The Stopped Clock

You Gotta Watch Out For... Talking Dolls

2008-10-11T13:37:00.003-04:00

Have you heard about the talking doll whose short, pre-recorded stream of babble has been represented to include both pro-Islamic and pro-Satanic messages? If you made up this story, you would no doubt be accused of "elitism" and insulting the intelligence of the very people who are insisting that these "messages" are real.

What we are seeing, of course, is how impressionable the mind is, and how easy it can be to "hear" something in babble or nonsense syllables once you are told it is there. As well as how religious (and other) symbols, combined with fear, can make people... dare I say, irrational.

Read more here, along with links to videos and audio samples, and examples of other dolls that supposedly said horrible things.

Michelle Rhee's Secret Plan for Teacher Pay

2008-10-11T13:04:00.006-04:00

The Washington Post is again pushing Michelle Rhee's plan for eliminating tenure at for new hires and any teachers who join the new program, and increasing teacher pay for those teachers:

The bold plan of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee is two-tiered: Salaries as high as $130,000 would be available to teachers who forgo tenure and tie their pay to student performance, while those retaining tenure would still receive generous raises. No teacher with tenure would be forced to give it up under the voluntary plan.

I remain puzzled by this, for reasons also raised by this editorial:

Montgomery County teachers have been told that they'll probably have to forgo the 5.3 percent pay raise they had been promised for next year because of a worsening economy. Fairfax County, which this year could afford only 2 percent cost-of-living raises for its teachers, has no idea what it will be able to provide with revenue shrinking.

In other words, funds for increased teacher pay are unlikely to come from taxpayers - and given the state of the economy, school budget woes can reasonably be expected to get worse before they get better.

Still, union leaders have balked, thus jeopardizing the $200 million that Ms. Rhee says she has raised from national foundations willing to fund the contract -- but only if the District revamps how teachers are compensated.

Finally a hint at how D.C. will pay for the plan - at least initially - but more details are needed. That $200 million will last how many years? Followed by what? Massive reductions in salary? Teacher layoffs? Seriously - what's the plan to sustain this level of expenditure?

The Post complains about a critic of the plan:

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, criticized the plan in a letter to the editor of the New York Times even though, as she admitted to us, she hasn't seen the plan.

So the Post believes you can't comment on this plan unless you've seen it? Even though they have yet to print the plan, post it on their website, or point people to a place where they can read the plan?

I can't really argue with that, as I want to see the plan and its details so I can evaluate it for myself. I would like to know the specifics. Weingarted may be encountering the same problem I am having - the details of the plan appear to be a closely guarded secret, so to comment on the plan you have to rely on inferences and second-hand accounts.

But wait a second:

The union's refusal to put the proposal to a vote before its general membership is telling. Much misinformation about the proposal has been floated. Contrary to what has been said about the plan, there is apparently an appeals process for teachers who are terminated, as well as programs to aid in teacher development.

Apparently? So the Post hasn't seen the plan either, and the authors of this unsigned editorial are relying upon second-hand descriptions that they don't even know to be true. I guess it's okay to support a plan you haven't read, just not to oppose it.

Brooks Somehow Missed the Joke

2008-10-10T12:54:00.006-04:00

David Brooks argues that the Republican Party engaged in class warfare, eroding its support among intellectuals:

[O]ver the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

* * *

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

The result, as Brooks sees it?

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

* * *

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

I think Brooks has it wrong. The Republican Party isn't declining because it has alienated intellectuals. It's declining due to a combination of bad policy decisions and its void of new ideas. That's why you have an array of Republicans suggesting that "You have to let the party die in order to save it", as if it will arise like a Phoenix once it is reduced to ash.

That perhaps also reflects this nation's unfortunate tendency to start by supporting a party, embracing the party label as a matter of personal identity, and deciding from there that we support its agenda. If we even think about its agenda. It takes a great shock to wake people up to the idea that their political party doesn't actually have their best interests at heart, even though it seems obvious that the other party is full of corrupt, self-serving slaves to special interests.

As I see it, the set of elites that gained control of the Republican Party, and who foisted their policies upon the nation for the past eight years, have managed to convince a great many conservatives that the modern Republican party is largely not conservative, and has embraced one bad policy after another. Are you a fiscal conservative? How can you not choke on the manner in which the Bush Administration has blown the budget? A foreign policy conservative? How do you feel, then, about aggressive overseas military interventionism and the positioning of the U.S. as world policeman in a never-ending "war on terror"? Are you a social or religious conservative? What did the Bush Administration actually deliver on social issues, despite using them as wedge issues to "inspire the base" in every recent national election? Are you a "club for growth" type who cares about little beyond enriching yourself and eliminating taxes on inherited wealth? Somehow I don't think getting a capital gains tax cut's your hot button issue this week....

The conservative intelligentsia was always in on the joke. They voted for the Republican Party because they thought that Republican policies would best advance their interests, and they understood that the party had to string "the base" along in order to gain and hold power. The Republican party is losing their support because it has proved itself unfit to rule. (Which isn't necessarily to say that the alternative is better, but we're way past the point where "holding the course" seems like a credible response to the problems facing this nation.)

As for losing the base, the "working class" - a term elites use to describe blue collar "red state" voters - has faced a lot of adversity during the years of the so-called "Bush Boom". Then there was the housing bubble - okay, but that mostly affected other people, and most Americans were ready to ride that one out. Then there was the financial industry meltdown and a promise of even harder times, but not to worry - a bailout is on the way... for bankers. The weird thing about getting people to worry about social issues is that they have plenty of time and energy for it when times are good, but when the economy melts down attentions start to shift toward substantive political and economic issues. Right now, that's bad for the Republican Party.

I could have saved a lot of typing and coopted Clinton. Attention, David Brooks: It's the economy, stupid!

It Was A Typo?

2008-10-10T12:45:00.003-04:00

Perhaps Hassett meant, "Dow 3,600".

Cover Girl

2008-10-10T12:34:00.003-04:00

I cold only wish I looked that "bad" in close-up.

How Venture Capitalists See The Economic Meltdown

2008-10-10T12:22:00.002-04:00

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn.

About That Legacy....

2008-10-09T17:47:00.002-04:00

Just a few weeks ago, some were still arguing that historians might eventually hold G.W. in high regard.

Does anybody still believe that?

"Standard Practice"

2008-10-08T14:46:00.005-04:00

With the demise of defined benefit retirement plans and the rise of self-funded plans, such as 401(k) plans, hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into the stock markets. This wasn't due to the brilliance of corporate executives. It was (and is) where workers were advised to place their money. That didn't (and doesn't) stop CEO's from taking the credit for this influx of cash, to lay claim to astronomical salaries and stock options, and corporate benefits and perks that could make a Saudi Prince drool with envy. The best part is, they can keep pulling out those salaries and benefits right up to the day they either run a company into the ground, or get booted out and float gently to earth thanks to a generous golden parachute. Or perhaps better, they can run the company into the ground, get a multi-billion dollar taxpayer bailout, and still indulge:

American International Group Inc., the insurer that hosted a $440,000 event at a California resort less than a week after receiving an $85 billion federal loan, said it is "reevaluating" its costs a day after facing Congressional criticism for the trip.

"While this sort of gathering has been standard practice in our industry for many years and was planned many months before the Federal Reserve's loan to AIG, we understand that our company is now facing very different challenges," Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy wrote today in a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Because there's nothing like indulging yourself before, during, and after you set about a course of atrociously bad business decisions that run your company into the ground.

Congratulations - you helped bail out AIG, so that they could continue their "standard practices". But nobody's going to bail out your retirement savings.

Health Insurance - The New Republican Entitlement Program

2008-10-08T09:30:00.006-04:00

Today, Michael Gerson rallies to McCain's defense on health care, lamenting that Joe Biden mischaracterized the tax effects of McCain's plan. He criticizes Obama for making accurate observations about the plan, such as his noting that the tax credit is payable"directly to your insurance company". He also complains,

"At least 20 million Americans," charges Obama, "will lose the insurance they rely on from their workplace." As Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center points out, this is a distortion. He cites a Tax Policy Center estimate that the McCain plan would result in 21 million people entering the individual insurance market by 2018 - many because individual ownership of insurance will be more attractive

Let's see what Obama actually said:

And here’s something else Senator McCain won’t tell you. When he taxes people’s benefits, many younger, healthier workers will decide that it’s a better deal to opt out of the insurance they get at work – and instead, go out into the individual market, where they can buy a cheaper plan. Many employers will be left with an older, sicker pool of workers who they can’t afford to cover. As a result, many employers will drop their health care plans altogether. And study after study has shown, that under the McCain plan, at least 20 million Americans will lose the insurance they rely on from their workplace.

So Obama accurately states that about 20 million people are projected to lose employer-sponsored health care. He specifically addresses the fact that this will result in part from workers who find private plans more appealing (younger, healthier workers) opting for those plans instead of their employers' group plans. That other people would acquire health insurance during the first ten years of the plan is neither a surprise nor relevant to the issue Obama was addressing. Further, if the number of new enrollees is something that must be mentioned, Gerson is guilty of the same sin by not acknowledging that Obama's plan is projected to insure a significantly greater number of people than McCain's.

Gerson also complains,

Obama terms the McCain plan "radical" - which is its main virtue. It goes to the root of the problem - a system that depends mainly on businesses to provide health coverage.

Er, right... How dare Obama mention the plan's "main virtue".

Over the past few decades, the rising cost of health coverage to employers has eaten up pay increases, acting as a wage cap and leaving many incomes stagnant or falling. Business-based health coverage leaves many workers afraid to change jobs - a handicap in the constant employment churn of the new economy. It discriminates against the self-employed and places unique burdens on small businesses. And it insulates workers from decisions about health-care costs.

So let's see... Under McCain's plan:

Rising costs of health care will continue to devour wage increases, except workers will have to absorb 100% of the increase. The employer will no longer share in that increased expense.
It's not clear who the people are who are "afraid to change jobs" under the current system. Even if you don't change jobs, you can't rely upon your employer to maintain the same plans or coverage from year to year under the current system. Changing jobs to an employer with inferior health coverage or no health coverage translates into a pay cut, so we shouldn't expect people to voluntarily do that. The current system can be an impediment to self-employment, but that's something McCain has chosen to ignore.
The McCain plan does nothing to address the real problem - if you lose your job, you lose your coverage. Whether it's your employer who stops paying for it, or you who can't afford it, if the premiums aren't paid you lose your coverage. Gerson's later argument makes it plain that he understands this, so it seems dishonest of him to not admit it.
In terms of the current plan discriminating against the self-employed, how does that change? McCain envisions employers giving their employees raises equivalent to the employer's share of their current health plan - in his memos and talking points he likes to talk about a $9,000 raise for a family, 75% of a $12,000 health plan. Who's going to hand a raise like that to a self-employed individual? Or does he think this is a good economy in which the self-employed can raise their prices and fees? (After all, according to his reinvention of his past remarks, the self employed number among the "fundamentals of our economy", and thus they are "strong".)
Is it a bad thing to insulate an insured person from the costs borne by the insurer? Isn't that the whole point of insurance - to spread the costs, so that individuals aren't disadvantaged when they have unexpected medical emergencies or illnesses? So that they don't have to fret over whether they can take their child to a doctor or afford needed medications? And all assumptions aside, who says that individuals will do a better job of assessing which costs are unnecessary or avoidable? That's a nice gloss, but if Gerson wished to be honest he would acknowledge that the real goal is to shift more cost onto the consumer and, once that shift occurs, sponsors of McCain-style plans don't care if there are cost savings.

Gerson apparently rejects the McCain camp's argument that a government-sponsored insurance plan would be subsidized, instead arguing,

Unlike private companies, government can cut costs by imposing price controls and shifting costs to others (just as Medicare does). Over time, this would give the government an unfair price advantage over private insurance, causing more and more businesses to pay into the public program.

I recognize that Gerson rarely knows what he's talking about, but is he for real? Has he ever seen an "explanation of benefits" form from a private insurer, describing the discount the insurer has negotiated for medical services? An insurance company may pay $560 for a procedure that would be billed to a private consumer at $1,000. There's no "cost shift" there? Also, if an insurer (public or private) doesn't offer enough money to doctors and hospitals, they will opt out of the program. Perhaps it hasn't occurred to Gerson that this one of the reasons why many doctors, hospitals, clinics and pharmacies don't participate in certain insurance plans. He also can't explain why a private insurer couldn't negotiate the exact same rate as the government, or benefit from being able to offer a much larger network of participating doctors, hospitals and pharmacies due to even modestly higher reimbursement rates.

Obama's health plan is really slow-motion Medicare for all. And the problem with Medicare-like price controls is that they reduce the number of people willing to provide medical services, which always means longer lines and rationing.

Ah. That must be why people in nations with national health care plans are so eager to switch to "American-style" plans, and why the elderly of this nation are so unhappy with Medicare. And when did France and Germany get waiting lists? No system is perfect, but it's better to point to actual defects than to instead spout right-wing canards.

Here's where Gerson highlights the deficiency of McCain's plan that he previously glossed over - the fact that if you lose your job, you lose your insurance:

McCain's health plan has a problem of its own. It is not too radical but too timid. A refundable tax credit of $5,000 per family - in addition to increased cash wages from employers no longer burdened with paying for health care - would help middle-class workers get insurance. But for people on the lower end of the scale - who don't qualify for Medicaid - the $5,000 credit alone would not be enough to buy adequate coverage, which can cost more than double that amount.

It's interesting here that Gerson isn't suggesting that we eliminate Medicaid (or Medicare) in favor of this new "tax credit for all" - why not? Isn't that the proper "market" solution? And if we're keeping Medicaid, thereby rejecting the idea of a pure "market" solution, why not expand its reach to pick up people who can't afford private insurance? It's also interesting that Gerson claims that health coverage for a family can cost "almost double" the amount of the $5,000 tax credit. It can cost a lot more than that - and that's before we start talking about copayments and deductibles.

To be a genuine alternative, Republicans should follow their own logic and make the ownership of private health insurance an entitlement.

That should be an easy sell to the population of true "compassionate conservatives" in the Republican Party. But now that Gerson's convinced himself, how's he going to sell that idea to everyone else?

Fund the purchase of a basic health insurance plan completely, through a refundable tax credit, so every low-income American can afford insurance.

Help me out here - what's a "basic plan"? It isn't enough to provide a "basic plan" to somebody you know can't use it because they can't afford deductibles and copays, so would the "basic plan" minimize those amounts? You know, and insulate participants "from decisions about health-care costs"?

They say the devil is in the details. Apparently Gerson's religious beliefs prevent him from directly addressing the devil.

Losing the Gatekeeper

2008-10-07T15:24:00.004-04:00

Will the cost and prevalence of arguably unnecessary tests and procedures go up or down if people are driven into "consumer-directed" health plans - plans with minimal coverage for routine care, huge copays, and benefits that really only kick in if you suffer catastrophic illness or injury? Despite the conjecture of health economists that people will make glorious, informed, cost-effective choices if asked to pay for their own care, I suspect they'll go up.

Why? Because right now insurance companies act as a gatekeeper. If their analysis shows that a particular procedure is unnecessary, or that a more cost-effective procedure will suffice, they'll refuse to pay for the more expensive or "unnecessary" test or procedure. Sure, the denials can be frustrating, even maddening, but they do hold down health care costs.

Consumers don't have the information, resources, or sophistication to make a similar evaluation of a doctor's recommendation. They may not even have a chance to reflect on whether they should agree to an expensive procedure at an emergency room, let alone inquire and evaluate alternatives, assuming they're even in a state of mind to do so. But maybe that's "okay" if it's an individual who is stuck with the bill?

Making A Public Record Of Your Life....

2008-10-07T11:32:00.004-04:00

Tapped points to a story about how a teen, hoping to avoid the draft in Israel, was foiled by the content of her FaceBook page. It established that she did not, in fact, lead the religious lifestyle she professed when seeking an exemption from military service. But anybody can do this, not just the military. Many employers look for this stuff. Lawyers should, as well.

Recently I dug up a FaceBook page by a witness who had "flipped", and was testifying on behalf of the government. My effort was 90% perspiration and 10% luck. (Or maybe that's the other way around.) The witness had nothing on his page that identified him by his actual name, or even by any alias or nickname known to the defense. But he sprinked enough into a comment he made on somebody else's page that I found him. I was brought into the case at a very late date, unfortunately, as I suspect his public page was just the tip of the iceberg - and I really would have liked to have seen the private content of his page, as well as getting his email addresses and following their trail to online email accounts or other sites that may have provided even more information about his activities and schemes. (The witness was demolished on cross, but the defendants were nonetheless convicted.)

If you're a lawyer, you have to look for this stuff - and you have to look early. For that matter, look late as well - if you find FaceBook or MySpace pages, blogs, or similar pages by jurors, see what they write about the case and when they write it. Look for posts by witnesses - in a recent fatal car-pedestrian accident I know about - as a friend of the family, not as a lawyer - a witness poured his heart out onto his blog. Would your trial and discovery prep be improved by having a witness account that is close to contemporaneous?

McCain's Enormous Health Care Assumptions

2008-10-07T08:02:00.004-04:00

While asserting that (but not explaining why) Obama's plan is superior to McCain's, Ruth Marcus provides a rose-colored view of the McCain health care plan that illuminates how McCain expects - or probably more accurately, expect us to believe - that the plan would work.

So what does John McCain's plan do? It has just such a refundable credit: $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family. The Obama campaign tries to scare voters into believing that this is a terrible deal, noting that the average family policy costs about $12,000.

True, but if you get $12,000 in health insurance from your employer and are in the 25 percent tax bracket, you would owe another $3,000 in taxes. The credit would let you take $5,000 off your overall tax bill. You come out ahead -- unless your insurance is hugely generous, in which case it's serving to drive up everyone's health-care costs.

In other words, if you currently have a $12,000 plan for your family and your employer picks up 75% of the cost, the McCain plan envisions your getting a $9,000 raise when your employer stops paying that 75% contribution to the cost of your health insurance. She assumes you would pay 25% in taxes, thus paying $3,000 in federal taxes on the cost of your health plan. She then assures you that the McCain tax credit more than makes up for the difference, as $5,000 is greater than $3,000.

What's wrong with these assumptions?

People at the lower end of the job market are not getting $9,000 per year subsidies of their insurance. We can argue that they are also covered by cheaper policies - man of them are underinsured - but let's not pretend that the McCain plan will enable them to afford $12,000 per year health insurance.
Employees won't get raises equivalent to the employer's contribution to their health plan, let alone to a family plan. The assumption that the market will compel employers to give raises equivalent to a family-sized contribution is absurd. If raises are offered they will at most be at the level of the benefit to a single employee, or the average cost to all employees, resulting perhaps in a boon to single employees but a net loss to people on family plans.
- Employers are not going to increase their payroll by giving oversized raises to employees who don't participate in family health plans - those who are single, or opt out because they have insurance through their spouse or domestic partner.
- Employers have an incentive to shave their costs by giving raises smaller than their current contributions.
- Employers may not give raises at all. John McCain may not understand this, having married rich and found himself a sinecure in the Senate, but a lot of employees right now will have a hard time making a lateral move at equivalent pay. For employees who have been on the job for twenty or thirty years, earning significantly higher wages than their peers due to annual raises, the employer may see a golden opportunity to both cut their effective pay and shift their increasing insurance costs off of its books.
Health insurance costs are increasing much faster than the rate of inflation, and wages are not. Even if we assume a raise that covers this year's cost, with each passing year the employee will bear more and more of the cost. Not just an increased copay on a 25% contribution, but an increase of the full cost. With health care inflation at about 6% per year, if we assume inflation of 3%, that translates into a $360+ pay decrease every year a worker maintains that (presently) $12,000 plan. Marcus indicates that McCain will index the tax credit to inflation, but not to health care inflation.
If a raise is offered that, in fact, makes it a "better deal" to drop employer-sponsored coverage, at least in terms of take-home pay, younger, healthier employees are likely to go uninsured or to opt for minimal coverage. That will raise the costs of health insurance for older and sicker employees, while increasing the likelihood that the increased population of uninsured and underinsured people will end up passing the costs of catastrophic injury or illness on to the taxpayer or other patients.
Employers are apt to drop their health plans quickly, not "eventually" as Ruth Marcus suggests. Doing so when the job market is bad makes sense, as employees are less able to seek jobs with more generous health plans. Smaller businesses are likely to quickly drop employee health plans. Once a few major employers successfully make the shift, you'll see a cascade. Let's not forget, that's the design of the plan, and is what Ruth Marcus assures us makes it attractive.
Oops - no mention of payroll taxes. Employers aren't going to transform their tax-deductible insurance contributions into a raise of equivalent size. They're going to reduce it by their share of payroll taxes. Your $9,000 raise drops to about $8,200. After your own share of payroll taxes and state income taxes, your tax bill is probably $4,000. Under McCain's rosy assumptions you come out slightly ahead this year, but the benefit disappears next year or the year after due to health care inflation - it's just delaying by a year the amount of time it takes for you to go in the hole. But even that one- or two-year benefit is abstract - as we previously discussed, if your job is at all typical, you won't be getting that $9,000 raise McCain and Marcus assume.
Your "free market" plan, even at the same cost, will be vastly inferior to your employer-sponsored plan. You will be denied coverage over pre-existing conditions, or perhaps simply because of your age. (Marcus concedes that insurers will "cherry-pick the healthiest enrollees" under McCain's plan.)

Your immediate costs - copays, deductibles, the cost of care excluded from the plan, etc. - will go up the second you sign up for an equivalently priced plan as as individual. A few years ago when I was about to reach the end of COBRA coverage on a really nice employer-sponsored plan, I priced private plans - I found many at comparable cost, but none which offered anything even close to the same level of coverage. Some of the plans were then in the range of $16,000 - $20,000 per year for a family of three, but they didn't offer the same benefits of the $12,000 plan, available to federal employees, that McCain likes to ballyhoo as the type of insurance you are likely to be able to afford under his plan. Not even close. And that's assuming you don't try to "save money" by purchasing a less expensive plan that shifts an even greater portion of the cost of your care and prescriptions onto you.

Marcus asserts that we should assume that McCain's on the right track, because one of Obama's economic advisors endorses the idea of replacing employer-sponsored care with a tax credit. But if Marcus were to read past the McCain memo she seemingly cribbed when writing her column, she should be identifying the elements that the advisor asserts would be part of any effective plan - progressive tax credits, mandatory coverage "or other institutional mechanisms to increase participation", new pooling mechanisms, and reducing adverse selection in existing pooling mechanisms. She should also acknowledge that plan is intended to "eliminate the incentive to go from some insurance to more insurance," while "increasing the incentive to go from no insurance to some insurance" - but without clear concepts of what that means, it's literally an experiment with people's health and lives.

A huge hole in this type of plan is that, even if we assume that everything else goes as promised and disregard the many reasons to believe that won't happen, the distortion of tying insurance to employment isn't eliminated. It's reduced - once you're buying your own plan you can keep it even as you move from job to job - but if you lose your income you can't pay your premiums, and thus lose your coverage. As with employer-sponsored care, that could still result in your loss of coverage if you become disabled from working due to illness or injury - and if you recover, you will almost certainly face increased costs for an equivalent private plan or may even find that you cannot get health insurance, rather that being able to get coverage at a group rate through an employer-sponsored plan that doesn't consider your pre-existing conditions. Obama's plan is better in this regard only because it maintains employer-sponsored plans, such that if you return to work you can again get insurance at a group rate, but neither plan actually addresses the problem of paying for insurance when you're between jobs.

The aforementioned McCain memo accuses Obama and Biden of "lying" about the plan, and purports that their claims have "failed every fact-check". Unfortunately no links to those fact-checks are provided, and that claim itself seems dubious. But let's check out the truthiness of McCain's claims about Obama's plan:

Barack Obama's Plan Continues The Push Toward Government-Run Healthcare: The Obama plan will create a brand new government-run health plan at the cost of $243 billion a year – a financial burden of more than $3,000 a year on American families.

McCain doesn't explain how he came up with that figure. I did find this:

Researchers at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center project McCain's plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 1.3 million in the first year at a cost $185 million. About 20 million people would lose their employer-sponsored coverage under McCain's plan, but 21 million would gain coverage on the individual market.

Obama's plan in its first year would reduce the number of uninsured by 18.4 million at a cost of $86 billion. Over 10 years, McCain's plan would cost $1.3 trillion and Obama's would cost $1.6 trillion, according to the report.

So McCain wants to spin a fiction that his plan is free, whereas in fact its projected cost is only marginally less than that of Obama's plan, and he neglects to mention that in the first year alone Obama's plan is projected to provides coverage to more than 17 million people who McCain would leave out in the cold.

Barack Obama's Plan Will Harm Employer Coverage: The Obama plan includes a $179 billion a year employer mandate. The mandate requires employers to either provide "meaningful" coverage or pay a tax towards the government plan. Faced with tough economic conditions and rising health costs this creates a clear incentive for employers to drop coverage and move families into the new government plan.

So we're supposed to accept that the biggest benefit of McCain's plan is that it will end employer-sponsored health care, but simultaneously pretend that Obama's plan will do more to bring about that end?

Barack Obama's Plan Will Damage Private Coverage: The government-run plan will have a clear advantage over private insurance since it will be subsidized by American taxpayers. A recent analysis of both plans by the nonpartisan CATO Institute concluded that the Obama government-run plan will be able to "keep its premiums artificially low…since it can turn to the U.S. Treasury to cover any shortfalls" resulting in "undercutting the private market."

Obviously, fears of a subsidy can be addressed in the legislation that authorizes any government-run plan, so McCain's claim amounts at best to overblown rhetoric and at worst to fear mongering. McCain aparently regards the words "could" and "will" as interchangable - let's not confuse what could happen with what will happen.

We should also consider what happened, for example, when we allowed private insurers to compete with Medicare through "Medicare Advantage". We ended up subsidizing the private insurers because Medicare was able to offer the same (or better) coverage for less money. The real fear here is probably not that the premiums will be artificially low, but that they will be naturally low, particularly as compared to plans offered to individuals by private insurers.
__________
1. Marcus writes,

No one designing a health-care system from scratch would set things up this way. Tying insurance to employment makes little sense in a world where workers hop from job to job. Excluding the value of insurance from taxable income leads to overconsumption of health care, driving up costs. It favors better-off employees who, because they pay higher marginal rates, derive a greater benefit from not being taxed on their health insurance.

Eliminating this distortion - if done the right way, and that's a big if - could help more Americans obtain insurance, push down costs and reduce the drain of health-care costs on the federal budget.

Even if we assume that there's a free market solution to this issue, Marcus does not explain what it would be and, abetted by columns like this, McCain is simply hoping that nobody is paying attention to the glaring flaws of his own plan. By all appearances, McCain is trying to dress up what amounts to a Gingrich-style plan to kill off affordable health insurance and shift costs onto consumers.

Well, He's Right....

2008-10-06T23:31:00.001-04:00

Except the angry barrage of insults was directed at Obama and came from his supporters.

Why We Don't Have A Financial Crisis

2008-10-06T23:05:00.005-04:00

Writing about debtors prisons some 250 years ago, Samuel Johnson observed,

Those who made the laws have apparently
supposed, that every deficiency of payment is the crime of the debtor. But the truth is, that the creditor always shares the act, and often more than shares the guilt, of improper trust. It seldom happens that any man imprisons another but for debts which he suffered to be contracted in hope of advantage to himself, and for bargains in which he proportioned his profit to his own opinion of the hazard ; and there is no reason why one should punish the other for a contract in which both concurred.

* * *

It is vain to continue an institution which experience shows to be ineffectual. We have now imprisoned one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We have now learned, that rashness and imprudence will not be deterred from taking credit; let us try whether fraud and avarice may be more easily restrained from giving it.

Fortunately, the world heeded Johnson's words and human nature has changed! Now people are unwilling to take on debts they cannot afford, and the abolition of debtor's prisons and advent of modern bankruptcy laws have made lenders cautious about making loans to people who may not be able to repay them.

The Clintons' Bad Gamble?

2008-10-06T22:44:00.004-04:00

It has seemed like even after he won the nomination the Clintons, and perhaps especially Bill Clinton, wanted Obama to come with hat in hand and say, "I just can't win this without you." More cynical people (and yes, there are some more cynical than I) have suggested that the Clintons secretly hoped Obama would lose so that Hillary Clinton could run again in 2012.

But if things keep going the way they're going, the Clinton's 1992 observation that it's "the economy, stupid" is going to prove itself correct, and Obama will "do it without them." In which case it not only would have been better for the party, but better for the Clintons, had they immediately and unreservedly gotten on board with Obama from the moment he became the inevitable nominee.

Note, I'm not suggesting that Hillary Clinton should have stopped campaigning one moment sooner than that. Note also, as I have previously suggested, I'm of the opinion that Obama could and should have done more to mend fences with the Clintons after the primary campaign ended.

What's The Story Here

2008-10-06T18:40:00.002-04:00

According to the Times,

Senator John McCain has also been targeted by a liberal group suggesting that his years in a prison camp have made him unfit to serve as president.

If anybody passing by here knows, what's the group and where can I find their website? (I know about "Vietnam Veterans Against McCain", but they don't appear to be a liberal group, it doesn't appear that anybody takes them seriously, and they don't fit the description.)

Truly, The Man Has No Shame

2008-10-06T18:16:00.005-04:00

Bill Kristol spins out all the latest Republican talking points in favor of Sarah Palin, with her eager assistance.

As for the campaign, Palin made clear - without being willing to flat out say so - that she regretted allowing herself to be overly handled and constrained after the Republican convention. She described the debate on Thursday night as “liberating,” and she emphasized how much she now looked forward to being out there, “getting to speak directly to the folks.”

You mean, by ignoring the questions? By insisting on hamstringing the format to avoid direct challenge of her evasions and misrepresentations? (I don't think the Democrats should have agreed to that, but on the other hand it might have looked bad had Biden been given the opportunity to directly challenge her. Which isn't to say that appearances should trump substance, but....)

The excessive handling, of course, included a broad effort by hack pundits aligned with the Republican Party to spin the "She's gonna crash and burn" line, as part of a concerted effort to drive the expectations for her performance down to ground level. As SNL put it, she didn't throw up so at worst we should call it a tie, right?

Since she seemed to have enjoyed the debate, I asked her whether she’d like to take this opportunity to challenge Joe Biden to another one.

There was a pause, and I thought I heard some staff murmuring in the background (we were on speaker phones). She passed on the notion of a challenge. But she did say she was more than willing to accept an invitation to debate with Biden again, and even expressed a preference for a town hall meeting-type format.

So she won't challenge Biden to a debate, but she'll accept an invitation? And she prefer a format that isn't actually a debate format, but ties into one of McCain's favorite themes, the "town hall meeting"? Alright....

And, really, shouldn’t the public get the benefit of another Biden-Palin debate, or even two? If there’s difficulty finding a moderator, I’ll be glad to volunteer.

Oh, I get it now. The whole column is a joke!

Part of who Obama is, she said, has to do with his past associations, such as with the former bomber Bill Ayers. Palin had raised the topic of Ayers Saturday on the campaign trail, and she maintained to me that Obama, who’s minimized his relationship with Ayers, “hasn’t been wholly truthful” about this.

With the misrepresentation or omission being what?

I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers — and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?

I can see why John McCain is tentative about making stupid "attacks by association" on Obama, given his own background, but it's perhaps even more absurd for Palin to do so. Her husband was a member of a secessionist party, and she was clearly friendly to that party and its leadership. She has been happy to obstruct and decline cooperation with the investigation of her firing Alaska public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan. She attends a church where she was happily present as a visiting minister prayed to protect her from witches and made what some interpret as an anti-semitic comment (but in language that is really hard to parse). But who am I to judge. Maybe that's typical for a Jane Six-Pack hockey mom, and I'm elitist to suggest otherwise.

As The Economy Worsens....

2008-10-06T18:02:00.003-04:00

I suspect that online advertising may continue to flourish. Why? Because you can measure the return on your ad campaigns, and with proper monitoring can quickly terminate ads and campaigns that aren't performing. I expect "pay per click" and "pay for performance" ads to continue to perform both for businesses and for publishers who use them properly.

I Hate Polls (Sort Of)

2008-09-30T15:21:00.004-04:00

I read them, but I hate them. Actually, I'll acknowledge a like-hate relationship. They can be highly informative, or highly misleading. The way you phrase a question can dramatically skew the outcome, as can any number of other factors. For political junkies, they can be a lot of fun.

But although polls inspire much triumphalism and gloominess, what do they really mean? About six weeks ago, we heard a continuous whine from partisans and pundits that Obama wasn't polling at over 50%, and that this somehow meant he couldn't close the deal. As if you can close an election that far out in a nation that's pretty evenly divided, absent a horrendous scandal befalling your opponent. Then McCain had his post-convention/Palin bounce, and it was nothing but doom and gloom from Obama's supporters. Now Obama's polling significantly ahead of McCain, he's over 50% in a couple of polls, and we have people claiming that unless something big happens McCain can't win.

Guess what - the economic problems we're presently facing are big, and they happened. Lots of things can happen in five weeks, and it's not that you want any game-changers to come along, as they're often catastrophic, but... they could. And perhaps what we're seeing right now is a "financial bail-out bill bounce", not something that will hold any more than the McCain post-convention bounce. So let's take the polls for what they're worth, but remember that we're still five weeks away from the only poll that matters.

"How We Became the United States of France"

2008-09-29T15:42:00.004-04:00

Worth reading. It probably would have been funnier yesterday, and it will probably seem less satirical tomorrow.

Personally, I'm in the "France is a nice place to visit, but..." category. That said, it's a really nice place to visit. If you're staying in Paris, check out the Hotel Saint James near Place Victor Hugo - tourists (who want to be a bit off the beaten tourist path) should check for good specials, and everybody else should max out the corporate credit card.

Good Health Insurance? That's for Rich People

2008-09-28T12:57:00.004-04:00

John McCain opines,

[McCain a]ppeared to concede that his health care plan would result in higher taxes for some. McCain favors a $5,000 annual tax credit to help individuals and families afford health insurance, but that could leader employers to drop their current plans, including some that could not be replaced for $5,000.

"It depends on, on, on what plan they have," McCain said. "But that's usually the wealthiest people. Ordinary working Americans have the kind of, or an overwhelming majority have the health insurance plans that this tax credit, refundable tax credit, will actually put more money in their pockets for the purchase of health care than what they had before."

So as McCain sees it, most people have crappy insurance and thus would profit from McCain's proposal?

No offense, John, and conceding that you're a rich person who doesn't have to care, but how much would cost you to obtain insurance - even crappy insurance - on the private market? How much would the coverage you receive as a Senator cost if you had to purchase equivalent coverage as an individual? The official McCain campaign position:

While still having the option of employer-based coverage, every family will receive a direct refundable tax credit - effectively cash - of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families to offset the cost of insurance.

A dose of reality:

In 2007, employer health insurance premiums increased by 6.1 percent - two times the rate of inflation. The annual premium for an employer health plan covering a family of four averaged nearly $12,100. The annual premium for single coverage averaged over $4,400.

Even if we assume that the cost of insurance won't rise for individuals purchasing coverage as individuals, as opposed to at group rates through an employer-sponsored plan, and even if we assume that the average cost of health care is misleading with a median cost of insurance considerably below the average, this doesn't sound like a good deal for working people or their families. If the goal is to lock working people into policies with minimal coverage, though, it sounds like a heckuva plan.

The Absurdity of Running Against Earmarks

2008-09-28T12:24:00.004-04:00

John McCain's official campaign position on earmarks:

I will veto every bill with earmarks, until the Congress stops sending bills with earmarks.

John McCain, acting as a Senator:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Sunday he probably would have voted for legislation to keep the federal government running after midweek, even though it was packed with the kind of "outrageous pork-barrel spending" he has long opposed.

"That's the way they always do," the Arizona senator said dismissively of fellow lawmakers. "You put in the, you put in the good deals, and then you put in the pork, as well." He said separate votes should be allowed on the bill's different provisions.

McCain did not vote on the measure when it cleared Congress on Saturday, although he returned to Washington after Friday night's campaign debate in Mississippi. McCain said he was working on other matters at the time of the vote, including negotiations on a bailout of the financial industry.

"I certainly would have done everything in my power to remove those earmarks," he told ABC's "This Week" in an interview. "But I may have voted for it if, I probably would have ended up voting for it, but I decry a system where individual members are, are faced with taking all this unacceptable, outrageous stuff that has contributed to the largest growth in spending since the Great Society."

So as a Senator he sees the necessity of voting for a bill, loaded with earmarks, to keep the government running or to avoid a financial crisis, but as President he would veto the bill and shut down the government or allow the credit markets to freeze up? Why do I doubt that.

Focusing on government waste and excess is easy because there are so many measures that either appear wasteful or are wasteful, and people don't like to see their taxpayer dollars wasted. But they're a reality in our political system, and it's not realistic to threaten to veto "every bill" that contains earmarks. There's also the question of whether particular earmarks, even those that are among the easiest to ridicule, are inappropriate uses of federal funds. Does McCain understand the purpose of analyzing bear DNA in Montana? If so, does he oppose the goals of those who requested and obtained that earmark? Also, unfortunately, we can't balance the budget, or even make an appreciable dent in the deficit, even with the total elimination of earmarks - technically they don't even increase the budget, but instead allocate funds that have already been appropriated to specific projects.

I'm singling out McCain hear because of the particular absurdity of his concession that, yes, he would vote for bills with earmarks (and in fact voted in favor of the bill containing the Grizzly Bear DNA earmark). I'm not sure, though, if it is worse to throw out fake "solutions" to deficits, or to take Obama's approach, pretty much ignoring the issue. I don't expect Presidential candidates to spend a lot of time talking about how to balance a budget, save perhaps for those rare occasions when they're fighting over how to burn through a budget surplus. But I wish we were in a culture where we could have a mature discussion of deficits and tax policy within the context of a Presidential election, or for that matter at any other time. There's a media failure here, but it's also a societal failure of will.

Sometimes a Bargain Hunter Just Can't Resist....

2008-09-26T11:17:00.003-04:00

It seems like so long ago, but it was only about six months. I was commenting to a bank manager at Chase about how I had ended up with a Chase account through a series of bank mergers. The bank manager replied that they had expanded considerably through mergers, but were "done with that for a while." But you know, things change.

Trying to Pull Rank

2008-09-25T19:54:00.005-04:00

A "Rodney Dangerfield" parenting moment while kidding around with my (almost four-year-old) daughter....

Emma: Why do you want me to do that?

Me: Because I'm the boss of you.

Emma: You're not the boss.

Me: Okay, then who's the boss of you?

Emma: Mommy's the boss.

Where Men are Men and the Sheep Are....

2008-09-25T11:08:00.002-04:00

Okay, no jokes about Calhoun County. But in light of a recent ruling by the Michigan Court of Appeals, that acts of bestiality don't require registration as a sex offender, I think there's room for a difference of opinion. Is this a good rulling? Or is it baaaaaaad?

(Read the opinion here [PDF])