Month: December 2009

by Patrick Appel

The Economist heralds immigration:

Immigration keeps America young, strong and growing. “The populations of Europe, Russia and Japan are declining, and those of China and India are levelling off. The United States alone among great powers will be increasing its share of world population over time,” predicts Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, a think-tank. By 2050, there could be 500m Americans; by 2100, a billion. That means America could remain the pre-eminent nation for longer than many people expect. “Relying on the import of money, workers, and brains,” writes Mr Lind, America is “a Ponzi scheme that works.”

Another paragraph worth pondering:

It is possible that unskilled immigrants hurt the wages of unskilled locals. George Borjas, a Harvard economist, estimates that native workers’ wages decline by 3% or 4% for every 10% increase in immigrants with similar skills. But others, such as David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, have found little or no impact. Gianmarco Ottaviano of the University of Bologna and Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, find that nearly 90% of native-born American workers actually enjoy higher wages because of immigration. Many immigrants bring new skills and ideas, spend money, pay taxes and employ natives.

by Chris Bodenner

Brian Palmer explores the history of the "side grip," or holding a gun sideways when firing, which makes for terrible aim. Its contemporary origin is traced to the opening scene of the 1993 film Menace II Society, which popularized it among street gangs. But the side grip has an even earlier history:

During the first half of the 20^th century, soldiers used the side grip for the express purpose of endangering throngs of people. Some automatic weapons from this era—like the Mauser C96 or the grease gun—fired so quickly or with such dramatic recoil that soldiers found it impossible to aim anything but the first shot. Soldiers began tilting the weapons, so that the recoil sent the gun reeling in a horizontal rather than vertical arc, enabling them to spray bullets into an onrushing enemy battalion instead of over their heads.

Video NSFW. Film reviews here.

by Patrick Appel

Michelle Cottle flags a new study on young people's pitiful knowledge of contraception. She pounces:

When 18 percent of young adult men (ages 18-29) believe that having sex standing up is a good form of birth control, it is time for massive, mandatory, honest, comprehensive sex education.

by Chris Bodenner

"Professor Fnord’s Internet-legendary “Mad World” / Domo-kun mash-up “Domo Darko” gets a long overdue HQ remastering."

by Patrick Appel

BPS passes along an interesting study:

Nordgren's team tested the idea that "restraint bias" could explain why drug addicts are so prone to relapse. They recruited 55 participants through a smoking-cessation programme, all of whom had been smoke free for at least three weeks. Those who said they had more impulse control also tended to say they wouldn't be trying so hard to avoid temptation, such as the company of other smokers. Four months' later, those with the inflated sense of impulse control were more likely to have relapsed.

by Andrew Sprung

This just in* from Jonathan Cohn – removing a major worry about the Senate HCR bill (link is my addition):

Paragraph (2) allows for annual caps before 2014, to an extent difficult to determine on a first read: plans "May only establish a restricted annual limit on the dollar value of benefits…with respect to the scope of benefits that are essential benefits under section 1302(b)" of the bill (pg. 103ff). That section does not obviously clarify the way in which annual caps may work. But they are prohibited as of Jan. 1, 2014.

One thing about this endless sausage craft: many of the bill's potential booby traps have been flagged by a thousand watchers and pinged around the Internet pretty quick. Not everything about the process has been dispiriting. 

* Updated with bill language, 4:10

Arlington, Virginia, 11.06 am

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Patrick says:

Even though delinking [insurance] coverage and employment would be offset by higher wages, there would be a lag between ending employer benefits and wage increases. And Americans do not typically understand the that benefits come out of wages. The public would react like a massive financial burden had been created regardless of reality.

The obvious move then is to mandate full disclosure of employer paid benefits. Declare that paystubs and W-2's must provide the full detail of the costs of all benefits, the amount paid by the employer and the amount paid by employee. The totals are added to the wage totals to reflect total compensation. After the population has digested that information, then we can move forward to transitioning health care expenses away from the employers. Something so simple as telling the truth can solve many problems.

Another reader points out the problems with ending employer health care in the current economic environment:

My current employer, like many corporations, isn't having a record year for revenue or earnings and our executive management is under a lot of pressure from Wall Street to get our numbers up. If the health care market shifted to where they could drop all insurance for employees, I guarantee we'd see at best a small fraction of those expenses added to our paychecks and the bulk of it would go towards improving the company's bottom line, not my personal income. While this might be a boon for a lot of struggling companies, I see no way in which it wouldn't shaft the vast majority of current workers whose health care is employer-provided.

He continues:

Yes, there would be increased pressure over the long term to reduce both cost and cost growth, but the initial disruption would be huge. I've yet to see any economist deal with this issue in a rigorous fashion, and too many of the pundits commenting on the correlation seem to make the incorrect assumption that *every* dollar currently being spent by employers on health insurance would be converted to wages.

by Andrew Sprung

Continuing with the fictional flashbacks: Gail Collins' lament (if Gail Collins can ever be said to lament) over Senatorial privilege triggered a couple. Collins:

He is being treated like a visiting superpower. When the prime minister of India came to the United States, he got that one crasher-wracked party and an hour of face time with Barack Obama. Ben Nelson has met Obama at least three times in the last nine days. The president, he said serenely, “made a strong case for passing health care reform, but it remains to be seen if it was compelling."

Good work making your case, most powerful person on the planet. But we will see if it meets the standards of Senator Ben Nelson.

Back up seventeen centuries. Here's the newly empurpled emperor Julian, taking his first imperial bath, attended by his best friend and his uncle (from Gore Vidal's Julian*): 

I submerged for a moment, eyes tight shut, soaking my head. When I came to the surface, Oribasius was sitting on the bench beside my uncle.

    "That is no way to approach the sacred presence." And I splashed Oribasius very satisfactorily. He laughed. My uncle Julian laughed, too, for I had soaked him as well. Then I was alarmed. In just this way are monsters born. First, the tyrant plays harmless games: splashes senators in the bath, serves wooded food to dinner guests, plays practical jokes; and no matter what he says and does, everyone laughs and flatters him, finds witty his most inane remarks. Then the small jokes begin to pall. One day he finds it amusing to rape another man's wife, as the husband watches, or the husband as the wife looks on, or to torture them both, or to kill them. When the killing begins, the emperor is no longer a man but a beast, and we have had too many beasts already on the throne of the world. Vehemently I apologized for splashing my uncle. I even apologized for splashing Oribasius, though he is like my own brother. Neither guessed the significance of this guilty outburst.

Next up: a virtuous queen of C.S. Lewis' imagining (from Till We Have Faces), confronted by the freshly widowed wife of the counselor she always secretly loved. The wife, after a moment of intimacy in which the two women recognize that they loved the same man, accuses the queen of sucking all her servants dry, being "gorged with other men's lives, women too." The queen reacts:

"It's enough," I cried. The air in her room was shot with crimson. It came horribly in my mind that if I ordered her to torture and death no one could save her. Arnom would murmur. Ilerdia would turn rebel. But she'd be twisting (cockchafer-like) on a sharp stake before anyone could help her

How many Democrats would cede to Obama (or perhaps the Lyndon Johnson of sudden nostalgia) the power to impale Joe Lieberman just now?

Speaking of Johnson, he was definitely the splash-from-the-bath type. According to Robert Caro, he would force people to consult with him while he was on the toilet.

Take a step back: it's remarkable, the constraints democracy has placed around power over the slow march of centuries.

——

*Andrew has excoriated Vidal's verbal flame-throwing in public affairs – with some justice. But the man is a master story-teller.

by Chris Bodenner

Lyrics to Nina Simone's "Little Girl Blue" after the jump:

Sit there and count your fingers
What can you do
Old girl you're through
Just sit there and count your little fingers
Unlucky little girl blue.

Just sit there and count the raindrops
Falling on you
It's time you knew
All you can count on
Are the raindrops
That fall on little girl blue

No use old girl
You may as well surrender
Your hopes are getting slender
Why won't somebody send a tender blue boy
To cheer up little girl blue

No use old girl
You may as well surrender
Your hopes are getting slender
Why won't somebody send a tender blue boy
To cheer up little girl blue