Month: May 2013

The Heritage Foundation’s Jim DeMint and Robert Rector, in a recent WaPo op-ed, cite a recent Heritage study to argue that extending amnesty to “unlawful immigrants” would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. Yglesias isn’t buying it:

The study starts by simply ignoring large swathes of the bill. There’s no W Visa program here. No replacement of the Diversity Visa Lottery with a new points-based program. No expansion of H1-B, no reform of the treatment of spouses of skilled green card holders. There’s nothing but amnesty for undocumented workers presently residing here. They tally up the taxes likely to be paid by the typical undocumented worker (low because he’s poor) and compare them to the cost of public services associated with each person. This latter is high because Heritage mixes and matches its methodology. When it comes to means-tested benefits, they do an individualized analysis at the margin so one extra low-income person costs however much it would cost to sign up an extra person for SNAP. But when it comes to general public services, they do a population average method. …

[Another] assumption here is that granting legal status to unauthorized workers will have no economic value to the workers. If that were true, it would be hard to understand why we’d even be having this debate.

Jenn Rubin passes along conservative criticisms of the op-ed. Reason’s Shikha Dalmia is also critical:

There is a vast and rich economics literature on this subject that Rector seems to be quite innocent of. Plenty of studies have found that immigrants don’t depress but stimulate the labor market for natives because they allow more businesses to form. As for the wage effects, even restrictionists’ favorite economist George Borjas’ 2003 paper failed to find any. Borjas disaggregated the impact of low skilled immigration on different native groups and found that, over the long run, the overall impact on their wages was zero. Only one group, high school dropouts, felt a noticeable negative impact. However, a subsequent study by Giovanni Peri and Gianmarco Ottaviano failed to corroborate Borjas’ findings even for native high-school dropouts. They found a positive long-run effect of 0.3 percent. In other words, no one — not even high school dropouts lose in the long run due to low-skilled immigration.

DiA shows how Rector and DeMint are out of step with Milton Friedman on the matter.

Brian Beutler points to a recent study showing that the slowdown in healthcare spending we have seen over the past few years could stick:

The study by Harvard researchers, featured in the latest edition of Health Affairs, finds, like all studies of this nature, that the recession and weak economy contributed significantly to the spending growth slowdown. Less generous benefits, resulting in higher out-of-pocket costs, accounted for 20 percent of it. Faced with less generous coverage and less disposable income, people consumed fewer health services.

But the good news is that spending growth also slowed among those whose health benefits haven’t changed, including Medicare patients. And that suggests a more enduring trend. “Our findings suggest cautious optimism that the slowdown in the growth of health spending may persist — a change that, if borne out, could have a major impact on US health spending projections and fiscal challenges facing the country,” the authors write.

Walter Russell Mead likes what he’s seeing:

[W]e’re entering an era where medical tech developments are more about data collection and streamlined service delivery. This kind of tech is one of the best hopes we have of bringing health care costs down. These studies are an early sign that this tech may be living up to its promise.

The study also makes another important point: increased out-of-pocket spending is driving health care consumption down. When third parties bear the cost of care, patients have little incentive to bring market discipline to the health care sector. When patients have to bear more of the cost themselves, they’re more likely to limit their consumption of care. It’s too early to tell whether the slowdown in health care spending will continue, but the structural changes these studies point to are encouraging.

The death toll from the factory collapse in Bangladesh has topped 800. Take a moment to look at Taslima Akhter’s heartbreaking photograph of a man and woman buried in the rubble:

I spent the entire day the building collapsed on the scene, watching as injured garment workers were being rescued from the rubble. I remember the frightened eyes of relatives — I was exhausted both mentally and physically. Around 2 a.m., I found a couple embracing each other in the rubble. The lower parts of their bodies were buried under the concrete. The blood from the eyes of the man ran like a tear. When I saw the couple, I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I knew them — they felt very close to me. I looked at who they were in their last moments as they stood together and tried to save each other — to save their beloved lives.

Every time I look back to this photo, I feel uncomfortable — it haunts me. It’s as if they are saying to me, we are not a number — not only cheap labor and cheap lives. We are human beings like you. Our life is precious like yours, and our dreams are precious too.

Earlier coverage of the tragedy here and here. Above is an award-winning report from Brian Ross and his team on a massive fire in a Bangladeshi garment factory late last year that killed more than 100 people. The deaths, like the ones from the factory collapse, were caused by poor safety regulations that kept victims from escaping the inferno.

Steven A. Cook anticipates that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan will lean on Obama to ramp up involvement in Syria when he visits the White House next week:

Ankara has tried to enlist a deeply reluctant Washington to play a role in helping to topple the Assad regime through stepped up support for the rebellion, the establishment of safe zones within Syria’s territory to relieve pressure on Turkey, and a No Fly Zone.  For Turkey, the Syrian civil war has all kinds of effects on its national security ranging from the challenges of playing host to anywhere between 325 and 450 thousand refugees and the complications the conflict has on the nascent peace process with the [nationalist Kurdish party] PKK and Ankara’s relations with Erbil.

There is a broader issue at play as well.  Ankara now finds itself in a proxy war with Iran in Syria and would like Washington’s help rolling back Iranian influence.  Turkish policymakers are confounded that Washington does not see Syria as a place to deal Tehran a blow. Although it seems that some change in U.S. policy is in the offing, Washington is clearly wary of a Syrian quagmire and does not believe that the end of Assad means the end of Iran’s role in Syria.  Under these circumstances, whatever the Obama administration has to offer Prime Minister Erdogan, it is likely to fall short of what Ankara believes it needs.

The activist and filmmaker behind Gasland offers a primer on mineral rights, and how the natural gas industry can legally drill on your property against your will:

Back in February, Hallie Seegal explained the “compulsory pooling” that gas companies often use to access gas deposits in cases of split rights:

Compulsory pooling, also known as forced pooling, allows oil and gas companies to use private property without permission if a certain number of adjacent mineral rights owners lease their acreage out for gas production. Part of the new wave of the shale boom that has raised property owners’ fears involves horizontal drilling, which includes subterranean infrastructure that crosses dozens of property lines at a time. If just one property owner objects, the whole project could dismantle. Forced pooling prevents this situation from becoming an issue.

ProPublica has reported on the practice as well. Fox’s previous Ask Anything answers are here. Full AA archive here.

Lindsey Graham, super-serial today about his Benghazi hearings, draws one basic lesson from the tragedy:

I think it’s a foreign policy gone wrong here. Syria, Libya, Egypt — I think the greater story is that the light footprint approach to the mideast at a time of turmoil is is not working.