links for 2008-01-15

• Bush tax cut mythology - Paul Krugman Blog
• Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times
• EU launches new Microsoft antitrust probe - FT
• Fact Check, Reality Check? New GDP Data - Arvind Subramanian
• Financial forces run amok - Los Angeles Times
• Baltimore Finds Subprime Crisis Snags Women - New York Times
• LHC short films (CERN too) - Information Processing
• A green lining (to stabilization policy) - Dean baker
• Pelosi Begins Discussions on Stimulus to Economy - New York Times
• The (Interestingly Accumulated) Wealth of Nations - Eric Rauchway
• Analysis of Macro Stabilization via Discretionary Fiscal Policy - Econbrowser

Comments

[hari]

LAT - Al Meyerhof on financial forces run amok!

This is a good summary of what's recent economic history of Feds moral hazard management...

[anne]

A specialist in commercial real estate law, who closely follows the housing market, writes to me that the mortgage crisis is a profound setback in asset accumulation for African Americans and in African American communities, proportionally far more so than for other groups for being proportionally sold far more of the highest cost mortgages.

[anne]

While we have known for more than a decade that African Americans were unfairly made targets for the highest cost mortgages, a majority of subprime mortgages may actually turn out to have been made to African Americans. If this is so, the setback for wealth accumulation for African Americans will be astonishing and progoundly influential and long term in consequence.

[anne]

Notice the continual ferocious determination of this Republican Administration to be environmentally destructive. When a sense of what global warming would bring became symbolized by the danger to polar bears, the response of the warming denying Administration was to forbid government scientists to mention polar bears in talks and writings. The official warning to scientists not to mention polar bears was repeated for emphasis.

That was years ago now, and almost comical as this Administration is comical in disdain for scientists and science, but years have passed and this disdainful Administration is still determined to allow the destruction of polar bears for the sake of rapacious environment degradation.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/opinion/15tue2.html

January 15, 2008

Regulatory Games and the Polar Bear

Although Congress and the courts have largely frustrated the Bush administration's efforts to open up Alaska to oil and gas drilling, Vice President Dick Cheney and his industry friends remain determined to lock up as many oil and gas leases as they can before the door hits them on the way out. They are certainly not going to let the struggling polar bear stand in their way.

The Interior Department's Minerals Management Service has announced that early next month it will sell oil and gas leases on nearly 30 million acres of prime polar bear habitat in the Chukchi Sea. Meanwhile, the department's Fish and Wildlife Service has postponed a long-awaited decision on whether to place this iconic and troubled animal on the list of threatened species.

These two moves are almost certainly, and cynically, related. Listing the polar bear as threatened would trigger a range of protective actions. Delaying that listing gives the Department of Interior just enough time to move ahead with the lease sales without having to deal with the bear while avoiding an embarrassing bureaucratic squabble.

The listing delay was announced on a Sunday night, when few people were paying attention. H. Dale Hall, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the oil companies would have to comply with any eventual listing of the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act. But once the companies stake their claims, it would be hard to stop disruptive exploratory drilling. The delay also gives the political appointees at the Interior Department — notorious for meddling with science — time to craft a listing decision that magically excludes the oil companies from having to do much of anything to protect the bear.

With the possible exception of Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, everyone agrees that the polar bear is in deep trouble. The United States Geological Survey predicts that two-thirds of the world's polar bears, and all of Alaska's, will be gone by mid-century. While the overwhelming threat is the loss of sea ice, caused in large part by global warming, invading that habitat with oil rigs would surely increase the stress on the animals....

[anne]

We have a Federal Funds rate at 4.25% while the 10-year Treasury rate is at 3.7%. The Federal Reserve will almost surely lower the Funds rate by 50 basis points, given the pessimism of bond investors.

[anne]

Suppose you are in a position of trust, and suppose you know of an abuse of turst, is there any formal reason for you to, like, tell? We are living at a time and in a way I do not recognize as continuous with a development of an American ethical sense, but am learning of recognition.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/washington/15cnd-scotus.html

January 15, 2008

Supreme Court Restricts Securities Lawsuits
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON — In one of the most closely watched business cases in years, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld protections for secondary players in securities-fraud schemes, as opposed to the primary engineers of those plots. The court ruled, 5 to 3, against plaintiffs who had sued two cable television equipment suppliers whose dealings with a cable television company had allowed the cable outfit to inflate its earnings and hide its failure to achieve its financial goals.

Although the outcome of the case, Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta Inc., No. 06-43, hinged on terminology that might seem technical and arcane to a layman, the case is likely to be felt far beyond Wall Street, as lawyers for investors and businesses fight over who can be sued and who cannot.

The Stoneridge ruling appears to offer protection for accountants, lawyers and others who may know about corporate shenanigans but can establish that they are not directly involved in them. Defense lawyers in shareholders' suits often complain that defendants can be forced to settle claims with little merit rather than risk prolonged and costly litigation....

[anne]

Care to guess who the 5 deciding votes were? We have a Republican conservative, reflexive Supreme Court majority that will defend business interests against all for years and years to come in a legal retreat to a period before the New Deal.

So to, the majority that has set back school desegregation mandates to separate and equal, will set voter registration requirements back to generations we should care not to return to.

[anne]

http://www.challiance.org/news/press_releases_08/080115_emergency_wait_time.shtml

January 15, 2008

Harvard Study Finds Dangerous Increase in Emergency Department Waits Nationwide: Even the Severely Ill are Waiting Longer

Waits for emergency care are getting longer each year, according to a study published online today by the journal Health Affairs. * The study, which analyzed the time between a patient’s arrival in the emergency department (ED) and when they were first seen by a doctor, found that the increasing delays affected everyone, including those with and without health insurance, and people from all racial and ethnic groups.

Severely ill patients suffered the largest increases in ED waits. Between 1997 and 2004, waits increased 36% for all patients (from 22 minutes to 30 minutes, on average). However for those, whom a triage nurse classified as needing immediate attention, waits increased by 40% (from 10 to 14 minutes). Waits increased the most for emergency patients suffering heart attacks, who waited only 8 minutes in 1997, but 20 minutes in 2004, a 150% increase. A quarter of heart attack victims in 2004 waited 50 minutes or more before seeing a doctor. The authors state that the lengthening delay for care of heart attacks is dangerous, because chances of surviving a heart attack are known to worsen when treatment is delayed.

The research, carried out at the Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School, is the first detailed analysis of national trends in ED waits. Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the authors analyzed over ninety thousand ED visits nationwide between 1997 and 2004.

While all demographic groups experienced lengthening ED waits, waits were slightly longer for blacks (13.0% longer than non-Hispanic whites) and Hispanics (14.5% longer). Women also had longer waits (5.6% longer than men), while rural hospitals’ patients had the shortest waits.

The number of ED visits increased from 93.3 million in 1997 to 110.2 million in 2004. Meanwhile, the American Hospital Association reports that the number of hospitals operating 24-hour EDs decreased by 12% between 1994 and 2004. ED crowding in the remaining EDs causes one ambulance to be diverted away from a U.S. ED every minute according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Dr. Andrew Wilper, lead author of the study, said “EDs close because, in our current payment system, emergency patients are money-losers for hospitals. Planned admissions of elective patients who need procedures are usually more lucrative for two reasons. First, elective patients can be scheduled more conveniently and efficiently, and second, they can be pre-screened for health insurance. Our study suggests that these perverse incentives are causing dangerous delays in potentially life-saving emergency care, even for those with insurance.”

“One contributor to ED crowding,” said Dr. David Himmelstein, Associate Professor of Medicine and senior author of the study, “is American’s poor access to primary and preventive care which could address medical issues before they become emergencies.” ....

[anne]

Somehow it seems like only yesterday that George Bush was telling us to fear not because there is always emergency care for all, of course that would seem to mean emergency care for all eventually or possibly not even eventually for the very, very ill. This, as we find urban public hospitals increasingly troubled and closing.

[anne]

So, we deny health care insurance to 3.8 million needy children for a mere few days cost of madly occupying Iraq, and we tell parents to fear not for there is always emergency care, which of course well comforts parents, only for the parents to find interminable waits for a sick child to be treated, especially if the child is really sick.

The problem however is, well, medical insurance as in, shudder, France.

[anne]

Remembering -

Martin Luther King: "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhumane." *

* Presentation at: The Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights; March 25, 1966; Chicago, IL.

[anne]

Remembering -

Martin Luther King: "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhumane." *

* Presentation at: The Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights; March 25, 1966; Chicago, IL.

[anne]

Pardon the repetition which was accidental, but which should tell us clearly that as Franklin Roosevelt considered health care a fundamental right, a civil right, so too did Martin Luther King. Our right to health care however is not even being maintained, but is being steadily eroded. The very parent whose child has been denied health insurance and who is waiting for emergency treatment from harried nurses and doctors, is easily a parent who does not even have a paid sick day provided.

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/stimulus-never-mind/

January 15, 2008

Stimulus? Never Mind
By Paul Krugman

If this * Times report is at all right, Republicans will hold any attempt to help the economy now hostage to yet another try at making the Bush tax cuts permanent — thereby, among other things, crippling future possibilities for health care reform. I suspected that’s what would happen, but thought that maybe, just maybe, the GOP would be sufficiently scared by the prospect of a nasty recession in an election year that it would back off. Guess not.

Just a reminder: here’s the evidence on which Republicans base their faith that making the Bush tax cuts permanent is absatively, posolutely, essential to prosperity:

[Chart.]

Rereading this, I think I could have been clearer. The only way anything useful will get done by way of stimulus in the next few months is if both parties agree not to demand anything that would tie the hands of the next president and Congress — that means no long-term spending plans from the Dems, no long-term tax cuts from the GOP. And it seems that the Republicans are already making it clear that they won’t play it that way; they’re trying to hold any help for the economy hostage to their agenda, which is exactly what happened 7 years ago. **

* http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/washington/15policy.html

** http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/opinion/28KRUG.htm

[anne]

The point of Republican compassionate conservative strategy, in all compassion, will be to force an economic stimulus that adding to the mad costs of Iraq will produce budget restrictions for the coming President, that should there be a Democratic President will make an approach to universal health seem prohibitively costly.

War and military occupation, as we understand, being costless, the need for Republicans will be to make health care spending impossible to afford just in case a President might wish to afford such social spending. So much for thinking as Martin Luther King would have us think.

[anne]

As Martin Luther King understood so well in the course of the Vietnam War, the war became not only a war on the Vietnamese and Cambodians but a war on people of need in
America. The war in and occupation of Iraq is a war against those in need in America. This needless deceitful immoral war and occupation that has been such a physical and psychological and material tragedy, is a war against America's poor.

[anne]

There will be no universal health care in America, compassionless conservatives and morally blind liberals will threaten social well being in America, threaten the health of pregnant women and infants, threaten the health of children, threaten oler America's Social Security and Medicare and threaten proper schooling from elementary to university levels, as long as there is war an occupation and plans for an ever more expansive ever more voracious military.

[TigerPaw]

One way of addressing the ideological tilt of the court in the US would be for the next president to propose and have enacted a law legislating that 3 new justices are required. If I recall correctly the number of people on the court is not specified in the US constitution but is simply specified by an act of Congress. Then just fill the empty slots with centre/left types. The right-wing will scream but they like to shout just to hear themselves anyway. Oh and make sure the new ones appointed are in their 30s, so they'll be there a LONG time.

Of course three additional statutes need enacting as well: (a) ban all signing statements (b) repudiate all acts of Bush II (c) start war crimes proceedings on the most of the Bush department heads plus Bush/Cheney.

OK, time to wake up ... it was a nice dream.

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/signs-of-the-apocalypse/

January 15, 2008

Signs of the Apocalypse
By Paul Krugman

William F. Buckley discovers * the virtues of regulation and calls for government intervention to help fix the mortgage crisis.

If conservative principles are abandoned so easily in the face of a bad economic situation, what was the whole thing about in the first place?

* http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjhlMzhjNTJlNmY4Y2NhOGYzOWQyOWUyYjA3MTYxYjE=#more

[Noticed by Elizabeth Warren....]