who attended the fund-raising weekend in Vail this month. The event included five House Republicans, none of them from Colorado and two of whom serve on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the health care industry. “It’s a way to get some large chunks of a lawmaker’s time,” the lobbyist said.

The Jury Right

At The Weekly Standard, David M. Wagner writes:
[Eighty-one] years before the right to vote made its first appearance in the Constitution, the jury right in criminal cases was already included in the unamended Constitution (Article III, Section 2, paragraph 3), as it came from the Philadelphia Convention. But the convention declined to extend this right to civilcases. This alone lost the Constitution the votes of George Mason and Elbridge Gerry, and got the ball rolling on the movement for a Bill of Rights, either as a condition of ratification (constitutional opponents lost on that), or as a top item of business when the new government convened (they won on that; politicians kept promises in those days). And so a guarantee of jury trial in civil cases became the 7th Amendment.
In fact, 3 of the first 10 amendments mention juries: We have grand juries in the 5th, criminal petit juries in the 6th, and civil juries in the 7th. For comparison, the right to vote is nowhere mentioned in the Bill of Rights. A latecomer, as I said.
Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t drive too thick a wedge between jury service and voting. A jury votes, after all. Yale’s Akhil Amar, a major advocate of juries, even suggests that the Framers likened juries to a Parliament in miniature, with the jury analogized to the House of Commons, making the most important decisions, and the judge to the House of Lords, exercising a moderating but rarely reversing power. 
To whom did this “jury right” belong? The criminal suspect? The civil plaintiff and defendant? All of these—but also to the citizen who would take a turn as a juror. This was an important element of self-government. Citizens were to have a role not only in making laws (by voting for their representatives), but in enforcing and interpreting them too.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Bush 41 and Iraq

Today is the 25th anniversary of George H.W. Bush's inauguration.  The key event of his presidency was the 1991 Gulf War.  After the war, some criticized him for not occupying all of Iraq.  In a book with national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, he responded:
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Obama and Spying

A few days ago, Peter Baker wrote at The New York Times:
As a young lawmaker defining himself as a presidential candidate,Barack Obama visited a center for scholars in August 2007 to give a speech on terrorism. He described a surveillance state run amok and vowed to rein it in. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens,” he declared. “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.”
More than six years later, the onetime constitutional lawyer is now the commander in chief presiding over a surveillance state that some of his own advisers think has once again gotten out of control. On Friday, he will give another speech, this time at the Justice Department defending government spying even as he adjusts it to address a wave of public concern over civil liberties.
The journey between those two speeches reflects the transition from the backbench of the United States Senate to the chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Like other presidents before him, the idealistic candidate skeptical of government power found that the tricky trade-offs of national security issues look different to the person charged with using that power to ensure public safety.
Aides said that even as a senator, Mr. Obama supported robust surveillance as long as it was legal and appropriate, and that as president he still shares the concerns about overreach he expressed years ago. But they said his views have been shaped to a striking degree by the reality of waking up every day in the White House responsible for heading off the myriad threats he finds in his daily intelligence briefings.
“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser. “There are people out there every day who are plotting. The notion that we would put down a tool that would protect people here in America is hard to fathom.”
And John Harwood followed at The New York Times:
In his first Inaugural Address, President Obama stirred liberals by proclaiming that “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Five years in, the presidency has taught Mr. Obama that the choice he rejected is not so false after all. Ever since the disclosures about the extent of National Security Agency surveillance, leading to the changes that Mr. Obama plans to announce in a speech on Friday, a chastened president has embraced “balance” between competing imperatives of security and civil liberties.

History shows that is what the Oval Office does to everyone who occupies it. The grinding reality of governing the country nearly always gives the lie to the facile, I-can-square-the-circle formulations that winning candidates carry with them into the White House.
\
Those formulations typically stem from candidates’ attempts to please all sides in contentious debates by acknowledging the concerns of opponents without surrendering their own principles. But it is rarely that easy.

A tour through recent history shows Mr. Obama with plenty of company.
Harwood cited JFK and the missile gap, LBJ and Vietnam, and others.

On the day of the president's speech, law professor Jonathan Hafetz wrote at Politico:
We have seen this kind of response from Obama before, when he’s used the Big Important Speech to tackle major constitutional controversies. In his 2009 remarks at the National Archives, Obama affirmed his intention to reform Bush-era practices that he argued had undermined America’s security and values. Although torture has been eliminated from the country’s terror-fighting tool kit, the prison at Guantanamo Bay remains in use, as do military commissions and the imposition of indefinite detention. The speech nonetheless helped create the impression of broader change.

Last spring, Obama delivered a major address at the National Defense University focused on drone strikes. In it, the president spoke eloquently about the need to bring drones under control and the risks of a perpetual war on terror. Drone strikes, of course, have continued since the speech, albeit with somewhat less frequency and fewer civilian deaths than before, and the war on terror rages on. The speech nonetheless helped quiet concern over the drone program.
Today’s speech may prove less effective. While making the case that government surveillance is measured and lawful, Obama is nonetheless deviating in various respects from the recommendations of his own advisory group. Also, the specifics of key changes—including the collection of telephony metadata, which will continue in a different form—remain uncertain. Other changes depend on action in Congress, deferring rather than resolving controversy.


Saturday, January 18, 2014

Misunderstanding the First Amendment

Many posts have discussed gaps in public knowledge about government. The Huffington Post reports:
More than 4 in 10 Americans think the First Amendment protects them from being fired for what they say, and more than 3 in 10 think it applies to situations like A&E's now-revoked suspension of "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson, according to aHuffPost/YouGov poll. But they're wrong.
In the new survey, 45 percent of Americans said the First Amendment does not allow people to be fired from a job for expressing their views, while only 36 percent said such firings are allowed under the Constitution. Twenty percent said they weren't sure.
Moreover, 35 percent think the First Amendment does not allow a television network to suspend an on-screen personality for expressing a politically incorrect point of view, while 43 percent said such a suspension is permitted under the Constitution. Another 22 percent said they weren't sure.
In fact, the amendment -- which starts with the phrase "Congress shall make no law" -- protects Americans only against the government's intrusion into free speech and does not apply to the acts of private employers.

Friday, January 17, 2014

POTUS Meets with College Presidents

Inside Higher Ed reports on a summit at which President Obama tried to enlist college presidents as allies:
Wednesday’s summit was, politically, the administration’s latest effort to advance its agenda in a gridlocked Congress. Obama reiterated Wednesday that he had (and would use) a "pen to take executive actions where Congress won’t, and I’ve got a telephone to rally folks around the country on this mission.”

For college leaders, the price of admission to the event was to make a “new commitment” to helping more low-income students attend and complete college. More than 100 college presidents and 40 organizations made promises, which the White House unveiled Thursday.

He praised the new commitments by college leaders as “an extraordinary accomplishment,” adding that he “didn’t pass a bill to do it.”
Instead of focusing on price and accountability, as he had in the past, the president and his staff used the White House setting as what a fictional president called "the single greatest home-court advantage in the modern world."
[Economic adviser Gene] Sperling, in closing the summit, suggested that attendees send him and his White House colleagues recommendations and thoughts in advance of the president’s upcoming State of the Union address -- a venue Obama has in previous years used to put colleges “on notice” about their rising tuition and propose accountability measures. He insinuated that a mention in the prominent speech could await those who have particularly innovative suggestions.
The event also allowed the dozens of participating campus leaders to use the stature of White House attention to bolster publicity for their campuses. College press offices eagerly shot out advisories about their commitments, and a handful of presidents held a news conference against the backdrop of the West Wing.

Presidents snapped photos of the President and First Lady on their phones and iPads. Several dozen presidents met with top administration officials in an off-the-record dinner sponsored by the Lumina Foundation on Wednesday night. And at least one enjoyed a trip to the conference on Air Force One.
In return, the president surely hopes, the attendees will say nice things about him, or at least refrain from saying bad things.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Economic Freedom

Our chapter on economic policy looks at international ratings of economic and political freedom.

In September, Canada's Fraser Institute reported:
Hong Kong again topped the rankings of 151 countries and territories, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, and Switzerland in the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report.

The United States, once considered a bastion of economic freedom, now ranks 17th in the world.

“Unfortunately for the United States, we’ve seen overspending, weakening rule of law, and regulatory overkill on the part of the U.S. government, causing its economic freedom score to plummet in recent years. This is a stark contrast from 2000, when the U.S. was considered one of the most economically free nations and ranked second globally,” said Fred McMahon, Dr. Michael A. Walker Research Chair in Economic Freedom with the Fraser Institute.

Venezuela has the lowest level of economic freedom worldwide, with Myanmar, Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, and Chad rounding out the bottom five countries. Some nations, like North Korea and Cuba, could not be ranked because of a lack of data.
The conservative Heritage Foundation recently reached a similar conclusion:
In a welcome turnaround, economic freedom is “once again on the rise,” according to the editors of the 20th annual Index of Economic Freedom, released today by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. “Much of the momentum lost during the past five years has been regained.”
The world average score of 60.3—seven-tenths of a point above the 2013 average—is the highest average in the two-decade history of the Index, the editors note. Forty-three countries, including Singapore andSweden, achieved their highest scores yet in the 2014 Index. Among the 178 countries ranked, scores improved for 114 countries and declined for 59. Four recorded no score change.
But the news was not all positive. The United States fell out of the top 10, its score declining enough to leave it in the 12th slot overall. The 2014 Index finds notable declines for the U.S. in fiscal freedom, business freedom and property rights, placing it again behind its neighbor to the north, Canada.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Government as Problem

Gallup reports:
Americans start the new year with a variety of national concerns on their minds. Although none is dominant, the government, at 21%, leads the list of what Americans consider the most important problem facing the country. The economy closely follows at 18%, and then unemployment/jobs and healthcare, each at 16%. No other issue is mentioned by as much as 10% of the public; however, the federal budget deficit or debt comes close, at 8%.

Americans' current telling of the top problems facing the country comes from a Jan. 5-8 Gallup poll. The rank order is similar to what Gallup found in December, although the percentage mentioning unemployment has risen four percentage points to 16%.
Mentions of the government as the top problem remain higher than they were prior to the partial government shutdown in October. During the shutdown, the percentage naming the government as the top problem doubled to 33% from 16% in September.
Compared with a year ago, mentions of government are up slightly. Mentions of healthcare, on the other hand, have quadrupled -- from 4% in January 2013 to 16% today, likely related to highly visible problems with the rollout of the 2010 healthcare law. At the same time, references to the federal deficit or debt have declined from 20% to 8%, while mentions of the economy in general have dipped from 21% to 18%, and mentions of unemployment/jobs are the same, at 16%.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

SCOTUS and Recess Appointments

The New York Times reports:
In an extended argument that contained large doses of constitutional history and practical politics, the Supreme Court on Monday seemed skeptical of the Obama administration’s contention that it could bypass the Senate to appoint officials during short breaks in the Senate’s work.
Justices across the ideological spectrum appeared prepared to rein in the ability of presidents to make appointments without obtaining the Senate’s advice and consent by invoking the Constitution’s recess-appointments clause, which says “the president shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.”

Justice Elena Kagan said the clause may be a “historic relic” from “the horse and buggy era,” when presidents needed the authority to fill vacancies because lawmakers were out of town and could not return on short notice. More recently, she said, presidents of both parties have used the appointment power “as a way to deal, not with congressional absence, but with congressional intransigence, with a Congress that simply does not want to approve appointments that the president thinks ought to be approved.”
She suggested that the new use of the clause was problematic.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he had scoured the historical and legal materials. “I can’t find anything,” he said, “that says the purpose of this clause has anything at all to do with political fights between Congress and the president.”
The problem of congressional absence no longer exists, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “The Senate — I think to be candid — the Senate is always available,” she said. “They can be called back on very short notice.”
From the oral argument:
JUSTICE SCALIA: What do you do when there is a practice that --that flatly contradicts a clear text of the 10 Constitution? Which --which of the two prevails?
GENERAL VERRILLI: Now, I think the practice has to prevail, Your Honor, but I do --and I
JUSTICE SCALIA: So if you ignore the Constitution
GENERAL VERRILLI: But I don't think
JUSTICE SCALIA: --often enough, its meaning changes?
GENERAL VERRILLI: But, Your Honor, of course, in this situation, the meaning of the clause with respect to the timing of --of the vacancy has been a matter of contention since the first days of the Republic.
 JUSTICE SCALIA: Now, you're --you're questioning my hypothesis. You have to accept my hypothesis.

Monday, January 13, 2014

President Obama and the War on Poverty

Last week, President Obama said:
As Americans, we believe that everyone who works hard deserves a chance at opportunity, and that all our citizens deserve some basic measure of security. And so, 50 years ago, President Johnson declared a War on Poverty to help each and every American fulfill his or her basic hopes. We created new avenues of opportunity through jobs and education, expanded access to health care for seniors, the poor, and Americans with disabilities, and helped working families make ends meet. Without Social Security, nearly half of seniors would be living in poverty. Today, fewer than one in seven do. Before Medicare, only half of seniors had some form of health insurance. Today, virtually all do. And because we expanded pro-work and pro-family programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, a recent study found that the poverty rate has fallen by nearly 40% since the 1960s, and kept millions from falling into poverty during the Great Recession.
Lloyd Green writes:
Sadly, in his attempt to make all government programs equal and beneficiaries the same, Obama got sloppy with the facts, and worse, dismissive of working Americans. For the record, Social Security was FDR’s brainchild and has been around since 1935. It is not a Great Society legacy.
Furthermore, Obama forgot that he is the one calling for cuts to Social Security, over protests from Senate Democrats. As The Hill reports. “Obama proposed nearly $1 trillion in spending cuts in his budget, including a switch to using the Chained Consumer Price Index (CPI), which liberal policy experts estimate could cost seniors thousands of dollars in benefits over their lifetimes. 
Finally, Social Security and Medicare are the antithesis of food stamps and Medicaid. Unlike Medicaid and food stamps whose only criterion for eligibility is indigence, Social Security and Medicare are earned through a lifetime of work. Somehow, the notion that benefits must be earned may have been too much for the one-time community organizer
As for the other part of the war on poverty, Obama was more circumspect. He didn’t talk about how nearly 60 percent of births born in New York City are to households receiving Medicaid.
Nor did the president comment on the decoupling of reproduction from marriage, and its relationship to poverty. In his speech, Obama even ignored the question previously posed by Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute about the recent New York Times profile of Dasani Coates, “Did Inequality Make Dasani Homeless?

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Campaign Finance Networks and State Politics

The New York Times reports:
Interviews with more than 50 donors, strategists and elected officials involved with those efforts, along with a review of thousands of pages of public records, revealed how the Democratic and Republican state machines share an array of strategies and goals.
Both sides rely on interlocking networks of political action committees, party organizations and nonprofit groups, often based in states with forgiving campaign finance rules, that work in concert to raise contributions and shuffle money to thousands of local races around the country. In some states, liberal or conservative donors have established political nonprofits that function like shadow parties, often exempt from the contribution limits or disclosure requirements that apply to candidates and traditional parties.
Not unlike a political version of Cayman Islands banks, the networks allow political strategists to sidestep regulations and obscure the source of funds. Campaign contributions that would be banned or restricted in one state can be sent to a state where the rules allow money to flow more freely, often scrubbed of the identity of the original donor. Some groups work behind the scenes to orchestrate “money bombs” of smaller contributions from hundreds of different donors, allowing the groups to provide candidates with large doses of cash — fingerprint-free — even in states with low contribution limits.
Both networks arose to help Democrats and Republicans skirt the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which sharply cut the flow of money from national parties to the states. But over the last three years they have been turbocharged by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which made it easier in many states for unions, corporations and the wealthy to pool money for large independent expenditures.
Today, state and even local races increasingly are financed by checks written hundreds or thousands of miles away. A five-figure contribution from a Colorado energy executive passes through a bank account registered in Pennsylvania, where it is mixed with money that ends up in the campaign coffers of an attorney general candidate in Iowa. Business money raised in Michigan, where corporate contributions to candidates are banned, fuels campaigns in Florida and Maine, where such contributions are legal.
Much of the money passes through a handful of Washington-based organizations: From 2006 to 2010, the volume of campaign cash flowing from Beltway-based groups to state parties and candidates almost doubled, to $139 million from $79 million, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data collected by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Obamacare Problems Will Mount in 2014

When millions of health-insurance plans were canceled last fall, the Obama administration tried to be reassuring, saying the terminations affected only the small minority of Americans who bought individual policies.
But according to industry analysts, insurers and state regulators, the disruption will be far greater, potentially affecting millions of people who receive insurance through small employers by the end of 2014.
While some cancellation notices already have gone out, insurers say the bulk of the letters will be sent in October, shortly before the next open-enrollment period begins. The timing — right before the midterm elections — could be difficult for Democrats who are already fending off Republican attacks about the Affordable Care Act and its troubled rollout.
Some of the small-business cancellations are occurring because the policies don’t meet the law’s basic coverage requirements. But many are related only indirectly to the law; insurers are trying to move customers to new plans designed to offset the financial and administrative risks associated with the health-care overhaul. As part of that, they are consolidating their plan offerings to maximize profits and streamline how they manage them.
Meanwhile, other problems are cropping up. The Los Angeles Times reports:
Obamacare's biggest problem isn't the troubled HealthCare.gov website anymore.

Consumers are easing up on criticism of government exchanges and turning their frustration and fury toward some of the nation's biggest health insurers. All too often, new policyholders say, the companies can't confirm coverage, won't answer basic questions, and haven't issued identification numbers needed to fill prescriptions or get medical care.
Day after day, people say, they contact insurance company call centers waiting hours at a time with no response. Meantime, insurers have already taken many customers' payments for coverage intended to take effect Jan. 1.
But without proof of insurance, patients are having to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket for medications and doctor visits, if they can afford it. Insurance agents say dismal service has become commonplace across many companies.
These industry problems pose the next major hurdle for what's already been a flawed rollout for President Obama's signature law. It could further sour public opinion on the overhaul and hamper enrollment efforts through March 31, when the first sign-up period ends.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Goodbye, Blue Dogs

Scott Bland reports at National Journal:
North Carolina's Mike McIntyre will not run for reelection in 2014, he announced on Wednesday. (Politico first reported the news.) He and Utah's Jim Matheson, who is also retiring, are two of just 15 Blue Dog moderate Democrats left in the House. Two terms back, the Blue Dogs comprised an influential bloc of 54 members. As measured by National Journal's 2012 vote ratings, McIntyre and Matheson are the two most conservative Democrats left in the House, and Matheson's retirement also left Democrats with very little chance of retaining his seat.
Four moderate Republicans from swing districts have also retired recently; Rep. Jim Gerlach, R-Pa., became the latest on Monday. That and former Florida Rep. Bill Young's death in October have left five of the 30 most Democratic-leaning districts held by Republicans open in 2014. Matheson and McIntyre represented two of House Democrats' three most Republican-leaning seats.
The departure of leading aisle-crossing lawmakers makes it even harder for bipartisan legislation in this incoming Congress. After 2014, both parties will have even fewer members with an incentive to appeal to moderate, independent-minded voters.
Cameron Joseph reports at The Hill:
“The mass exodus of moderate Republicans coupled with the retirements of Blue Dogs mean there will be fewer and fewer members of Congress representing a district that voted for a president of the opposite party. That means more ideological purity and less compromise,” one Democrat with deep ties to the party’s centrists said.
There are just seven incumbent House Democrats running for reelection in 2014 in districts President Obama lost in 2012, and 13 Republicans running in districts he won.
The trend of disappearing centrists has been going on for decades, but it accelerated starting in 2006 and 2008, when Democrats intentionally and effectively targeted middle-of-the-road Republicans in left-leaning seats, wiping them out in suburban districts nationwide and especially in the Northeast.
Republicans returned the favor in 2010, wiping out Blue Dogs and other centrist Democrats in rural red districts, primarily in the South. Redistricting and gerrymandering by both parties before the 2012 election only further shrank the number of swing districts around the country.
That has had a big policy effect. For instance, of the 34 Democrats who voted against ObamaCare, four are still in Congress and running for reelection.

Friday, January 10, 2014

Millionaires on the Hill

In our chapter on Congress, we discuss the economic and demographic differences between the lawmakers and average citizens.  The Center for Responsive Politics reports:
For the first time in history, most members of Congress are millionaires, according to a new analysis of personal financial disclosure data by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Of 534 current members of Congress, at least 268 had an average net worth of $1 million or more in 2012, according to disclosures filed last year by all members of Congress and candidates. The median net worth for the 530 current lawmakers who were in Congress as of the May filing deadline was $1,008,767 -- an increase from the previous year when it was $966,000. In addition, at least one of the members elected since then, Rep. Katherine Clark(D-Mass.), is a millionaire, according to forms she filed as a candidate. (There is currently one vacancy in Congress.)
Last year only 257 members, or about 48 percent of lawmakers, had a median net worth of at least $1 million.

Labor Force Participation Is Down

MarketWatch reports:
 The participation rate in the labor force declined one-fifth of a percentage point to 62.8% in December, matching October’s level, which was the lowest since 1978.
The participation rate is a broad gauge of the labor-market health, showing the workforce’s share of the civilian noninstitutional population. Falling rates means that people are increasingly less likely be in the labor force — not a great sign of economic strength or confidence.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Gallup reports:
The U.S. Payroll to Population employment rate (P2P), as measured by Gallup, fell to 42.9% in December, from 43.7% in November. The current rate is the lowest Gallup has measured since March 2011.

Gallup's P2P metric estimates the percentage of the U.S. adult population aged 18 and older that is employed full time by an employer for at least 30 hours per week. P2P is not seasonally adjusted. However, because of seasonal fluctuations, year-over-year comparisons are often helpful in evaluating whether monthly changes are attributable to seasonal hiring patterns or true growth (or deterioration) in the percentage of people working full time for an employer. The P2P rate for December 2013 is down from 44.4% in December 2012 and 43.8% in December 2011, but is higher than the 42.4% of December 2010.
The most recent results are based on Gallup Daily tracking interviews with approximately 26,000 Americans, conducted Dec. 1-29 by landline and cellphone. Gallup does not count adults who are self-employed, working part time, unemployed, or out of the workforce as payroll-employed in the P2P metric.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Party Competition and Party Polarization

At "The Monkey Cage," Frances Lee points out that the past three decades have been the longest sustained period of competitive balance between the parties since the Civil War.
Competition fuels party conflict by raising the political stakes of every policy dispute. When control of national institutions hangs in the balance, no party wants to grant political legitimacy to its opposition by voting for the measures it champions. After all, how can a party wage an effective campaign after supporting or collaborating with its opposition on public policy? Instead, parties in a competitive environment will want to amplify the differences voters perceive between themselves and their opposition. They will continually strive to give voters an answer to the key question: “Why should you support us instead of them?” Even when the parties do not disagree in substantive terms, they still have political motivations to actively seek and find reasons to oppose one another. In an environment as closely competitive as the present, even small political advantages can be decisive in winning or losing institutional majorities.
During the long years of Democratic dominance following the New Deal, politics was less contentious in part because the national political stakes were so much lower. Democrats did not perceive themselves in danger of losing their outsized majorities. The “permanent minority” Republicans did not see a path to majority status. In such an environment, members of the minority party were more willing to bargain over legislative initiatives in which they would vote “yea” in exchange for substantive policy concessions, because such support did not grant political legitimacy to an opposition that they hoped to vanquish at the next election. Meanwhile, members of the majority party were more willing to fight about public policies internally among themselves, rather than attempting to close ranks against an opponent that had little perceived chance of winning power.

Obamacare Troubles Continue in 2014

AP reports:
Record-keeping snags could complicate the start of insurance coverage this month as millions of people begin using policies they purchased under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.
Insurance companies are still trying to sort out cases of so-called health insurance orphans, customers for whom the government has a record that they enrolled, but the insurer does not. They are worried the process will grow more cumbersome as they deal with the flood of new customers who signed up in December as enrollment deadlines neared.
The government says the problem is real but under control. Officials say the total number of problem cases they are trying to resolve with insurers currently stands at about 13,000. That includes orphan records. More than 1 million people have signed up through the federal insurance market that serves 36 states. Officials contend the error rate for new signups is close to zero.

Insurers, however, are less enthusiastic about the pace of the fixes. The companies also are seeing cases in which the government has assigned the same identification number to more than one person, as well as so-called "ghost" files in which the insurer has an enrollment record but the government does not.
CNN Money reports on people who lost their policies but cannot afford new ones on the exchanges.
Realizing the public relations nightmare of having insured people lose their coverage because of health reform, the Obama administration took many steps to try to address their problems.
To deal with the millions who received termination letters, it allowed insurers to renew these policies for another year. But state insurance regulators needed to agree to this extension and not all did.
It also expanded the options for buying catastrophic plans, previously available only to those under age 30 and those who qualify for a hardship exemption. And it set up a special help line for these folks, though it only received 2,400 calls, the administration said.
To assist these folks -- and everyone else -- buy plans on the exchange, it overhauled the problematic healthcare.gov site and repeatedly delayed the deadline to sign up and pay for policies. Many states running their own exchanges, such as California, followed suit.
Regardless, some consumers have been left on the insurance sidelines.
It's unclear how many. About 11 million people buy their own insurance, and reliable estimates do not exist for how many are losing coverage for 2014.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

In and Out of Poverty

Fifty years ago today, LBJ declared war on povertyA Census report explains that poverty can be temporary:


The Census also offers an infographic (too big for the blog) about the measurement of poverty

Independents and Party Identification

Gallup reports:
Forty-two percent of Americans, on average, identified as political independents in 2013, the highest Gallup has measured since it began conducting interviews by telephone 25 years ago. Meanwhile, Republican identification fell to 25%, the lowest over that time span. At 31%, Democratic identification is unchanged from the last four years but down from 36% in 2008.

The results are based on more than 18,000 interviews with Americans from 13 separate Gallup multiple-day polls conducted in 2013.

In each of the last three years, at least 40% of Americans have identified as independents. These are also the only years in Gallup's records that the percentage of independents has reached that level.

Americans' increasing shift to independent status has come more at the expense of the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. Republican identification peaked at 34% in 2004, the year George W. Bush won a second term in office. Since then, it has fallen nine percentage points, with most of that decline coming during Bush's troubled second term. When he left office, Republican identification was down to 28%. It has declined or stagnated since then, improving only slightly to 29% in 2010, the year Republicans "shellacked" Democrats in the midterm elections.

Lobbyist for Higher Education

Higher education is a special interest like any other.  Inside Higher Ed profiles one of its lobbyists:
In an era when most people in this town have been in their jobs for about 20 minutes, it doesn't seem that far off when Becky Timmons jokes in an interview about having started her higher education lobbying career "in the Pleistocene era."
The occasion of the interview, after all, is the announcement late Tuesday that Timmons will retire from the American Council on Education this month after 40 years. ("Forty years -- that's completely ridiculous, isn't it?" she says.)
She spent many of those years as the lead federal lobbyist for the main association of colleges and universities, a job in which she encountered no shortage of critics attacking higher education, endless lines in Congressional hallways awaiting hearings, and snooty young Hill aides.
And while she can shoot a mean glare when she's unhappy, the prevailing image for just about anyone who worked with her all those years is of her throaty laugh -- yes, gallows humor sometimes, but most often humor of some sort. (Yes, some of it unprintable.)

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Obamacare and Unanticipated Consequences

At Commentary, Peter Wehner writes of the finding that Obamacare may actually increase ER visits instead of decreasing them.
It might be worth calling attention, then, to a paper by the 20th century sociologist Robert K. Merton, who in 1936 published an essay in American Sociological Review, titled, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.” (Merton helped popularize the theory of unintended consequences.)
In citing some of the major factors of unexpected consequences, Merton listed ignorance and error. About the latter, he wrote the following:
Error may also be involved in instances where the actor attends to only one or some of the pertinent aspects of the situation which influence the outcome of the action. This may range from the case of simple neglect (lack of systematic thoroughness in examining the situation) to pathological obsession where there is a determined refusal or inability to consider certain elements of the problem… In cases of wish-fulfillment, emotional involvements lead to distortion of the objective situation and of the probably future course of events; such action predicated upon “imaginary” conditions must inevitably evoke unexpected consequences.

Talking Back to Washington

At the Cato Institute, John Dinan discusses ways in which states can push back against federal power.  The excecutive summary:
Effective federalism requires that state officials be able to secure relief from national directives that impose undue burdens on state governments or improper constraints on state policy discretion. Many analysts focus on clearly legitimate and occasionally effective tactics such as lobbying or lawsuits. Some activists consider discredited tactics such as nullification that are a nonstarter in the 21st century. This policy analysis calls attention to various ways that states talk back to Washington using tactics that go beyond lobbying and litigation but fall short of nullification.
First, when state and federal governments both possess regulatory authority, states can enact measures decriminalizing certain practices, hoping federal executive officials will not enforce federal statutes in states with contrary policies. Second, states can decline to participate in federal programs and accept the designated penalties, hoping Congress will revise statutes or executive officials will issue rules or waivers that moderate the programs. Third, when federal judicial doctrine is uncertain or in flux, states can enact measures inconsistent with Supreme Court precedents, hoping the Court will reconsider and relax judicially imposed constraints on state policy discretion. Fourth, when federal judicial doctrine is uncertain or in flux, states can enact measures inconsistent with federal statutes, hoping the Supreme Court will invalidate or limit the reach of federal statutes. In recent years, state officials have relied on each of these tactics and with some success in responding to federal directives relating to marijuana, education, abortion, and health care, among other areas. State officials have resources to push back against national officials, thereby improving American federalism.

Monday, January 6, 2014

Deliberation and Participation

Mark Funkhouser writes at Governing:
In a recent study entitled Making Public Participation Legal, Matt Leighninger cites a Knight Foundation report that found that attending a public meeting was more likely to reduce a person's sense of efficacy and attachment to the community than to increase it. That sad fact is no surprise to the government officials who have to run -- and endure -- public meetings.
...

Making Public Participation Legal not only makes the case for how outdated public participation laws actually work against meaningful citizen engagement but also lays out an excellent set of policy options for strengthening public participation. The study includes model municipal and state public participation legislation, along with model city charter language for citizen advisory boards.
It is with these citizen advisory boards that the authors see the best chance for beginning to reframe the relationship between citizens and their governments. Over the years, these boards have become increasingly reactive and more formalized, often following Robert's Rules of Order and using public-hearing procedures that Leighninger says "replicate the limitations and disadvantages of city councils."
That's a big problem. The whole purpose of these citizen advisory boards is to provide an entry point for citizens into government decisions, gathering information and providing a forum for citizen advice and opinion to be communicated to the governing body. With a little tweaking, the study says, they could be "ideal forums for deliberative democracy practices that can better mirror the organic processes of citizen-driven collective action."

Sunday, January 5, 2014

The Red and Blue Senate

Many posts have discussed polarization in CongressRonald Brownstein writes at National Journal:
The tightening correlation between presidential and Senate voting represents a back-to-the-future trend in national politics. Through the first half of the 20th century, party-line voting was common. After Franklin Roosevelt's first two victories in 1932 and 1936, for instance, Democrats held 89 percent of the Senate seats in the 40 states that supported him both times.

This relationship frayed later in the century, as more voters split their ticket between presidential and Senate races. That was especially true in the South (and to some extent in the Mountain West), where many voters who had shifted toward GOP presidential candidates still supported Democrats in Senate and House races. The result was that the GOP controlled only about half the Senate seats in the states that twice voted for Richard Nixon (in 1968 and 1972) and Ronald Reagan (1980 and 1984).

The large number of senators elected from states that leaned toward the other party in presidential elections encouraged the Senate's culture of compromise and negotiation from roughly the 1950s through the 1980s. Senators who'd been elected, in effect, from behind enemy lines were natural dealmakers: Representing voters with mixed loyalties, they had a clear self-interest in suppressing partisan conflict.

But those instinctive bridge-builders are vanishing. Since the 1980s, party-line voting between presidential and congressional races has steadily increased. The share of Senate seats controlled by the president's party in the states he carried twice rose to two-thirds after Bill Clinton's reelection and to three-fourths under George W. Bush. Following Obama's two victories, Democrats now hold 83 percent (43 of the 52 seats) in the 26 states he carried twice.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Medicaid and the ER

The New York Times reports:
Supporters of President Obama’s health care law had predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly emergency room visits because people would go to primary care doctors instead. But a rigorous new experiment in Oregon has raised questions about that assumption, finding that newly insured people actually went to the emergency room a good deal more often.

The study, published in the journal Science, compared thousands of low-income people in the Portland area who were randomly selected in a 2008 lottery to get Medicaid coverage with people who entered the lottery but remained uninsured. Those who gained coverage made 40 percent more visits to the emergency room than their uninsured counterparts during their first 18 months with insurance.

The pattern was so strong that it held true across most demographic groups, times of day and types of visits, including those for conditions that were treatable in primary care settings.

The findings cast doubt on the hope that expanded insurance coverage will help rein in emergency room costs just as more than two million people are gaining coverage under the Affordable Care Act. And they go against one of the central arguments of the law’s supporters, that extending insurance to large numbers of Americans would reduce emergency room use, and eventually save money.

Friday, January 3, 2014

The Youngest Boomers Turn Fifty This Year

Demographic trends influence social welfare policy.The Wall Street Journal offers a graph on the US age distribution, which has great significance for coming debates on Social Security and Medicare.


 

Limited Faith in Government

AP reports
Americans enter 2014 with a profoundly negative view of their government, expressing little hope that elected officials can or will solve the nation's biggest problems, a new poll finds.
Half say America's system of democracy needs either "a lot of changes" or a complete overhaul, according to the poll conducted by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Just 1 in 20 says it works well and needs no changes.
...
Local and state governments inspire more faith than the federal government, according to the poll, with 45 percent at least moderately confident in their state government and 54 percent expressing that much confidence in their local government. 
...
Americans don't feel terribly optimistic about their own economic opportunities. Although 49 percent say their standard of living surpasses their parents', most are broadly pessimistic about the opportunity to achieve the American Dream. And they are mixed on whether people like them have a good chance to improve their standard of living.
...
The AP-NORC Center poll was conducted online Dec. 12-16 among a random national sample of 1,141 adults. The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points for all respondents.
The survey was conducted by GfK using KnowledgePanel, a probability-based Internet panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. Respondents to the survey were first selected randomly, using phone or mail survey methods, and were later interviewed online. People selected for KnowledgePanel who didn't otherwise have access to the Internet were provided with the ability to access the Internet at no cost to them.