Month: June 2014

That’s what Jamelle Bouie calls family cap laws, which prevent parents on welfare from receiving additional benefits when they have another child:

Of course, the policy was based on a myth, the idea of the sexually irresponsible “welfare queen.” In 1990, just 10 percent of households that received Aid to Families with Dependent Children—the precursor to today’s federal welfare program—had three or more children (most had two or fewer). Those figures were down from the 1960s, when 32.5 percent of such families had four or more children. In 2013, the Bureau for Labor Statistics noted that “average family size was the same, whether or not a family received assistance.” Public perception notwithstanding, there’s no difference in family size between those that collect welfare and that those that don’t.

So what are the results of these misguided policies?

There’s little evidence that family caps work as advertised. What is unquestionably true is that they make poor families poorer.

A 2006 report from the Urban Institute found that family caps increase the “deep poverty” rate of single mothers by 12.5 percent, and increase the deep poverty rate of children by 13.1 percent. It’s easy to see how this works. In Maryland, a state without family caps, the average benefit for a single-parent family of three is $574. If, while receiving that benefit, the parent had another child, it would rise to $695, a 17 percent increase. By contrast, in Virginia—where the benefit for a family of three is $389—it would stay the same (as opposed to growing to $451). And when you consider the generally low benefit levels of family cap states—in Georgia, the average monthly benefit for a three-person household is $280, in Mississippi it’s $170—what you have is a recipe for greater poverty.

The Economist flags an Israeli study on it:

The researchers concluded that the programme works. It has increased the diversity of the student bodies at top universities by helping the poor without increasing the risk of admitting unqualified applicants. Students admitted through the programme “are not falling behind academically, even at the most selective majors,” the authors found.

Israel is a unique—and uniquely small—country with its own social complications, and there is no guarantee that a programme that works there would work in America. But the study offers some hope for those who seek to create more diverse student bodies and perhaps improve social mobility without explicitly privileging groups based on race.

Leonhardt, who provides the above chart, contends that traditional affirmative action is on the way out:

[H]ere’s the paradox for defenders of today’s affirmative action: Their best hope of salvaging some form of it is to make race secondary and class primary.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote on the Supreme Court, has signaled some openness to letting institutions consider race, so long as race doesn’t dominate their decisions. And in today’s version of affirmative action, race dominates. The standard way that colleges judge any potential alternative is to ask whether it results in precisely the same amount of racial diversity, rather than acknowledging that other forms of diversity also matter.

An affirmative action based mostly on class, and using race in narrowly tailored ways, is one much more likely to win approval from Justice Kennedy when the issue inevitably returns to the court.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, editor of The Future of Affirmative Action, supports a class-based system:

Shifting from racial considerations would substantially increase socioeconomic diversity. While those in the bottom socioeconomic half currently enjoy access to just 14 percent of seats at selective colleges, that would rise to 46 percent under socioeconomic affirmative action, 31 percent under a top-10-percent plan, and 53 percent under a program combining the two.

Achieving racial diversity by such alternative means is a matter of fairness and equity: While race matters in allocating opportunity, class is an even more significant barrier to success. Although the achievement gap by race used to be twice as large as the achievement gap by income, today the reverse is true.

Earlier this week, the HHS released a report (pdf) on Obamacare premiums. Yglesias, who posts the above chart, observes that the “average subsidy-eligible enrollee in the federal exchange gets a pretty cheap health plan.” But that fact worries Bob Laszewski:

The lowest income people––who pay the lowest premiums and out-of-pocket costs––are the ones who are obviously signing up. That explains why the average consumer subsidy is so high and the average net cost is so low.

As I have said on this blog before, the biggest consumer problem Obamacare has is that the plans––with their still high premiums even after the subsidy, big deductibles, and narrow networks––are not attractive to working class and middleclass families and individuals.

Simply, the Obamacare plans are unattractive to all but the poorest who get the biggest subsidies and the lowest deductibles.

Suderman points out that the “data released by the administration doesn’t account for premiums in the 14 states that ran their own exchanges this year” and that “those averages conceal an awful lot of variation.” He goes on to cite a Manhattan Institute study finding that health insurance has gotten significantly more expensive under Obamacare:

[T]he study by health policy fellow Yevgeniy Feyman found that, on average, premiums were up 49 percent under Obamacare. Again, that’s an average, and it masks some variation—in New York, which had unusually restrictive, badly designed health insurance market rules prior to Obamacare, premiums are actually down quite a bit—but it indicates that the overall trend for unsubsidized premiums is up.

The difference, then, is being made up by federal subsidies. According to the administration’s report, those subsidies are carrying 76 percent of the total cost of subsidized insurance plans selected in the federal exchange. The out-of-pocket average is $82. But the actual average premium price, without subsidies, is $346.

But the exact size of those premium increases is up for debate:

[A] new analysis from a conservative health-care economist suggests that Obamacare sticker shock wasn’t nearly as steep as other studies previously suggested. Consumers who bought their own coverage between 2010 and 2012 saw the average cost of their plan increase between 14 percent and 28 percent when they switched to new coverage under the Affordable Care Act, according to Mark Pauly, a professor of health-care management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

Adrianna McIntyre digs into the details of that study. Why costs went up:

On balance, the authors suggest that the hike is attributable to insurers expecting an influx of sicker enrollees. Health reform makes insurance easier to obtain for sick people. The new insurance rules means that cost gets spread around across the sick and the healthy, so when enrollees get sicker overall, prices go up for everyone.

The other factor that might have driven up prices — the essential benefits package — doesn’t seem to have played a major role. This new paper finds that the generosity of the insurance benefits offered before Obamacare was roughly similar, on average, to the medium-level plans on today’s exchanges. And that suggests the change in who’s enrolling in insurance — not the richness of those insurance benefits — is driving the rise in prices.

Why not the Washington Reagans? You only need to change a few letters and whiten up the mascot some.

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) June 18, 2014

Adam Raymond explains what has Washington sports fans riled up this morning:

Eight years after a group of Native Americans filed a lawsuit seeking to repeal the Washington Redskins trademark, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has done just that. The team’s name, the ruling says, is “disparaging to Native Americans” and trademarks that “disparage” or engender “contempt or disrepute” are prohibited by federal law.

The ruling doesn’t require the Redskins to change their name, but if it’s upheld after the inevitable appeals, the team may decide to do so anyway since its name will no longer be protected. If anything, the ruling should settle the debate over whether redskin is a slur or an honorific.

Jay Caspian King praises the decision:

As part of their appeal, the respondents argued that “Redskins,” as it referred to the football team, had been stripped of its associations with Native Americans – never mind the cartoon warrior on the team’s helmets and the headdresses worn by fans. Such disingenuous, purely linguistic claims have been used throughout history to justify all manner of terror; to argue that the name of the football team had shed its historical associations relies upon a terrible logic that says that, because a group of peoples has been, over centuries, killed, brutally dispossessed, and internally exiled – to the point that they are invisible to many of the residents of Washington, D.C. – their history should be trumped by the history of a football team.

Alyssa is also hoping for a name change:

I would not be surprised if [owner Dan] Snyder stands his ground anyway, after years of gleefully tweaking anyone who has issued a basic appeal to courtesy or financial common sense. But if he decides to change the name of his team, Snyder could seize an opportunity not just to reinforce his financial position, but to make a real gesture towards strengthening the franchise’s relationship with the city where it is located.

In contrast, Robert Tracinski is disturbed by the move:

Our system of government depends on the impartial administration of the laws by the executive. In this case, executive officials declared that a private company doesn’t deserve the protection of the law: if the ruling survives an appeal in the courts, the federal government will stop prosecuting violations of the team’s intellectual property rights, potentially costing it millions of dollars.

This ruling isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a slope we’ve already slid down: bureaucrats in Washington are now empowered to make subjective decrees about what is offensive and what will be tolerated, based on pressure from a small clique of Washington insiders. Anyone who runs afoul of these decrees, anyone branded as regressive and politically incorrect, is declared outside the protection of the federal government.

Kavitha Davidson considers the legal precedent:

Under trademark law, the [Patent and Trademark Office] reserves the right to reject an application if it “consists of or comprises immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” The office has exercised this clause many times, rejecting an application for “Khoran” liquor, since alcohol is considered sinful in the Islamic holy book. Basically any application involving the N-word is rejected, including Damon Wayans’s attempt to trademark his clothing line, “Nigga.” And a skiing equipment company was turned away from using the term “squaw.”

Joseph Stromberg looks ahead:

Today’s decision is an important victory for [plaintiff Amanda] Blackhorse and the plaintiffs, but it doesn’t guarantee that the team will actually lose the trademark registrations. For one, the team will almost certainly appeal the decision in federal court. … In the meantime, the team will keep full protection of its name and logo.

But Jordan Weissmann argues that losing the appeal wouldn’t hurt the team too much financially anyway:

[I]n the worst of all possible worlds for the NFL, a few companies might be able to start producing Washington apparel without any logos or player names. Irritating? Yes. Disastrous? Probably not.

Then there’s the question of who would actually want to go into that business. As of now, the companies that want to produce pro-football-branded merchandise have to negotiate with the NFL for a collective license that covers all of the teams. (That could change, however, depending on the outcome of a pending court case.) Any corporation that decided to go rogue and start selling unlicensed Washington gear would undoubtedly incite the NFL’s wrath. That might be fine for the odd guy with a stand selling T-shirts on the corner, but not, say, Nike.

For much more on this debate and mascot controversies in general, check out the Dish thread.