Tag: Premium

Josh Green makes the “case for extending jobless benefits in seven charts.” One of the most striking:

How Republicans are approaching the unemployment insurance fight:

[M]ultiple Republicans are going all in on the suggestion that they would support extending benefits if only it were paid for. Republicans want to reframe this as a battle over how to pay for extending benefits, not over whether to extend them at all — as a fight over fiscal responsibility, not over whether to preserve the safety net amid mass unemployment.

Beutler suggests calling the GOP’s bluff:

[I]f Democrats relent and agree to an offset, one consolation will be some insight into the split between the GOP’s political opportunists and its unyielding ideologues — those who refuse to subsidize the less fortunate and have convinced themselves that the long-term unemployed have been lulled into complacency by unemployment benefits or have determined that it’s not in their interest to return to work. These are the folks who side with Heritage Action and other conservative groups warning Republicans not to vote for any UI extension, even one that’s deficit neutral.

Remember, nobody actually thinks unemployment is such an emergency that it’s appropriate to renew emergency unemployment benefits but not such an emergency that it’s better to let them expire if they add to the deficit. If anyone actually fit into that category they’d be willing to defray the cost by closing tiny tax loopholes. In the days ahead I wouldn’t be surprised if Republicans vote down such an offset unanimously.

Cassidy notes that “the financial cost of the program is pretty modest: about two billion dollars a month in 2013”:

Other than an ideological aversion to government spending of any kind, there is no reason not to extend unemployment benefits for a while longer. Economists sometimes worry that making them available for long periods will encourage the jobless to remain unemployed rather than taking jobs, but careful studies have failed to show much evidence of this. When employment openings are scarce, as they are still, a bigger worry is that curtailing benefits will encourage some of the long-term unemployed to drop out of the labor force completely. (As a condition for receiving benefits, recipients have to be looking for work.) When that happens, it inflicts further suffering on many of the people concerned, and crimps the growth potential of the economy at large.

Perhaps it isn’t accurate to say that most Republican senators and congressman don’t care about these things. But they are trapped inside a party and a conservative movement that, increasingly, makes them act as though this were the case.

Waldman considers the moral underpinnings of the UI debate:

When liberals talk about extending unemployment insurance, they talk about people who can’t find work and are keeping their heads above water only because of those benefits. Take away the benefits, and that family could lose their home or suffer other kinds of deprivation. What distresses liberals is the thought of a family that needs help not getting it. Conservatives don’t deny that those people exist. But they don’t talk about them. When conservatives talk about this issue, they focus on a different kind of person, the one who could get a job, but hasn’t because he’s chosen to suckle at government’s teat, making taxpayers pay for his continued enjoyment of things like food and heat.

Liberals don’t deny that those people exist, either. Somewhere, there’s an unemployed engineer who could get a menial job somewhere, but is managing to pay the rent and feed himself with the help of unemployment benefits, and is hoping that if he holds out a few more months he’ll be able to find a job in his chosen field. What liberals believe is that even if you think that guy is “undeserving,” taking away 50 other deserving people’s benefits just so you can tell that one guy to get his butt down to Arby’s to fill out an application would be unconscionably cruel. But that numeric argument is utterly unpersuasive to conservatives, because the family not getting the benefits they need—even fifty such families—doesn’t, for them, have the same moral urgency as the one guy getting benefits they think he doesn’t deserve.

Recent Dish on the unemployment insurance debate here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar explains that the high price of drugs isn’t entirely due to corporate greed:

Often you will hear people talking about why drugs are expensive: it’s the greedy pharmaceutical companies, the patent system, the government, capitalism itself. All these factors contribute to increasing the price of a drug, but one very important factor often gets entirely overlooked: Drugs are expensive because the science of drug discovery is hard. And it’s just getting harder. In fact purely on a scientific level, taking a drug all the way from initial discovery to market is considered harder than putting a man on the moon, and there’s more than a shred of truth to this contention.

In this series of posts I will try to highlight some of the purely scientific challenges inherent in the discovery of new medicines. I am hoping that this will make laymen appreciate a little better why the cost of drugs doesn’t have everything to do with profit and power and much to do with scientific ignorance and difficulty; as one leading scientist I know quips, “Drugs are not expensive because we are evil, they are expensive because we are stupid.”

I could actually end this post right here by stating one simple, predominant reason why the science of drug discovery is so tortuous: it’s because biology is complex. The second reason is because we are dealing with a classic multiple variable optimization problem, except that the variables to be optimized again pertain to a very poorly understood, complex and unpredictable system.

In a later post, he focuses on the difficulty of finding new drugs:

Almost every single time, irrespective of the starting source, a promising newly discovered molecule is what’s called a hit. A hit is to a drug what a freshly minted West Point graduate is to a four-star general. It is weak and unpolished in its interactions with biological system and it can often be too toxic. It may be poorly absorbed or it may hang around in the body for much too long. It may be impossible to press it into a pill and it may be impossible to simply get it into cells in the first place. Namely, it may have a lot of potential but very few real credentials. With some effort a hit may be turned into a lead which is a better version of a hit but still inadequate. Turning a hit or lead into a drug occupies the mind of the best scientists in academia and industry and even after decades of efforts there is no general formula which will achieve this. But not for lack of trying.

Siddhartha Mahanta exposes how your tax dollars are funding the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the lobbying arm of Big Beef:

Imagine if the federal government mandated that a portion of all federal gas taxes go directly to the oil industry’s trade association, the American Petroleum Institute. Imagine further that API used this public money to finance ad campaigns encouraging people to drive more and turn up their thermostats, all while lobbying to discredit oil industry critics—from environmentalists to those calling for better safety regulations or alternative energy sources. That’s a deal not even Exxon could pull off, yet the nation’s largest meat-packers now enjoy something quite like it. Today, when you buy a Big Mac or a T-bone, a portion of the cost is a tax on beef, the proceeds from which the government hands over to a private trade group called the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The NCBA in turn uses this public money to buy ads encouraging you to eat more beef, while also lobbying to derail animal rights and other agricultural reform activists, defeat meat labeling requirements, and defend the ongoing consolidation of the industry. …

[I]n the case of the NCBA, the degree of subsidy is particularly extreme.

With its membership having shrunk from 40,000 in 1994 to 26,000 today, only 7 percent of the NCBA’s revenue comes from membership dues. That means that most of the cost of its overhead, from the $434,477 it paid its chief executive in 2010 to the cost of keeping the lights on and maintaining its Web site, comes from public money. As such, the comingling of its public money with lobbying activity is inherent and of great value. If the NCBA didn’t have those checkoff funds, says rancher Steve Charter, “they would have a pretty tough time keeping going.” Put another way, without the public money it receives, the NCBA might not even exist, and certainly would not have the lobbying clout it has today. As it is, the NCBA uses its power to lobby on a broad range of issues besides meat labeling that benefit meat-packers and other concentrated interests in agriculture. Most dramatic has been its successful effort to sabotage the Obama administration’s high-profile campaign to use antitrust law to limit the power of the big packers.

The NCBA is also a major opponent of animal welfare legislation:

The NCBA’s hostility to the Humane Society also puts it at odds with many independent ranchers. To be sure, ranchers and animal rights activists have stood for decades on almost entirely opposite sides of all farming issues. But that is changing, as consumer awareness and concern grows over the ethical and public health issues raised by confined animal feeding operations and other forms of industrial agriculture. Ranchers who treat their animals well want the public to know their story, and don’t want to be forced to subsidize a trade group that vilifies their potential customers as animal rights “radicals.”

Update from a reader: “In his new book Meatonomics, David Robinson Simon digs deeper“:

·         Average market value of a cow in the North Central United States : $245

·         Average cost to raise a cow in that region : $498

·         Amount US taxpayers spend yearly to subsidize meat and dairy : $38 billion

·         To subsidize fruits and vegetables : $17 million

·         Revenue collected by US fishing industry per pound of fish caught : $0.59

·         Portion of this figure funded by taxpayers as subsidies : $0.28

·         Annual government-managed “checkoff” spending to promote meat and dairy : $557 million

·         To promote fruits and vegetables : $51 million

·         Human lives that a 50% excise tax on meat and dairy would save yearly : 172,000

·         Animal lives it would save : 26 billion

·         Pounds this tax would cut yearly from US carbon-equivalent emissions : 3.4 trillion

·         Pounds of carbon equivalents emitted yearly from all US motor vehicles and vessels : 3.3 trillion

Another:

I think the beef post is a little misleading. The article is referring to the USDA “check off” program from the mid-’80s. Now, I can’t stand NCBA, the dairy producers, or the egg or pork guys (based on health and animal welfare grounds) who all use this program. If the author wants to repeal the law, that’s fine, but it’s not fair to keep insinuating that it’s public money, as though Congress is appropriating general fun revenue to these ag industries. They agreed to tax themselves to raise the money. There are plenty of insidious corporate welfare programs to attack without making one out to be more than it is.

Philip Rucker and Robert Costa report that “there is deep disagreement among Republican leaders and strategists over whether to embrace an economic-mobility agenda in the 2014 midterm campaigns.” But some prominent Republicans are beginning to address the issue:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) will give a speech Wednesday that aides said will lay out changes to federal programs to help people climb out of poverty permanently. In the weeks to come, Rubio also plans to introduce ideas to make it easier for mid-career adults to go back to college or learn new job skills at vocational schools. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the 2012 vice-presidential nominee, has been traveling to impoverished areas and meeting with community organizers. He plans to address poverty in an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams on Thursday.

A third potential GOP presidential candidate, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), is also putting a renewed emphasis on the poor, traveling to Detroit to pitch a plan to revitalize urban centers through “economic freedom zones.” Paul has given his message on income inequality an ideological edge — mixing lofty, empathetic language with anti-government broadsides. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who has been visiting urban schools, will give a speech Wednesday promoting school choice as a way to address poverty. And Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has proposed increasing the child tax credit as a means of blending social conservatism with anti-poverty policies.

York advises the GOP against “a high-profile Republican campaign on poverty — a campaign launched without the party’s internal agreement on a specific anti-poverty agenda”:

Contrary to critics on the left, there’s little doubt that for many Republicans, the initiative is heartfelt. But going forward without a plan leaves the GOP open to the critique that it’s all talk. And even if it were all talk, the new strategy ignores the (at least rhetorical) lesson of the Democrats’ recent successes: When it comes to winning votes, it’s all about the middle class.

Barro reviews the Republicans’ anti-poverty ideas, or the lack thereof:

The Republican theory seems to be that if the government “just got out of the way” by cutting taxes, spending and regulation, then labor market would magically tighten, people would get jobs, and wages would rise. Empirical evidence for this proposition is lacking. … On the long-run side, Republican policies are again nominally aimed at raising long-run GDP growth. They do not address the question of how the returns from such growth are distributed. They don’t necessarily promote a tighter labor market or stronger wage growth. Even if that agenda is a growth agenda (dubious) that doesn’t make it an agenda that is effective at growing low or moderate market incomes.

Alec MacGillis piles on:

Saying that the Republicans lack an agenda to address poverty does not necessarily mean that they need to endorse every Democratic proposal—even back in the heyday of the George Romney moderates, Republicans opposed some New Deal and Great Society measures as too top-down or unwieldy or big-government. But, unlike today, they proposed real alternatives. If Republicans today believe that raising the minimum wage is too much of a burden on small business, they could pass a major expansion of the earned-income tax credit, as conservative economist Greg Mankiw suggests. If they believe that extended unemployment benefits are discouraging some workers from taking available jobs, they could seek to more narrowly target extended benefits to make sure they’re available to those who the data shows have the cards most stacked against them—say, by age or location. If they believe the food stamp program and other elements of the War on Poverty really have failed—despite ample evidence to the contrary—they can go back to the Nixon or Romney toolbox of the ‘60s and early ‘70s for the approaches they think may have worked better.

But aside from the occasional highly touted speeches by a senator here or there, there are no active efforts along these lines …

Sargent thinks the GOP must respond to these issues eventually:

Democrats are going to do everything they can to shift the Obamacare debate into a broader economic context on their own terms — highlighting stories of Americans being helped by the law, arguing that Republicans would take away its benefits and protections, and tying it to broader GOP resistance to policies that would help struggling Americans, such as the minimum wage hike and unemployment extension. Tying Obamacare to this broader debate will be a major goal in Obama’s upcoming State of the Union Speech, which might get a bit of media attention. Also, it isn’t as if Republicans can avoid having a poverty agenda. Soon enough, they’ll have to decide whether to kill the extension of unemployment benefits and block the minimum wage hike. These votes will happen, whether or not Republicans roll out a broader agenda.

Michael Crowley lays out how Obama will and won’t respond to a resurgent al Qaeda in Iraq. He says “the White House’s game plan involves better arming Maliki to repel al-Qaeda forces from his country”:

With America out of Iraq, disillusioned with Afghanistan, and clearly opposed to intervening in Syria, the opposition to a direct re-engagement in Iraq could be intense. Even McCain and Graham don’t propose it. And the administration now says it supports repealing the war authority Congress granted George W. Bush in the fall of 2002, which in theory might be used to justify renewed military action there. “It would take nothing short of a catastrophic attack on the United States at home to get U.S. forces back into Iraq,” says Daniel Benjamin, formerly the Obama State Department’s top counter-terrorism official and now at Dartmouth’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. ”The American public has zero appetite for engagement in Iraq.”

Totten sees no easy way to destroy al Qaeda, in Iraq or elsewhere:

Al Qaeda has such a wide theater to operate in that counterinsurgency is a game of planet-wide whack-a-mole. Booted out of Afghanistan? Go to Iraq! Defeated in Iraq by the Americans? Move to Mali! Kicked out of Mali by the French? Go to Libya! It’s like using radiation and chemotherapy against a cancer that won’t stop metastasizing.

I’d love to be able to say we should do x, y, and z and Al Qaeda will eventually cease to exist, but there are no x, y, and z. The world may have to wait for this scourge to extinguish itself like communism did in Europe. That hardly implies we should do nothing in the meantime—we did not sit passively by until the Soviets self-destructed—but our options are limited and it will likely take decades.

(Photo: The roof of vehicle is partially destroyed following of a suicide car bomb that detonated outside a central police station in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on January 7, 2014, killing two people and wounding some 52 others. By Marwan Ibrahim/AFP/Getty Images)

Victoria Turk yawns at the hype of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), singling out one of this year’s buzzy gadgets, an app-enabled toothbrush:

CES always seems to bring out these sort of “wow look, a random everyday object—but connected!” kind of products, and they inevitably get a disproportionate amount of hype. Remember the HAPIfork from last year? The “smart fork” that measures how fast you eat ended up plastered across the media as if it were the greatest invention since the internet. What good is your smartphone anyway, if it won’t wirelessly connect with your silverware? Or, indeed, your toothbrush? …

I’d almost guarantee that you won’t see many people using “connected” toothbrushes anytime soon. I’ve written before about how calling something “smart” doesn’t automatically make it so, and I’m afraid the toothbrush could be a victim to that mindset. While the company claims in their promo video that “Kolibree helps you outsmart your dentist,” the truth is that it doesn’t do much more than you could with a regular toothbrush, a stopwatch, and maybe a mirror. Or alternatively, just that common sense you’ve hopefully gained after decades of brushing practice.

Also noting the proliferation of wearable technology at CES, Leonid Bershidsky wonders when, or whether, someone will develop this market’s “killer app”:

The smartphone market took about 10 years to get to the point where consumers could make sense of what was on offer. Now there’s just Android and Apple’s iOS. If you want to be generous, there’s also Windows Phone, which Microsoft says is outselling Apple in a number of countries but which still has less than 4 percent market share. All the platforms offer a more or less identical list of functions and plenty of apps.

The wearable market offers no such clarity and standardization. “We expect every smartwatch provider to build their own app store, and consumers to experience a lawless jungle by 2015,” the Finnish wearable software company Koru, headed by Nokia Lifeblog creator Christian Lindholm, predicted in a December presentation. It is still an open question what a wearable device should really do. Is it OK simply to tell time and interact with a smartphone, showing messages and push notifications on a smaller but more accessible screen and using voice commands to manage the phone? Or should it also have the functions of a fitness band, tracking workouts, counting calories and analyzing sleep patterns? Does a person need a watch and a wristband?

Kyle VanHemert talks about a new tool for keeping time:

Durr [seen above] is a watch designed to draw attention to that slippery disconnect between time as it passes and how we perceive it passing. Instead of hands or numbers, it’s just a solid, colorful disk. Every five minutes, it vibrates. … [Designer Theo] Tveterås says it adds an undeniable “rhythm” to the day, chopping it into chunks small enough to let you look back and consider what you’ve been doing (vibrating any more often than every five minutes, they found was annoying; any longer than 10 and it became hard to remember when the last interval started).

Of course, giving people an existential metronome can have the opposite effect. In some cases, it hasn’t led to the wearer noticing the passing of time but rather time passing away. “We’ve gotten feedback from other people using it that it acts a little like a countdown for life, which wasn’t the intention at all,” Tveterås says. “But the memento mori aspect is very fascinating, too.”

Tikker, another new watch, is designed to be a countdown of your life, second by second – based on “an algorithm like the one used by the federal government to figure a person’s life expectancy“:

Tikker’s inventor is a 37-year-old Swede named Fredrik Colting. He says he invented the gadget not as a morbid novelty item, but in an earnest attempt to change his own thinking. He wanted some sort of reminder to not sweat the small stuff and reach for what matters. Colting, a former gravedigger, figured imminent death was the best motivator there is. That’s why he calls Tikker “the happiness watch.” It’s his belief that watching your life slip away will remind you to savor life while you have it. And, it turns out, there is some evidence for his point of view. A 2009 study showed that thinking about death makes you savor life more. And a 2011 study has shown that thinking about death makes you more generous, more likely to donate your blood.

Jenny Davis doesn’t mind that the algorithm is flawed:

Really, the Tikker is not much different than putting an inspirational saying on your bathroom mirror. It reminds you to live a certain way, focuses your energies on this lifestyle mentality, and encourages you to remain reflexive, always mindful of who you are, who you want to be, and how you have to live to get there. … This technology quantifies the self inaccurately, but these inaccuracies are of little consequence, as the numbers are but tools in the pursuit of a particular kind of mindfulness; a particular urgency of life.

Scientists are studying the brains of athletes in search of “brain-training techniques that will enable the rest of us to develop elite-level mental agility”:

In a series of studies starting in 2009, [researcher Martin] Paulus and his colleagues put hardened Marines, elite adventure racers, and regular Joes through various cognitive tasks while monitoring their brain activity in real time with an fMRI scanner. To provide an “aversive stimulus”—a scaled-down version of the stress they’d experience when coming under enemy fire or taking a wrong turn during a multi-day race—the researchers occasionally interfered with subjects’ breathing, restricting airflow to masks they were wearing.

The subjects knew the sensation was coming but not always when. Some members of the control group panicked and had to be removed from the scanner, but the Marines and the adventure racers handled the scenario with ease. In the fMRI scanner, they showed higher activation in the insular cortex immediately before the restricted breathing started. They had, essentially, prepared themselves for the unpleasant sensation. Then, while it was happening, the same region of the brain showed lower activity and carried on with business as usual. “That kind of anticipation and preparation is critical,” Paulus says. The goal, then, is to train your brain to anticipate, and not overreact, to unexpected stress. …

For now, the most promising technique is one that’s already familiar to many professional athletes:

meditation. Paulus’s latest study put 30 Marine recruits through a program in mindfulness, an approach to self-awareness with roots in Buddhist teachings. “You learn to monitor how your body actually feels while suspending judgment about it,” Paulus explains. In the study, subjects followed an eight-week course that taught simple breathing exercises, sitting and walking meditation, yoga, and techniques like “body scans,” in which they focused awareness on each part of their bodies, progressing from head to toe. Brain scans before and after revealed that the trainees acquired some of the same brain patterns that the Marines and adventure racers had shown in the earlier experiments. More surprising, the changes persisted a year later. The biggest effects were in the MPC [medial prefrontal cortex], which moderates knee-jerk responses to external stimuli.