The Dish

Letting Go Of Global Hegemony

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal poll on foreign policy made for a stark contrast with the growing consensus among the chattering classes about president Obama’s foreign policy. Here’s MoDo channeling the frustration of many and addressing herself directly to Obama:

You are the American president. And the American president should not perpetually use the word “eventually.” And he should not set a tone of resignation with references to this being a relay race and say he’s willing to take “a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf,” and muse that things may not come “to full fruition on your timetable.”

An American president should never say, as you did to the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, about presidents through history: “We’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” Mr. President, I am just trying to get my paragraph right. You need to think bigger.

A great line. Until you ask yourself what exactly does she mean by thinking bigger. The closest MoDo comes is the following:

Especially now that we have this scary World War III vibe with the Russians, we expect the president, especially one who ran as Babe Ruth, to hit home runs.

Home-runs, please is not exactly a productive contribution to the discussion. What on earth would a “home-run” mean in Ukraine, for example? But this analysis misses one core fact: Americans, in polling, really do not want to be policing the world any more. Here’s one take-away from the WSJ poll:

That’s a record 47 percent favoring a less active foreign policy than Obama has conducted. As for the “scary World War III vibe” MoDo wants reassurance on, only 5 percent of Americans want the US out front alone on Ukraine. A quarter want to delegate the issue to the EU. And almost half want action only in cooperation with other countries. The decidedly non-interventionist public also strongly opposed a strike in Syria; wanted withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan; and still prefer, in record numbers, for the US president to focus on domestic affairs. More to the point, this non-interventionist consensus crosses party lines. Obama has, on most issues, stayed in line with popular opinion. That’s one key reason why Rand Paul has traction. And it’s one reason Hillary Clinton will be vulnerable if she appears to want to return to neocon reflexes.

The paradox, it seems to me, is that Americans also miss the glory days. They both want withdrawal from the world but feel nostalgic for the heady post-Cold War days of easy hegemony, a budget surplus and a global reputation not stained by military occupations and torture. Robert Kagan had a shrewd column a month ago on this strange confluence of a president pursuing popular policies and becoming unpopular as a result. Here’s the poll of polls on foreign policy for Obama:

The switch to disapproval happened about a year ago. Some of the subsequent shift may be due to the harsh criticism Obama received for not striking Syria after seeming to move toward it (even though the public wants to go to war in Syria like they want to abolish social security). Some of it may be due to Putin’s ugly machinations – prompting unreconstructed neocons like McCain to blame Obama for somehow encouraging it. The open wound of the Israel-Palestine question – where Obama has been very very active but without any progress at all – may also be a factor. But I suspect the bigger picture is that we’ve seen both an acceptance of a much more restrained America after the catastrophe of neocon governance and subsequent lingering unease about no longer being the sole superpower whose authoritah is always respected.

My view is that Obama has done about as good a job as possible in managing the core task of his presidency: letting self-defeating global hegemony go. That required a balancing act – of intervention where absolutely necessary and caution elsewhere. He prevented the world economy tipping into a second Great Depression, has maintained overwhelming military superiority and shored up Asian alliances even as he concedes, as we should, that China will be the dominant power in the region in the 21st Century. He rescued us from the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters, without chaos or immediate blowback. He’s successfully coordinating European responses to Russian aggression in Ukraine. It all adds up to the effective tending to a new era in which other countries and regions no longer accept American supremacy, and when US ideals – such as opposing torture – have been revealed as frauds.

This kind of pragmatic balancing act has none of the glory of the Cold War and a dispiriting (to some) element of retreat. But in many ways, this is inevitable. The staggering success of the West’s model in the last two decades is not one that can be sustained at the same pace. You don’t get to liberate Europe twice. And of course the biggest factors behind this new climate are the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They essentially revealed the US military as all-powerful on paper but inevitably insufficient to deal with sectarian hatred in the Muslim world, or running a “country” that cannot be run outside of a dictatorship or authoritarian figure. Even drones reached a point quite quickly at which their costs outweighed their benefits.

This is the essential context which makes sense of Obama’s pragmatic re-calibration of US foreign policy. What this picture reminds me of is the conventional wisdom about George H. W. Bush’s foreign policy at the time. In retrospect, his management of Soviet collapse was deeply under-rated, as was his decision not to invade Iraq. Like Obama, he saw China as a naturally emergent power to be coaxed rather than alienated. Like Obama, he tried and failed to move the Israelis out of their new project of Greater Israel. He was never going to be a Reagan, but in politics and world affairs, timing is everything. The difference, of course, is that Bush followed Reagan, whereas Obama followed the foreign policy equivalent of two terms of Jimmy Carter. So the bathos of pragmatism is all the more vivid this time around.

The one exception to this picture with respect to Obama is the overture to Iran. If he manages to resolve the nuclear issue in the next year, it will be a clear and revolutionary break from the past, as well as being the sanest approach to handling that poisonous but rational regime. But again, his success, if it occurs, will prompt more cat-calls from the neocons and loathing from the hard right. And it will not be greeted with the same relief as the end of the last Cold War, not least because the ayatollahs will remain in power, even if the landscape then shifts against them. Avoiding war is often not as popular as starting one. But it is what this country wants at this juncture in history, and it’s what the world needs. In the end, even queasy Americans may see the pragmatic sense in much of it. But they’ll keep it quiet if they do.

(Photo of Obama yesterday by Brendan Smialowski/Getty)

Do I Sound Gay? Ctd

David Cross’s genius and NSFW take on the subject:

I have to say I haven’t thought about this in a while, and since posting that promo for the documentary, I find myself a little paranoid. Maybe it applies to me. I have never been able to bear hearing myself or watching myself on TV. It creeps me out in visceral ways. I can’t even listen to a podcast for very long without wanting to coil up in a ball of self-loathing. (By self-loathing, I don’t mean merely because of my sexual orientation. My self-hatred is so much more extensive and varied than that.) Still, I doubt it has nothing to do with anxiety over the “gay voice.”

I actually had a dream not too long ago where I was listening to an interview I gave on the radio and I sounded like Princess Diana. Seriously, my voice was quite clearly a woman’s. And it wasn’t a pleasant dream. Occasionally, I’ll catch a whiff of an old clip from, say, Charlie Rose or Brian Lamb, and my gay voice sounds gayer then than it does now – or at least so it seems to me. And in fact, before I came out in my late teens, I was much more stereotypically gay than I am now. I wore dandy-esque clothes; I was in the theater; as president of the Oxford Union, my first debate included a drag queen (by my invitation); at Oxford, I gamely initiated the Poohsticks Club, and my nickname was Piglet! I wasn’t just into college drama, I played the lead role in Another Country, a play where my first line was “I want to pour honey all over him and lick it off again.” No wonder that I was outed by the college newspaper, even though I’d never touched another man.

Sometimes I wonder if the outwardly gay presentation, for me at least, was related to the closet. Because I could not be public and open about my sexual orientation, my psyche sought to express it in other ways. What is repressed up-front finds a way to express itself indirectly. That’s why when I see a priest all decked out in frills and lace and gold, I immediately think: another repressed gay. In fact, I doubt whether much of the more elaborate liturgy, ritual and drama of high Catholicism isn’t entirely a function of frustrated queens finding some outlet for their otherwise repressed nature.

But after I came out, and grew up as a gay man in the midst of a sobering, mind-concentrating plague, I found those external signals less necessary.

I’m not saying that this was a conscious or deliberate process. It just happened. In fact, it was only after coming out that I got in touch with more stereotypically masculine aspects of my personality. I grew much more comfortable in my body and became a gym-rat. I grew a beard and found myself more comfortable with straight guys than before (even though my bro-ness quotient was pretty high in my all-boys, rugby-playing high school). My clothes went from dandy to crappy. I still couldn’t give a shit about sports, but equally, I can’t bear being in a room where The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is on the TV. All in all, after coming out, I found myself much less stricken between two polarities of what it means to be a man. I became much more comfortable in myself.

I wondered in the past what more social integration might do to the gay voice. Would it wane somewhat and eventually disappear? That’s the question I’d like to see addressed. If the gay voice is a function of the closet and of marginalization, would it have a harder time propagating in an era of much greater toleration and inclusion? My anecdotal evidence suggests something mixed. Yes, it is still there, but the extremes of either hyper-masculine presentation of hyper-feminine identity seem less extreme in the next generation. Here’s my ballsy guess: it’s a function in some ways of genetics but also the environment. Like every other fucking thing we humans do and are. But it’s fascinating to think of how specifically those two factors might interact, and what they may tell us about the paths for various homosexualities.

And by the way, do I sound gay?

The Healthcare Spending Uptick

Phil Klein highlights it and provides the above chart:

For several years, Obama and his allies had been crediting a slowdown in the rate of growth for health care to payment reforms imposed by the law. But other analysts predicted that spending would pick up as the economy improved and people started loosening the family purse strings. As I reported earlier this month, there were already signs of growing health care spending in the fourth quarter of 2013, when it jumped 5.6 percent, which had been the fastest clip since 2004.

But the 9.9 percent jump (on an annualized basis) came in the quarter from January through March, which was the first three months in which individuals who gaining coverage through the law were able to use it. That was the fastest rate recorded since health care spending grew at a 10 percent rate in the third quarter of 1980.

Chait reminds Klein that a temporary spike in spending was predicted for this year:

If you think I’m simply making up some after-the-fact excuse, advocates of health-care reform were pointing this out at the time the bill was being debated. Here’s Jonathan Cohn explaining in 2009 how the new health-care law was projected by Medicare actuaries to bend the long-term curve of health spending downward while still allowing for a big spike when new customers came online in 2014 … He even had a chart!

See that 2014 spike? That’s now.

Klein fires back:

[A]t no point did I write that the BEA report was definitive proof that costs would explode for as far as the eye could see. In fact, I even noted that the estimate for health care spending was, “preliminary and subject to revision in the coming months.” So I’m not sure what [Chait] thinks he has “debunked.”

As far as the broader issue, there’s been a huge debate within the health care policy community as to whether the historically low rate of growth in health care spending that was recorded from 2009 through 2012 could be attributable to the health care law or other long-term factors – or if it was temporary, and largely driven by the economic downturn.

Cohn joins the conversation:

The big unknown remains what happens next. There’s evidence to suggest that health care has undergone a real revolution, so that costs won’t continue to rise as quickly as they did historically. Hospitals are getting more aggressive about stopping infections and following up with patients after discharge. Insurers are bargaining harder with providers. Most people in and around the health care industry expect that, after an initial jump, health care inflation will settle back down at a lower level. But where will it settle? Will it be low enough to spare us painful fiscal trade-offs in years and decades to come? And what role will Obamacare end up playing in this trajectory?

The answers are impossible to know right now, in part because it depends on future decisions—about how strongly to stand by existing cost control efforts, and what new efforts to try. Even among like-minded experts, there’s lot of disagreement.

Kliff adds:

One important fact we don’t know is whether the increase in health care care is making people healthier. We don’t know the balance between care that people need (which they might have put off because they were uninsured) and care that was unnecessary, but still made accessible because of new health plans.

The Slow And Agonizing Death Of Clayton Lockett, Ctd

As the rest of the Western world recoils in horror, Andrew Cohen sees the botched execution as a turning point:

This has exposed yet another instance where the “machinery of death,” to use Justice Harry Blackmun’s immortal phrase, is incapable of running with the sort of precision necessary to work a capital regime. What happened [Tuesday] night to Clayton Lockett surely won’t convince lawmakers in Oklahoma or Texas or Missouri or Louisiana or Alabama to end their experiment with the death penalty. But if what happened last night in Oklahoma doesn’t cause our nation’s judges to stop the cycle of secrecy over lethal injections, it will be a scandal.

Indeed, Lockett now is a symbol of feckless judicial review by the federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court. The justices in Washington have had countless opportunities in the past year to stop the madness caused by the current generation of lethal-injection secrecy. They long ago could have and should have accepted one of those cases for review to establish standards that would require states like Oklahoma to share basic information about the drugs used to kill prisoners. What happened to Clayton Lockett last night is on them, too.

Sam Kleiner also hopes the courts will take action:

Today, there are a number of cases progressing through the federal courts that are challenging the secrecy laws surrounding lethal injections. Ultimately, the courts and potentially the Supreme Court itself will have to determine whether such secrecy violates the Constitution. The Court held in 2002 that the ban on cruel and unusual punishment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” While there may be a legitimate interest in protecting the suppliers of these drugs, our interest in protecting the integrity of our society’s most severe punishment is far greater.

Lauren Galik reviews the series of events leading up to Lockett’s execution:

On April 21, the Oklahoma Supreme Court stayed the executions of Lockett and Warner, which were scheduled to take place on April 22 and April 29, so that the justices could evaluate the legality of Oklahoma’s secrecy law.

In an unprecedented move, Gov. Mary Fallin proclaimed on April 22 that Oklahoma’s executive branch would not honor the state Supreme Court’s stays of execution, and issued an executive order that granted a seven-day stay of execution for Clayton Lockett.

Even more shocking, a Republican state representative, Mike Christian, introduced impeachment proceedings on April 23 against the five state Oklahoma Supreme Court justices who had voted for the stays of execution, stating that the justices had used “unsupportable arguments regarding constitutional rights.”

On April 24, the Oklahoma Supreme Court caved to political pressure, and declared that the state’s injection secrecy law was constitutional, allowing the botched execution to proceed on April 29 as Governor Fallin ordered.

Lithwick’s reaction to the story:

The death penalty is still legal in America, and to the extent you want to debate that, you can and should. But torturing prisoners is not legal, and when state actors fall over one another to secretly experiment with new drugs, that’s just a sin. State courts tasked with being careful and deliberate shouldn’t cave to threats or blackmail. Bert Brandenburg, executive director of Justice at Stake, a nonpartisan campaign working to keep our courts fair and impartial, says the real lesson from Oklahoma Tuesday night is this: “Political tampering with the courts and bullying of judges fed a fever that resulted in a state torturing one of its prisoners to death.”

Beutler’s bottom line:

Even if you grant the assumption, which I don’t share, that an intentional, scheduled killing can be done in a non-torturous way, if something (i.e. intentional, scheduled killing) requires a zero percent error rate in order to not be torturous, probably you just shouldn’t do it. But you certainly shouldn’t be hungry to do it.

Though hardly hungry, Matt K. Lewis still supports the death penalty:

You really can’t take someone like Clayton Lockett and reform him — or, at least, the odds of doing so are unfathomable. This wasn’t a crime of passion. He didn’t walk into his house, see his wife in bed with another man, fly into a rage, kill him, and then immediately feel remorse. He shot a 19-year-old woman and then watched his friends bury her alive. Try to reform that.

… [A]s the son of a prison guard from Maryland, let me assure you: Inmates who have no hope of earning an early release also have no incentive not to harm or kill correctional officers or other inmates. And solitary confinement is arguably a crueler and more unusual form of a punishment than the death penalty. And there’s also this: While capital punishment may not be a deterrent (the infrequency of its use almost guarantees this), the recidivism rate is astonishingly low. I mean, there are very few repeat offenders.

So yes, we ought to make sure we get to the bottom of what went wrong with this lethal injection. But no, we shouldn’t do too much hand-wringing and pearl-clutching along the way. At the end of the day, the death penalty should be safe, legal, rare — and utterly efficient.

The White House Takes On College Rape

Obama’s special task force assigned to address sexual assault on campuses has released its first report (pdf), which includes recommendations for what colleges should do:

The report calls for prevention programs that “are sustained (not brief, one-shot educational programs), comprehensive, and address the root individual, relational and societal causes of sexual assault.” Bystander intervention is listed as a “promising prevention strateg[y].” The CDC is currently researching the best sexual violence prevention practices.

The Task Force recommends that schools train officials on how to best respond to sexual assault complaints, avoiding “insensitive or judgmental comments” that make the victim feel he or she is being blamed instead of the person accused. It also recommended that colleges do away with mandatory reporting policies that may make students hesitant to report assaults in the first place. Assault survivors should have a place to turn to where they know what they say will remain confidential unless they say otherwise. “This is, by far, the problem we heard most about,” the report says.

The PSA seen above was released with the report. Bazelon wants to know why it took so long:

The administration’s recommendations are generally to the good, and Congress should make them stick by enacting them into law. And yet, I have to pause to say that I can’t believe how long it has taken to put this issue at the front of the national agenda—and how toothless the laws written to protect students remain. This is a problem the White House recommendations don’t sufficiently address.

Title IX has been on the books since 1972. The Clery Act, which requires schools to disclose campus crime statistics, passed in 1990. In 2011, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which is responsible for enforcing Title IX, sent schools a Dear Colleague letter emphasizing their responsibilities to provide an education free from sexual harassment and violence. And yet today the talking point from Vice President Joe Biden is, “Colleges and universities need to face the facts about sexual assault. No more turning a blind eye or pretending it doesn’t exist.” Well, yes, but shouldn’t they have stopped turning a blind eye a long time ago?

Jessica Valenti criticizes the report for its omissions:

The White House report also doesn’t provide guidelines for how schools should discipline campus rapists. According to a 2010 investigative report from the Center of Public Integrity, American colleges almost never expel those found guilty of sexual assault in campus judiciary proceedings. “The fact that schools will expel someone for cheating on a test, but not for violating another human being and their dignity shows they don’t have their values in order,” says Wanjuki.

Instead, colleges often opt for “punishments” like asking a rapist to write a letter of apology to his or her victim or forcing the assailant to write a research paper about rape. And while these abusers remain on campus – likely to rape again – their victims are often harassed, stonewalled by administrators and/or end up leaving campus for fear of running into their attacker.

Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is concerned that the recommendations invite colleges to disregard due process:

Perhaps most worryingly, the Task Force appears to be enthusiastic about essentially eliminating hearings altogether for students accused of assault and harassment. The Task Force is exploring a “single investigator” model, where a sole administrator would be empowered to serve as detective, judge and jury, affording the accused no chance to challenge his or her accuser’s testimony. Tellingly, the Task Force expresses only the most meager sense of the rights necessary to secure fundamentally fair hearings, noting that it believes the single investigator model would still “safeguard[] an alleged perpetrator’s right to notice and to be heard.”

Meanwhile, Charlotte Alter explores college-aged men’s fears that they could be falsely accused of rape or commit it by accident:

The changing definition of “consent” fuels a lot of this anxiety. Ben Murrie, one of the producers of a traveling campus assault education program called Sex Signals, says his program defines consent as “present, active, ongoing, freely given, and sober,” in an attempt to move away from the old “no means no” idea of consent. But to a literal-minded college student, that means anyone who willingly has sex after a couple beers could be a rape victim, and anyone who doesn’t hear “please continue with intercourse” could be a rapist.

Update from a reader, who disagrees with Bazelon:

As a former lawyer for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, I don’t think Title IX is “toothless”. Moreover, civil-libertarians have objected to the Education Department’s recent guidance on campus sexual assault and harassment, as I discuss in the commentary further below.

Not only have people successfully sued for a million dollars or more under Title IX and its sister statute, Title VI (which deals with racial harassment), as in the Zeno case, but the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights does in fact effectively impose sanctions on schools even when it doesn’t cut off their federal funds, since it sometimes conditions the end of the investigation on a resolution agreement that contains monetary compensation for victims.

For example, Tufts recently agreed to provide “monetary compensation” for a complainant, despite denying any wrongdoing, although it balked at an Education Department demand that it also declare itself in violation of Title IX: “Tufts signed an agreement with the government earlier this month, pledging to take a long list of steps in improving their policies, as well as providing monetary compensation to the student.”

Moreover, many seemingly-innocent students have been expelled or suspended based on meager evidence, as is evidenced by the cases cited on the web site of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and in former Massachusetts ACLU leader Harvey Silverglate’s Wall Street Journal op-ed in discussing the Caleb Warner case. As I noted in the commentary below, “For examples of seemingly-innocent students expelled or suspended from school based on very weak evidence, in the aftermath of the Education Department’s “Dear Colleague” letter, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.”

Unfortunately, the deck is usually stacked against the accused student. School officials have every incentive to expel students if there is any chance they are guilty at all. A state university official who doesn’t kick out the accused can be individually sued under decisions like Murrell v. School District No. 1 and Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee. That’s in addition to the fact that the university itself can be sued under Title IX. School officials can also be sued under state sexual harassment laws that reach further than Title IX, like New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination, which provides for individual liability on the part of school officials, as well as liability based on constructive rather than actual notice.

By contrast, a school that expels an innocent accused probably can’t be sued, even if he is probably innocent, since the accused only has a right to PROCEDURAL due process, not any SUBSTANTIVE finding of guilt or innocence. So as long as the school goes through the motions of giving the accused a fair hearing, and follows its procedures, it can kick him out even if he is probably not guilty.

America’s Favorite New Frenchman

As popular as Piketty is here all of a sudden, he’s pretty passé in his home country:

Although Amazon.fr now puts [Capital in the 21st Century] at the top of its current best-selling books, it did not feature at all in the top 100 in 2013 and did not grab headlines when the 970-page French version came out in August last year. Across all outlets, the French version of Capital is currently in 192nd place, according to Edistat, the French book-publishers’ ranking.

The French seem almost bemused by the sudden international fame of their home-grown economist. “Thomas Piketty, une star américaine,” ran the headline of an article in La Tribune, a business newspaper.

Tyler Cowen and Veronique de Rugy explain why Capital has been such a bigger deal in America:

First, Mr. Piketty has been on the intellectual scene, and the darling of the French Socialist party and intellectuals, for some time already. An early appointment as an economic adviser to Ségolène Royale, the Socialist presidential candidate in 2007, gave him a platform to present his ideas to the news media. He also has had access to President François Hollande and many other leaders for a while, so Mr. Piketty is older news to the French political elite and journalists alike. Besides, in France, unlike in the United States, most people take for granted the notion that income inequality is growing and destructive. A book that tells people what they already believe may receive approval without generating adulation.

But as Piketty’s American editor observed recently, Capital’s huge stateside success and the ensuing publicity have “re-energized interest in France.” That’s capitalism for you.

Recent Dish on Piketty here, here, here, here, and here.

Pfizer Wants To Expatriate

Jia Lynn Yang explains why the pharma giant is trying to acquire its British rival AstraZeneca:

It’s no secret that one of Pfizer’s motivations in its $100 billion bid for AstraZeneca is to save big on U.S. taxes. By purchasing a foreign company with company cash being held overseas, the pharmaceutical giant avoids getting hit by the U.S. federal corporate tax rate of 35 percent.

As part of the deal, Pfizer is also seeking to incorporate in Britain, a break from the company’s American roots — and the American corporate tax rate. But Pfizer isn’t picking just any country as a potential new home for incorporation. The British government has been tweaking its tax code in recent years to make it easier for businesses to lower their tax bills — especially for multinationals with byzantine accounting structures. And in the pantheon of companies that do this, few are more adept than tech and pharmaceutical companies. Companies exactly like Pfizer.

Peter Waldman describes how Pfizer could finagle the acquisition, which AstraZeneca has so far rebuffed, to avoid US taxes entirely:

[H. David] Rosenbloom [director of the international tax program at New York University School of Law] expects Pfizer to use a foreign subsidiary to borrow against the untaxed earnings overseas, and to use the borrowings to purchase AstraZeneca. That way the money may never technically land on U.S. shores and may never be subject to U.S. tax, and Pfizer could take a tax deduction on the interest expense, Rosenbloom says.

Barro suggests a way to counter the UK’s efforts to lure tax-averse corporations:

It’s counterintuitive, but Congress could avoid this problem by abolishing the tax on corporations’ profits and much more aggressively taxing their American shareholders – who are unlikely to flee to London along with Pfizer’s incorporation documents.

A Dropping Number Of Dropouts

And an unprecedented number of diplomas:

Stephanie Simon reports that the high-school graduation rate in the US has topped 80 percent for the first time in history, and that “if states can keep up their rapid pace of improvement, the rate could hit 90 percent by 2020”:

The improvement has been driven by steep gains among African-American and Hispanic students and by progress in shutting down hundreds of troubled urban schools dubbed “dropout factories.” And it’s not confined to one region of the country. Rural states such as Iowa, Vermont and Nebraska are among the best at keeping kids in school until graduation – but other top performers include Texas, Tennessee and Missouri, all of which serve large numbers of low-income students in densely populated cities. The practical result: Over the past decade, 1.7 million more students received diplomas than would have been expected if graduation rates had remained flat.

However, as the above chart makes clear, not all the news is good:

[W]hile low-income and minority students have made a lot of progress, wide gaps in achievement persist. Graduation rates increased 15 percentage points for Hispanic students and 9 points for African-American students from 2006 to 2012. But only 76 percent of Hispanic students and 68 percent of African-American students graduated in 2012, compared with 81 percent of white students, the report said. …

[In addition,] disparities are still great between special education students in different states. Students with disabilities make up about 15 percent of students nationally and have a graduation rate 20 percentage points lower than the overall rate. In Montana, 81 percent of high school students with disabilities graduated, while in Nevada, only 24 percent did.

Chris Kardish has more on the variations at the state level:

Overall graduation rates in states range from 59 percent in Nevada to 93 percent in Vermont. A number of states are graduating even low-income students above the 80-percent mark, including Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Tennessee and Indiana. For other states, the graduation rate even among students who aren’t living in poverty stands below 80 percent. Those include Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. Tennessee in particular has been a leader in raising graduation rates. The state boosted graduation rate 17 percent from 2003 to 2010 and reached 87 percent in 2012.

(Graph from Building A Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending The High-School Dropout Epidemic)

The View From Your Obamacare: Job Freedom

The popular thread continues:

You wrote, “When you are a long-term HIV survivor, that kind of health security and independence is, well, priceless.” Take out “long-term HIV” and replace it with “person with diabetes” or “person with a seizure disorder” or “person with a heart condition” and all of us feel that same security and independence and relief that you describe. I’ve had well-controlled diabetes for almost 30 years, which includes my entire working life. And for my entire life, I’ve known that I had to get and keep a job that offered a group insurance plan (or be married to someone who had that) in order to take care of myself and be financially stable (i.e., in the middle-class).

So that’s what I’ve done; I worked when my ex-husband was in graduate school (his school coverage didn’t cover pre-existing conditions); I put off having children until he had a job with group insurance; I worked at in the most toxic law firm environment I can imagine for 6 1/2 years because I was divorced and had to provide my own coverage; I finally left when I was hired by the federal government (admittedly, a lot of benefits came with that move, not just good health coverage).

But in the last few months, another sense of freedom has crept up on me and I realize that NEVER AGAIN will I feel trapped by my job as I have for my entire working life.

If I decide to leave the law, I can. If I want to piece together several part-time jobs that that allow me to use my other skills and would provide me with the minimum income, I can do it. It’s all up to me. I have no more excuses. It almost feels like personal responsibility and freedom and adult behavior all wrapped up together. But that doesn’t make sense, because then the Republicans would be all for it, right? I am so thrilled that Obamacare exists and I use the name proudly whenever I can. Another meep-meep for the ages!

Another also quotes me:

[The ACA’s] assurance of a stable insurance market that does not screen out someone with a pre-existing condition made me far more comfortable starting my own business. It gave me a baseline of security that simply didn’t exist before. It helped make entrepreneurialism possible.

Amen. I live in Silicon Valley.

As dynamic as this place is, I can’t tell you how many former colleagues have stayed in jobs just for the benefits. I really don’t understand why employers don’t want to get out of the healthcare business. It’s not a core competency and it’s nothing but a headache. This American Life had a story about how medical benefits became a way to lure workers during the WWI’s government-mandated frozen wages.

I’m currently in a struggling startup with no benefits. I have them through a partner, so I’m one of the lucky ones. I wonder how much innovation is being locked up by employer-based healthcare.

Another has part-time job freedom:

I am a 27-year-old freelance photographer and writer who works in the skateboard industry. I’m also a semi-professional downhill skater. It’s pretty much my dream job, and I wouldn’t have been able to chase it down without Obamacare. The ability to stay on my parents’ insurance until I was 26 gave me the freedom to move across the country and participate in a risky physical activity without fear of financial ruin. Later, when I aged out of my parents’ insurance, the lower premiums made it possible to afford insurance, without which I could not skate. (Thankfully, my sponsors pay for it.)

If the ACA hadn’t passed, I would be working a boring, stable office job instead of traveling the world pursuing my creative passion. Obama disappointed me on civil liberties and accountability for torture, but the Affordable Care Act has made a real and important difference in my life.

And this reader has freedom from jobs altogether:

I got health insurance through Covered CA. I’m 64 and Obamacare allowed me to retire a year earlier. Before Obamacare I would have been uninsurable and have to keep working to get employer-based coverage. I worked as an RN for 38 years and was wearing out fast. It’s the best thing that could have happened.

(Photo by Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)