Month: February 2014

In another part of our Deep Dish podcast, John addresses Obama’s “evolution” on marriage equality:

Subscribers can listen to the entire 90-minute conversation here. Some impressions from listeners:

Your Deep Dish conversation with John Heilemann was one of the best interviews/conversations I’ve listened to in a while. In fact, I just sat down, sipped a beer and listened without surfing the web or multi-tasking. Thanks!

Thanks to our reader for subscribing, which you can do here. Another reader:

In the new podcast, you and John Heilemann wonder WHY the younger generation seems so settled in favor of gay marriage and marijuana legalization. To me the answer is simple, and it’s almost always the answer for large-scale structural shifts in society: technology.

Kids are growing up engrossed in a new technology that now links them socially with anybody and everybody they care to associate with. And they’re always plugged into a constant feed of news and opinion via the same technology. In the past, if someone in Florida came out of the closet – either the gay closet or the cannabis closet – their close friends or family members may get a fresh perspective on that issue –  but this event would have ZERO effect on some random dude in Mobile, Alabama. However, coming out today means coming out on all sorts of social networks, many of which have a global scale. Now everyone knows someone who has come out, and it doesn’t just have to happen in your own backyard. And for the younger generations, it’s happening earlier and earlier in life, before the biases of previous generations can be burnt in.

Another shifts gears:

Listening to John Heilemann say “if [Hillary] wants to be the Democratic nominee, she is close to unstoppable” reminded me of Joe Scarborough in 2006 saying:

Hillary Clinton will be the nominee. She will crush Barack Obama. Barack, just sit it out, it’s going to be ugly, I promise you. You heard it here first.

Easy on the absolute predictions, guys. Here’s what I could like about a Hillary run: if she ran as Obama’s 3rd term rather than Bill’s 3rd term. It would like, “I’ve listened to what you make clear in 2008 when you chose Obama over me”. This would be moving forward. Hillary now isn’t the same as the one in 2008, people change. But how much change, really?

Other free samples of the podcast – discussing the Clinton juggernaut and Obama’s potential legacy – are here.

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s quick journey from long-term sobriety to relapse to death scares Seth Mnookin, who has struggled with alcohol and heroin addiction:

My first attempt at recovery came in 1991, when I was 19 years old. Almost exactly two years later, I decided to have a drink. Two years after that, I was addicted to heroin. There’s a lot we don’t know about alcoholism and drug addiction, but one thing is clear: Regardless of how much time clean you have, relapsing is always as easy as moving your hand to your mouth.

In response to Hoffman’s death, Sacha Scoblic highlights the shortcomings of twelve-step programs and wonders if another approach could have saved Hoffman:

A big part of the problem is rehab itself, which is almost universally based on twelve-step work, like Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. But AA was developed in the 1930s, in the absence of brain science and in the presence of unimaginable stigma. As Anne M. Fletcher writes in her excellent book Inside Rehab, contemporary rehab is still based on “the folk wisdom of recovering people, particularly through the perspectives of Alcoholics Anonymous and related twelve-step programs.” Don’t get me wrong, AA is an incredible program and a true American achievement for the millions of addicts around the world who desperately needed help when absolutely no one else was offering it. I think founder Bill Wilson should be sainted. I, myself, found sobriety in the rooms of AA, where fellowship and rigorous honesty probably saved my life. But AA is not a medical program, and it is not based on science. It is an abstinence-based program that may not be right for every addict. Particularly opiate addicts.

David Sheff looks at recent advances in addiction treatment:

We don’t know what treatments Hoffman received, but it’s unlikely that it was state-of-the-art care rooted in the fact that addiction is a brain disease. He should have received a range of treatments that have been proved to be effective. Traditionally, the only choices offered to addicts were 12-step programs, but proven treatments now include cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing and psychopharmacology. Indeed, medications are particularly effective in treating opiate addictions. Richard Rawson, associate director of the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs, says, “Failure to encourage patients to use these medications is unconscionable. It’s comparable to conducting coronary-bypass surgery and failing to prescribe aspirin, lipid and blood-pressure medications as part of a discharge plan.”

Sullum pushes back against Sheff:

Might there be disadvantages to viewing addiction as a brain disease? Stanton Peele, a psychologist who has been writing about addiction for nearly four decades, suggests that the “learned helplessness” inculcated by the disease model makes tragic outcomes like Hoffman’s death more rather than less likely. An addict who believes complete abstinence from heroin is the only acceptable option because he is physiologically incapable of exercising control over his drug consumption may be ill-prepared for a relapse. Having adopted an all-or-nothing view, he may be disinclined to take precautions such as moderating his intake, asking friends to look in on him, having naloxone on hand in case of an overdose, and avoiding other depressants (which are involved in the vast majority of so-called heroin overdoses). In other words, the lack of responsibility that Sheff urges can have deadly consequences.

Journalists arriving in Sochi are finding that things are not quite ready for primetime:

In the Ekaterininsky Kvartal hotel, the elevator is broken and the stairway is unlit, with stairs of varying and unpredictable heights. Outside the Chistya Prudy, there is a bag of concrete in a palm tree, leaking grey down the trunk. Inside, some of the electrical outlets are just plates screwed into drywall. …

My Postmedia colleague Cam Cole’s bathtub came loose from the wall, and therefore rocks like a ship. He has a shower curtain, though. In the Rosa Khutor section of the mountains, Stacy St. Clair of the Chicago Tribune was told by the front desk that if the water worked, “do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous.” When it did come out of the tap, it looked like a lot like cloudy urine.

But they don’t have it quite as bad as the people displaced to build the Olympic village:

Thousands of residents of Sochi’s Imereti Valley were evicted from the land that would become the Olympic complex, and despite their legal challenges and protests (including hunger strikes), were resettled in nearby Nekrasovskoye, a village built from scratch. Residents were promised that it would be lovely, with parks, a playground, a tennis court, and a Sochi Cultural Center that would prove a big draw for Olympic visitors. Everything certainly looked lovely in the state-approved photos of Vladimir Putin’s visit to Nekrasovskoye. (Thumbs up, Vladi!)

But then you look at some photos of Nekrasovskoye, taken Jan. 27. There is no park, no playground, no tennis court, and the Cultural Center is just a concrete skeleton[.]

This despite the fact that the games are the most expensive in history:

To take a round figure they look like costing $50bn. Up to now the most expensive Games have been Beijing in 2008, at some $40bn. The London Games of 2012 cost a bit over £9bn, say $15bn. You would expect Winter Olympics to cost perhaps half that of Summer ones and Vancouver came in at $7bn. So Sochi is huge.

Put it in the context of the Russian economy and it is even huger. [British] GDP in 2010 was £1,460bn, so the Games cost 0.6 per cent of GDP. (There were longer-term offsets and you can argue that overall the economy probably ended up ahead – but that is a separate debate.) Russian GDP this year will be about $2,100bn, so the cost is equivalent to 2.5 per cent of GDP. An entire year’s growth, maybe two years’, is being blown on one event.

Surowiecki explains why such projects are so corruption-prone:

Sochi is emblematic of Russia’s economy: conflicts of interest and cronyism are endemic. But the link between corruption and construction is a problem across the globe. Transparency International has long cited the construction industry as the world’s most corrupt, pointing to the prevalence of bribery, bid rigging, and bill padding. And, while the sheer scale of graft in Sochi is unusual, the practice of politicians using construction contracts to line their pockets and dole out favors isn’t. … And a recent report from the accounting firm Grant Thornton estimated that, by 2025, the cost of fraud in the industry worldwide will have reached $1.5 trillion.

What makes construction so prone to shady dealings? One reason is simply that governments are such huge players in the industry. Not only are they the biggest spenders on infrastructure; even private projects require government approvals, permits, worksite inspections, and the like. The more rules you have, and the more people enforcing them, the more opportunities there are for corruption.

Jonathan Mahler points out that every Olympic host overspends, and proposes a solution:

Designate permanent sites for both the Summer and Winter Games.

This would prevent countries from going on self-destructive Olympic spending sprees. (Montreal spent 30 years paying off its $1.6 billion debt from the 1976 games.) It would have attendant benefits, too: No more Olympics next to war zones, for instance. It may not be possible to divorce politics from the Olympics altogether — if the games were held in the U.S. this year, international civil rights advocates would probably be protesting the NSA — but you could at least mitigate the effects, maybe by awarding the Winter Games to neutral (and rich) Switzerland?

The CBO report released yesterday (pdf) found that found Obamacare will produce “a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.” Waldman puts a positive spin on the news:

The important thing to understand about the reduction in the labor force is that this is exactly what was supposed to happen. When you eliminate “job lock,” where people who’d like to leave their jobs can’t because if they do they won’t have health insurance, a certain number of people are going to take advantage of their newfound mobility. In some cases you might be able to construe it as a loss to the economy, say if a productive full-time worker cuts back to part time because she can. But in many cases it’s something to celebrate: an American exercising their freedom.

Yglesias is on the same page:

Obamacare will kill jobs in the same way that Social Security kills jobs. By making it easier for people in certain circumstances to get by without a job. But your mileage may vary on this. The point, however, is that we’re talking about people quitting not about people getting fired.

Douthat’s worries that Obamacare “might reduce financial hardship while actively disincentivizing upward mobility overall”:

2 million is a much, much uglier number than the 800,000 figure the C.B.O. cited in its last report. Maybe the early estimate was right and this one is wrong, or (just as likely) maybe both are off in one direction or the other. But it does seem like we may be dealing here with something that isn’t just a consequence of rejiggering the employer-provided model, and that actually reflects a more universal dilemma of welfare-state liberalism: Namely, that when the government moves to help people at the bottom of the income distribution, its assistance often creates perverse incentives, both by making it easier for the beneficiaries not to work at all and (when the assistance is means-tested) by imposing a steep marginal tax rate on upward mobility of any kind.

Cohn notes an important detail:

CBO didn’t actually say Obamacare would lead to 2 million fewer jobs. It said that Obamacare would lead to the “equivalent” of 2 million fewer jobs. In reality, CBO expects a much larger group of people to reduce their hours by a much smaller amount. Only a relative few will stop working altogether.

Suderman focuses on the costs of Obamacare:

Taken by themselves, Obamacare’s insurance provisions will increase the deficit by $1.4 trillion. The Affordable Care Act is a sprawling piece of legislation with a variety of revenue mechanisms built in that are supposed to offset the significant cost of the law. But CBO broke out the provisions that are specifically related to the provision of insurance coverage—the cost of the subsidies, the Medicaid expansion, the penalty payments made as a result of the mandate, the tax on high-end coverage, etc.—and found that, over the next 10 years, they will increase the deficit by $1.48 trillion. … This doesn’t mean that Obamacare, as a legislative whole, is now scored as a deficit hike. But it does mean that its central component, the coverage expansion scheme, is.

Greg Ip is unsurprised by the working hours reduction:

This is an unavoidable characteristic of a progressive system of taxes and transfers. As income taxes rise, they become an even bigger disincentive to work and invest; but we accept that distortion as the price of equity. Similarly, means-tested transfers that phase out with income represent high, implicit marginal tax rates and thus disincentives to work. We accept this distortion because it seems preferable to the alternatives: transfers that aren’t means tested, or no transfers at all.

Drum agrees that this is “a shortcoming in all means-tested welfare programs”:

If we simply had a rational national health care system, available to everyone regardless of income, then none of this would be an issue. There might still be a small income effect, but it would probably be barely noticeable. Since everyone would be fully covered no matter what, there would no high effective marginal tax rate on the poor and no reason not to work more hours. Someday we’ll get there.

Avik Roy admits that “any health-reform plan that seeks to offer coverage to the uninsured will have this type of effect on the labor market.” But he still rails against Obamacare:

The negative effect of Obamacare on the labor market is far worse than any Republican alternative would be, because the ACA dramatically expands Medicaid, and because the law heavily subsidizes health insurance for those nearing retirement. In addition, Obamacare depresses economic growth through a $1 trillion tax increase, and increases the cost of hiring new workers, because of its employer mandate requiring most businesses to offer health coverage to every worker.

Barro weighs in:

Broadly, one key goal of health policy should be to let people make work decisions without worrying about how those decisions affect their health insurance. The CBO report shows that Obamacare partly furthers that goal (by making insurance available to more people, regardless of income or employment status) and partly inhibits it (by withdrawing benefits from people who work more). Efforts to optimize the policy should focus on de-linking work decisions from insurance, not simply on maximizing the amount of labor supply.

Barro also notes that fewer workers should mean higher wages:

Obamacare alters the employer-employee relationship in a way that empowers employees. When an employee is dependent on his job not just for a wage but for health insurance, he is less able to threaten to leave if he doesn’t get a raise. Severing the work-insurance link strengthens the employee’s hand in bargaining — which is bad for employers and good for workers.

Cillizza imagines the political consequences of this report:

Close your eyes for a minute and fast forward to October. And imagine yourself sitting in a Charlotte hotel room watching TV. And this ad comes on: “Kay Hagan voted for Obamacare, a law whose rollout was so botched that a million people decided to not even sign up for health coverage. And the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says Obamacare will cost America 2 million jobs. Kay Hagan voted wrong. Now it’s time to vote her out.” That’s a VERY tough hit on any Democratic incumbent who voted for the Affordable Care Act.