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The Washington Post did an assessment of which states had the largest share of their eligible population enroll in the exchanges and which states were least successful. California topped the charts with 42 percent of the eligible population followed by Vermont. Picking up the rear was Hawaii, where it tells us less than 15 percent of the eligible population enrolled.
There is a big problem with the Post’s scorecard. The states didn’t start in the same place. In last place Hawaii only 8 percent of its population was uninsured. By contrast, in California 19 percent of its population was uninsured. This means that even with the differences in ACA enrollment Hawaii likely still have a higher insurance rate than California.
While the piece notes Hawaii’s problems in setting up its exchange, it is also the case that as the share of the population who is uninsured gets lower, it becomes more difficult to enroll the people who remain uninsured. These people are likely resistant to signing up for insurance or have difficulties navigating bureaucracies. Therefore it should not be surprising that Hawaii did not do well on this measure.
The piece also highlights enrollments of people 18-32. While there had been much hype around enrolling “young invincibles,” as Kaiser has shown the difference in premiums largely reflects the differences in health care costs. It really doesn’t matter much for the finances of the program how many young people enroll, although it is good to see them getting insurance.
The Washington Post did an assessment of which states had the largest share of their eligible population enroll in the exchanges and which states were least successful. California topped the charts with 42 percent of the eligible population followed by Vermont. Picking up the rear was Hawaii, where it tells us less than 15 percent of the eligible population enrolled.
There is a big problem with the Post’s scorecard. The states didn’t start in the same place. In last place Hawaii only 8 percent of its population was uninsured. By contrast, in California 19 percent of its population was uninsured. This means that even with the differences in ACA enrollment Hawaii likely still have a higher insurance rate than California.
While the piece notes Hawaii’s problems in setting up its exchange, it is also the case that as the share of the population who is uninsured gets lower, it becomes more difficult to enroll the people who remain uninsured. These people are likely resistant to signing up for insurance or have difficulties navigating bureaucracies. Therefore it should not be surprising that Hawaii did not do well on this measure.
The piece also highlights enrollments of people 18-32. While there had been much hype around enrolling “young invincibles,” as Kaiser has shown the difference in premiums largely reflects the differences in health care costs. It really doesn’t matter much for the finances of the program how many young people enroll, although it is good to see them getting insurance.
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Kevin Carey has an interesting piece in the NYT’s Upshot section which notes evidence that U.S. college grads seem to perform markedly worse on standardized exams than their counterparts in other countries. While this discussion is interesting his conclusion is completely wrong.
He concludes by telling readers:
“This reality should worry anyone who believes — as many economists do — that America’s long-term prosperity rests in substantial part on its store of human capital. The relatively high pay of American workers will start to erode as more jobs are exposed to harsh competition in global labor markets. It will be increasingly dangerous to believe that only our K-12 schools have serious problems.”
Actually economists would believe the exact opposite of what he asserts. If college graduates in other countries are better educated than our college graduates, and therefore more productive, then this will make us richer as a country. We will be made richer by the fact that we can get the goods and services they produce at a lower cost than would be the case if their college graduates were less educated than ours. This is good news in standard trade models.
Of course the implication is that college grads in other countries will be wealthier than college grads in the United States, but we are made better off, not worse off, by the fact that other countries have well-educated college grads. An editor at the NYT should have caught such a basic mistake.
Note: I see from comments that many are convinced that higher productivity elsewhere makes us poorer. This should not in general be true. Whatever we purchase from abroad is almost by definition better or cheaper, or we wouldn’t be buying it. That makes us richer. There is the issue of unemployment created by increased imports. In the standard model (which most economists adhere to far more religiously than I do), the rise in imports should lead to downward pressure on the dollar, which will lead us to export more and import less of other goods and services. That will bring us back to full employment.
There is a distributional issue, the people displaced will make less than they had previously while everyone else will in principle earn more. Note that this displacement goes the opposite direction of displacement in prior decades when trade was structured to put our manufacturing workers in direct competition with lower paid workers elsewhere. This tended to put downward pressure on less-educated workers, whereas implicitly we are seeing a story here where our college-educated workers may suffer in international competition.
It is also worth noting that nothing about this story can drive our wages to developing country levels. There are different ways we can tell this story, but perhaps the simplest is to point out that 80 percent of what we consume is produced here. The fact that we can get some items at very low cost due to cheap labor in the developing world is not going to lower productivity for the portion of our economy responsible for this 80 percent of our consumption. Unless you have a story about redistribution from wages to profits that is about 10 times as large as what we have actually seen there is no way that we would see developing country wages.
Kevin Carey has an interesting piece in the NYT’s Upshot section which notes evidence that U.S. college grads seem to perform markedly worse on standardized exams than their counterparts in other countries. While this discussion is interesting his conclusion is completely wrong.
He concludes by telling readers:
“This reality should worry anyone who believes — as many economists do — that America’s long-term prosperity rests in substantial part on its store of human capital. The relatively high pay of American workers will start to erode as more jobs are exposed to harsh competition in global labor markets. It will be increasingly dangerous to believe that only our K-12 schools have serious problems.”
Actually economists would believe the exact opposite of what he asserts. If college graduates in other countries are better educated than our college graduates, and therefore more productive, then this will make us richer as a country. We will be made richer by the fact that we can get the goods and services they produce at a lower cost than would be the case if their college graduates were less educated than ours. This is good news in standard trade models.
Of course the implication is that college grads in other countries will be wealthier than college grads in the United States, but we are made better off, not worse off, by the fact that other countries have well-educated college grads. An editor at the NYT should have caught such a basic mistake.
Note: I see from comments that many are convinced that higher productivity elsewhere makes us poorer. This should not in general be true. Whatever we purchase from abroad is almost by definition better or cheaper, or we wouldn’t be buying it. That makes us richer. There is the issue of unemployment created by increased imports. In the standard model (which most economists adhere to far more religiously than I do), the rise in imports should lead to downward pressure on the dollar, which will lead us to export more and import less of other goods and services. That will bring us back to full employment.
There is a distributional issue, the people displaced will make less than they had previously while everyone else will in principle earn more. Note that this displacement goes the opposite direction of displacement in prior decades when trade was structured to put our manufacturing workers in direct competition with lower paid workers elsewhere. This tended to put downward pressure on less-educated workers, whereas implicitly we are seeing a story here where our college-educated workers may suffer in international competition.
It is also worth noting that nothing about this story can drive our wages to developing country levels. There are different ways we can tell this story, but perhaps the simplest is to point out that 80 percent of what we consume is produced here. The fact that we can get some items at very low cost due to cheap labor in the developing world is not going to lower productivity for the portion of our economy responsible for this 80 percent of our consumption. Unless you have a story about redistribution from wages to profits that is about 10 times as large as what we have actually seen there is no way that we would see developing country wages.
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Neil Irwin’s Upshot column rightly points to the fact that Obamacare may have an ambiguous effect on the economy over the next few years. The point is that we want to slow health care cost growth, but in a weak economy less spending on health care means lower GDP and fewer jobs.
This is true, but this is part of a larger story. Since the economy is operating well below its potential and millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed, anything that creates demand would boost GDP. This is the old pay people to dig holes and fill them up again story. We could do that and increase employment and output. Better yet, we could pay people to retrofit homes to make them more energy efficient, to educate our kids, or to provide child care. But that would mean larger budget deficits and policy is now controlled by a perverse religious cult that says budget deficits are the devil’s work. Anyhow, the health care story should be seen as part of the larger stimulus/deficit story.
The other point is that we have always had problems measuring health care. Suppose Pfizer develops a great new drug called “Placebo” that is supposed to cure depression. It sells $170 billion worth of this drug in 2014. This would be an addition to GDP of approximately 1.0 percentage point. Now suppose that a whistle-blower reveals Pfizer’s secret test results that show Placebo doesn’t do anything. Sales plunge to zero in 2015. GDP has just fallen by 1.0 percentage point.
Much of health care spending has this character. We value our health, but we measure what we pay for. If we are healthier because of better diet and more exercise, and therefore spend less on heart related drugs and procedures, this counts as a drop in GDP. And many procedures and drugs really don’t improve our health, just like Pfizer’s Placebo drug. So, there will be many issues associated with measuring the economic impact of Obamacare, but it is wrong to imagine that we didn’t previously have problems measuring the output of the health care sector.
Neil Irwin’s Upshot column rightly points to the fact that Obamacare may have an ambiguous effect on the economy over the next few years. The point is that we want to slow health care cost growth, but in a weak economy less spending on health care means lower GDP and fewer jobs.
This is true, but this is part of a larger story. Since the economy is operating well below its potential and millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed, anything that creates demand would boost GDP. This is the old pay people to dig holes and fill them up again story. We could do that and increase employment and output. Better yet, we could pay people to retrofit homes to make them more energy efficient, to educate our kids, or to provide child care. But that would mean larger budget deficits and policy is now controlled by a perverse religious cult that says budget deficits are the devil’s work. Anyhow, the health care story should be seen as part of the larger stimulus/deficit story.
The other point is that we have always had problems measuring health care. Suppose Pfizer develops a great new drug called “Placebo” that is supposed to cure depression. It sells $170 billion worth of this drug in 2014. This would be an addition to GDP of approximately 1.0 percentage point. Now suppose that a whistle-blower reveals Pfizer’s secret test results that show Placebo doesn’t do anything. Sales plunge to zero in 2015. GDP has just fallen by 1.0 percentage point.
Much of health care spending has this character. We value our health, but we measure what we pay for. If we are healthier because of better diet and more exercise, and therefore spend less on heart related drugs and procedures, this counts as a drop in GDP. And many procedures and drugs really don’t improve our health, just like Pfizer’s Placebo drug. So, there will be many issues associated with measuring the economic impact of Obamacare, but it is wrong to imagine that we didn’t previously have problems measuring the output of the health care sector.
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My mistake, it actually began an article on Jean-Claude Juncker, the likely next president of the European Commission, by referring to the “rescue” of Greece. This seems a rather dubious characterization of an economic program that caused a plunge in Greece’s GDP of more than 20 percent and pushed its unemployment rate above 25 percent. Greece would almost certainly have fared much better if it had defaulted on its debt, abandoned the euro, and re-established its own currency. In any case, it is no more appropriate to describe the economic plan that the European Commission imposed on Greece as a “rescue” than as “torture.” The NYT would never use the latter term in a news story. It shouldn’t use the former term either.
My mistake, it actually began an article on Jean-Claude Juncker, the likely next president of the European Commission, by referring to the “rescue” of Greece. This seems a rather dubious characterization of an economic program that caused a plunge in Greece’s GDP of more than 20 percent and pushed its unemployment rate above 25 percent. Greece would almost certainly have fared much better if it had defaulted on its debt, abandoned the euro, and re-established its own currency. In any case, it is no more appropriate to describe the economic plan that the European Commission imposed on Greece as a “rescue” than as “torture.” The NYT would never use the latter term in a news story. It shouldn’t use the former term either.
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The NYT had an interesting piece on the persistence of poverty in eastern Kentucky and rural areas more generally. However the piece is seriously misleading when it refers to “the trillions of dollars spent to improve the state of the poor in the United States and promote development.” This comment would likely lead readers to believe that we are spending large amounts of money on anti-poverty programs. That is a very questionable claim.
Current spending on TANF, the main federal anti-poverty program is $17.4 billion, less than 0.5 percent of the federal budget. The budget for food stamps, which do not go exclusively to the poor, is around $75 billion or a bit less than 2.0 percent of federal spending. Other anti-poverty programs account for a considerably smaller share of federal spending.
In prior decades anti-poverty programs accounted for a larger share of the budget, but it is misleading to imply that they have ever been a major drain on the public’s tax dollar. Anti-poverty programs have always been dwarfed by spending on the military and social insurance programs like Social Security (which does have an enormous impact on poverty).
The NYT had an interesting piece on the persistence of poverty in eastern Kentucky and rural areas more generally. However the piece is seriously misleading when it refers to “the trillions of dollars spent to improve the state of the poor in the United States and promote development.” This comment would likely lead readers to believe that we are spending large amounts of money on anti-poverty programs. That is a very questionable claim.
Current spending on TANF, the main federal anti-poverty program is $17.4 billion, less than 0.5 percent of the federal budget. The budget for food stamps, which do not go exclusively to the poor, is around $75 billion or a bit less than 2.0 percent of federal spending. Other anti-poverty programs account for a considerably smaller share of federal spending.
In prior decades anti-poverty programs accounted for a larger share of the budget, but it is misleading to imply that they have ever been a major drain on the public’s tax dollar. Anti-poverty programs have always been dwarfed by spending on the military and social insurance programs like Social Security (which does have an enormous impact on poverty).
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That’s the obvious question that readers should be asking after seeing the paragraph at the end of an article on the Treasury Department’s plan to help low income people stay and/or become homeowners:
“The Treasury had promised that Mr. Lew would address the expansion of credit to potential home buyers, millions of whom are unable to get a mortgage with today’s tight standards. No new programs were offered, though Mr. Lew said the Treasury was working to jump-start the all-but-vanished market for private mortgage-backed securities, which would help lenders grow more confident and make more loans.”
The clear implication is that lenders would be making loans that don’t meet the standards of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, but would be packaged into mortgage-backed securities by private issuers. Some folks may be old enough to remember the last time we saw something like this.
That’s the obvious question that readers should be asking after seeing the paragraph at the end of an article on the Treasury Department’s plan to help low income people stay and/or become homeowners:
“The Treasury had promised that Mr. Lew would address the expansion of credit to potential home buyers, millions of whom are unable to get a mortgage with today’s tight standards. No new programs were offered, though Mr. Lew said the Treasury was working to jump-start the all-but-vanished market for private mortgage-backed securities, which would help lenders grow more confident and make more loans.”
The clear implication is that lenders would be making loans that don’t meet the standards of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, but would be packaged into mortgage-backed securities by private issuers. Some folks may be old enough to remember the last time we saw something like this.
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A NYT editorial on Senator Thad Cochrane’s narrow victory in a Republican primary criticized his record:
“He has consistently voted for the kinds of tax cuts that have starved discretionary spending and held down the economic recovery.”
This is incorrect. There is no direct relationship between the tax cuts Mr. Cochrane has supported and the cuts in discretionary spending that Congress and President Obama agreed to. The cuts came about because of a commitment to hit arbitrary deficit targets. Given the vast amount of unemployment and underemployment in the economy, there is no reason to be reducing the deficit. There is no reason that we could not have both maintained higher levels of discretionary spending and left the tax cuts in place.
It is important to be clear on this issue since the public needs to know that the main factor slowing growth and keeping millions of people out of work is simply a perverse cult of low deficits, not the need to raise taxes on anyone.
A NYT editorial on Senator Thad Cochrane’s narrow victory in a Republican primary criticized his record:
“He has consistently voted for the kinds of tax cuts that have starved discretionary spending and held down the economic recovery.”
This is incorrect. There is no direct relationship between the tax cuts Mr. Cochrane has supported and the cuts in discretionary spending that Congress and President Obama agreed to. The cuts came about because of a commitment to hit arbitrary deficit targets. Given the vast amount of unemployment and underemployment in the economy, there is no reason to be reducing the deficit. There is no reason that we could not have both maintained higher levels of discretionary spending and left the tax cuts in place.
It is important to be clear on this issue since the public needs to know that the main factor slowing growth and keeping millions of people out of work is simply a perverse cult of low deficits, not the need to raise taxes on anyone.
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The NYT noted that a sharp drop in health care spending reduced the first quarter growth rate by 0.16 percentage points. It is important to recognize that this drop followed a surge in health care spending reported for the fourth quarter of 2013 that added 0.62 percentage points to growth in quarter. That compares to an average of 0.28 percentage points for the prior four quarters. It is likely that the data overstated the actual increase in spending in the fourth quarter and therefore also overstated the drop in the first quarter. The average impact of health care spending on growth for the two quarters taken together is almost the same as over the prior four quarters.
The NYT noted that a sharp drop in health care spending reduced the first quarter growth rate by 0.16 percentage points. It is important to recognize that this drop followed a surge in health care spending reported for the fourth quarter of 2013 that added 0.62 percentage points to growth in quarter. That compares to an average of 0.28 percentage points for the prior four quarters. It is likely that the data overstated the actual increase in spending in the fourth quarter and therefore also overstated the drop in the first quarter. The average impact of health care spending on growth for the two quarters taken together is almost the same as over the prior four quarters.
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Morning Edition had a strange piece discussing how regulators can punish banks for breaking the law. The piece focused on the various fines and regulatory measures that can be imposed as penalties when banks are found to have broken the law. Remarkably it never considered the underlying logic of the punishment and the likely deterrent effect on criminal activity.
While banks are legal institutions, ultimately it is individuals that break the law. The question that any regulator should be asking is the extent to which the penalties being imposed will discourage future law breaking. As a practical matter, the immediate victims of the measures mentioned in the piece are banks’ current shareholders. Since there is often a substantial period of time between when a crime is committed and when regulators discover it and succeed in imposing a penalty, the shareholders facing the sanction will be a different group from the shareholders who benefited from the original crime. This makes little sense either from the standpoint of justice or from the standpoint of deterring criminal activity by bankers.
The imposition of large fines may cause current shareholders to demand the executives who broke the law be fired, but in many cases they will have already moved on to other jobs or retired. In the case of the fraudulent loans that were passed on in mortgage backed securities (MBS) in the housing bubble years, most of the top executives had already left their banks by the time actions were brought by the Justice Department.
In this case, they made enormous amounts of money by breaking the law. The financial crisis may have caused them to retire or leave their banks somewhat sooner than they would have preferred, but almost all of them come out as net gainers from their actions.
The one sanction that would clearly be effective in deterring bankers from breaking the law would be putting them in jail for breaking the law. It is likely that the prospect of spending several years in prison, along with fines taking away most of their monetary gains, would provide a serious disincentive to bankers who might otherwise break the law. The Justice Department could have pressed cases by showing that top officials in banks had good reason to believe that many of the mortgages they were passing along in MBS were fraudulent.
It is likely that top executives at major investment banks had some knowledge that many of the loans they were securitizing were fraudulent, since there were numerous accounts in the business press about bad loans. There were also widely circulated jokes about the quality of these loans. (It was common to talk about “NINJA” loans, referring to loans where the borrower had no income, no job, and no assets.) It is likely that the top officials at these banks had at least as much knowledge of the loans their banks were securitizing as the people writing about them in the business press. (Deliberately passing along fraudulent loans is fraud.)
Morning Edition had a strange piece discussing how regulators can punish banks for breaking the law. The piece focused on the various fines and regulatory measures that can be imposed as penalties when banks are found to have broken the law. Remarkably it never considered the underlying logic of the punishment and the likely deterrent effect on criminal activity.
While banks are legal institutions, ultimately it is individuals that break the law. The question that any regulator should be asking is the extent to which the penalties being imposed will discourage future law breaking. As a practical matter, the immediate victims of the measures mentioned in the piece are banks’ current shareholders. Since there is often a substantial period of time between when a crime is committed and when regulators discover it and succeed in imposing a penalty, the shareholders facing the sanction will be a different group from the shareholders who benefited from the original crime. This makes little sense either from the standpoint of justice or from the standpoint of deterring criminal activity by bankers.
The imposition of large fines may cause current shareholders to demand the executives who broke the law be fired, but in many cases they will have already moved on to other jobs or retired. In the case of the fraudulent loans that were passed on in mortgage backed securities (MBS) in the housing bubble years, most of the top executives had already left their banks by the time actions were brought by the Justice Department.
In this case, they made enormous amounts of money by breaking the law. The financial crisis may have caused them to retire or leave their banks somewhat sooner than they would have preferred, but almost all of them come out as net gainers from their actions.
The one sanction that would clearly be effective in deterring bankers from breaking the law would be putting them in jail for breaking the law. It is likely that the prospect of spending several years in prison, along with fines taking away most of their monetary gains, would provide a serious disincentive to bankers who might otherwise break the law. The Justice Department could have pressed cases by showing that top officials in banks had good reason to believe that many of the mortgages they were passing along in MBS were fraudulent.
It is likely that top executives at major investment banks had some knowledge that many of the loans they were securitizing were fraudulent, since there were numerous accounts in the business press about bad loans. There were also widely circulated jokes about the quality of these loans. (It was common to talk about “NINJA” loans, referring to loans where the borrower had no income, no job, and no assets.) It is likely that the top officials at these banks had at least as much knowledge of the loans their banks were securitizing as the people writing about them in the business press. (Deliberately passing along fraudulent loans is fraud.)
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