SOFT-HANDED ACADEMIC DUDES AND MINIMUM WAGE FAST FOOD: WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

I see tweets like this one in my timeline and I brace myself for the inevitable dogpile bashing workers:

Sonic in Albuquerque says “No one wants to work anymore.” pic.twitter.com/CR128n60mM

— Patrick Hayes (@KOBPatrickHayes) April 14, 2021

Unemployed minimum wage workers have collected too much from state unemployment and federal aid, the old white dudes opine from their cushy home offices somewhere in McMansionburbia, nudge-nudge-winking about prescient forecasts of inflationary pressures.

Sod off, you slack-bottomed, soft-handed gits.

Unemployed minimum wage workers were most likely to be laid off early in the pandemic, and may already have been laid off not once but twice or perhaps even more, depending on location and on whether they were or are juggling one or more minimum wage jobs to make ends meet.

These are the same workers whose jobs OSHA has categorized as High Exposure Risk:

Those who have frequent indoor or poorly ventilated contact with the general public, including workers in retail stores, grocery stores or supermarkets, pharmacies, transit and transportation operations, law enforcement and emergency response operations, restaurants, and bars. They’re in the same risk class as mortuary workers who prep the bodies of those who died of COVID.

This group of workers are among the risk class most likely to experience an outbreak of COVID; just look at the workplaces where Michigan had outbreaks as of April 9:

Not as bad as schools but how many of the K-12 and university students overlap in some way with fast food workers — either as consumers or employees?

Recall my chicken scratching from my last post about the unaffordability of the American Dream in which I calculate annual earnings for a full- time minimum wage worker:

Do the math:

Minimum federal wage $7.25 x 40 hour week x 52 weeks = $15,080 a year.

That’s nowhere near enough to make a payment on the median home priced at $301,000. It’s not enough for a tiny dump of a house at one-third of median price.

The equation above already contains numerous generous assumptions: the employee makes 1) minimum federal wage, 2) at a full-time job, 3) for the entire year. For most minimum wage workers, at least one of these three points doesn’t apply. Most employers who hire minimum wage workers avoid paying unemployment taxes by employing workers less than full time, which means a minimum wage worker must work two jobs (or more) to make $15,080.

The average one-bedroom or studio apartment costs roughly $1000 a month right now. What’s left over for food, health care, transportation? Even if a worker can manage a roommate or two, what’s left over for basic needs?

Gods help them if they need childcare or eldercare on top of shelter, food, health care, and transportation.

And with most employers refusing to hire minimum wage workers for more than 27-32 hours a week in order to avoid paying either unemployment insurance tax or contribute to health care, these workers are likely not to have any benefits like sick or paid time off, or any savings to offset time needed for illness.

Why would any food service or retail employer think for a moment that minimum wage workers should be beating down the doors to come back to more of the same if their health and their lives had been and could be again at risk, for an absurdly low wage? Why can’t the usual pudgy white neoliberal male academic types grasp this?

The snotty, dismissive attitude by business toward minimum wage workers reflected in the tweet above — though labor appears to be an essential component to the business — also reveals both carelessness and cluelessness of these businesses. If a piece of equipment needed repair for the business to remain open, they’d fix it. But apparently remedying the problems their workers face is a step too far or opaque to the business operator.

Minimum wage workers also need the right to organize. Amazon may pay more than the federal minimum wage, but there are businesses across the U.S. which also operate like Amazon but without the notoriety forcing Amazon to pay better wages. Those businesses must be forced to rejigger their business models. Amazon is no model employer, either; overall conditions are bad when Amazon looks good by comparison.

But demanding businesses rework their operations to protect workers’ right to organize is too much to ask, one might say. Is it?

1. Today, @Kroger is closing two stores in Seattle to retaliate against a local $4/hr hero pay law. More than 100 workers will be fired or dislocated.

Kroger made $2.8B in profit in 2020. CEO Rodney McMullen got a pay raise to $21M.

Some heart-breaking details are emerging. pic.twitter.com/vP8EOw5PY8

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) April 24, 2021

When businesses shut down sites to avoid unionization, they are rejiggering their business model, and they are doing it at a cost to the community as well as the workers. They are eating the cost of the closures to make an ugly point.

Kroger’s Seattle locations aren’t the only two sites the grocer is closing for this reason. At least three more closed in California to avoid paying higher wages to their workers who are disproportionately at risk of COVID — wages mandated by local government to ameliorate the risks these workers take.

Workers need Congress to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2019 (PRO Act) for this reason, as do their communities. Many older and disabled Americans rely on their local grocers; losing one is incredibly disruptive and expensive, especially when it creates a food desert. No business is obligated to do business in any location, but a business willing to pull up and leave a neighborhood and damage customer relations solely because it can’t (read: won’t) figure out how to pay a living wage needs to do its own reorganization internally, restructuring its business model to operate ethically. A workforce which has the right to unionize may be the only way to force business to reset its thinking and operations.

In other words, if a business’s profits rely on paying wages which can’t support a worker, the business model isn’t legitimate. Unions may be the only means to make this clear to businesses.

Something needs to give soon, because this kind of scenario will continue — a clueless business thinking it must hire anybody at less than living wages, to work in conditions which may not be safe for either employees or customers.

The Youngsville mother of two was taken aback at the offer since she was only trying to go inside to get the food that was left out of her order after going through the drive-thru a first time. The lobby was closed, so she went back to the drive-thru window to get the order straightened out.

Then she learned why the lobby was closed.

“The manager told me, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t open the lobby because no one wants to work,’” Picou said. “And then she asked if I wanted a job. She said they’d hire anyone at this point.”

Imagine thinking a fully-staffed indoor fast food lobby is necessary in the middle of a pandemic, instead of creating a safer alternative.

Waiting for those slack-bottomed academic types to nod their heads vigorously in affirmation as they wipe the fast food mung off their faces. You’ll notice that young mother in that article didn’t jump at the offer.

TRUMP REFUSES TO ANSWER WHY HE ORDERED MIKE FLYNN TO PLACATE THE RUSSIANS ON SANCTIONS

As I have repeatedly argued, a key detail of the Russian investigation that has never been adequately explained is the firing of Mike Flynn. Contrary to what Trump’s propaganda in early January 2017 suggested, it was no secret within the White House that Flynn had discussed delaying any response to Obama’s sanctions with Sergei Kislyak. Indeed, it is virtually certain Flynn did so on the Trump’s orders, conveyed via KT McFarland, and many of the people involved in creating Trump’s public explanations knew that.

Which is why it’s so interesting that Trump has refused to answer questions about the transition (in addition to questions about after inauguration).

But after months of negotiations with Mueller’s team, Trump’s lawyers have refused to answer any questions about his time as president-elect or president, arguing that the special counsel is not legally entitled to details about executive decision-making.

If, as I’ve posited, sanctions relief was one of the payoffs in a quid pro quo for election assistance, then by refusing to answer questions about the transition, Trump would effectively be refusing to go on the record about why he chose to undermine Obama’s policy (on this, and on assistance to Israel, probably among other things).

Now consider how this fits with regards to timing.

The WaPo reports that Trump was going to return his open book test to Mueller last Thursday, but balked, claiming they had questions about the legitimacy of the investigation.

Trump’s lawyers originally planned to submit the answers to Mueller last Thursday, but put on the brakes.

Giuliani said there were “more questions raised about the legitimacy of the investigation that we had to discuss and look into,” declining to elaborate.

That makes it more likely that the 10-day delay in a status report on Paul Manafort’s cooperation — from last Friday to next Monday — reflects Mueller’s effort to delay releasing that report until after he had received Trump’s responses (which, remember, he once said he’d return a day or so after returning from Paris).

It’s also possible that Trump got his first report on the status of the investigation from Whitaker last Thursday, one day after OLC released its memo deeming Whitaker’s appointment legal. Today, Chuck Schumer sent DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz a letter asking for an investigation into Whitaker’s communications with the White House, but I read it to relate exclusively to activity prior to his appointment as Acting Attorney General.

Or, less controversially, he may have gotten assurances from Whitaker that he, as Acting AG slash hatchetman, would deem transition period activities as protected by Executive Privilege.

And since we’re reading tea leaves, consider the additional motion Mueller submitted in the Mystery Appellant case.

Particularly given the motion Mueller submitted yesterday — which argued that any subpoena the Special Counsel issued before Whitaker’s appointment remains valid — I wonder whether the recent activity reflects Whitaker’s tampering as well, perhaps reflecting notice, after the OLC memo, that Whitaker does not agree with the subpoena. Today’s sealed motion is around 25% longer than yesterday’s brief, so it may be notice of that argument.

(I think the new motion raises the chances, slightly, that the Mystery Appellant is Trump, but if it were someone — like John Kelly — making an Executive Privilege claim, Whitaker’s intervention may rely on the same justification Trump might have made last week about withholding transition materials.)

In other words, not only is Trump trying to avoid providing sworn testimony about one key event in this investigation — his order to placate the Russians on sanctions — but there are other hints that Whitaker has started his work to undermine the Mueller investigation.

Still, it may be too little too late. Mike Flynn’s sentencing continues as scheduled, with his probation officer submitting his presentencing report today. The government will have to submit a report on his cooperation on December 4, in advance of his December 18 sentencing. So Mueller must feel confident he knows all the circumstances of those conversations with Kislyak regardless of Trump’s willingness to talk about it. IN DEFENDING HIS WHITAKER PICK, TRUMP ATTEMPTS TO PLACATE BOTH REPUBLICANS AND LAWYERS

President Trump flew all the way to Paris to (as far as we know) sit in the US Ambassador’s residence rather than attend the World War I remembrance he had flown all that way for. The stated reason was weather — basically some light drizzle in 50 degree temperatures.

I’m reminded that the other most prominent time Trump inexplicably blew off a high profile international event — when he had Ivanka sit in for him at the G-20 in July 2017 — he used the time instead scrambling with aides about how to craft a story about the June 9 meeting.

Given the way the Matt Whitaker appointment is blowing up — on top of persistent questions about the legality of the appointment, stories about the criminal investigation into his firm, (sketchy) claims that the White House knew nothing about his comments or past when they picked him, and additional reports of Whitaker’s radical legal belief, including that states can nullify federal law — I suspect he may similarly be huddled somewhere trying to prevent the Whitaker move from making his plight worse than it already was. (Though he’s demonstrably also working the phones in hopes of squeezing an extra Senate seat out of the process.)

Which is why I’m interested in the two tweets Trump made on the topic last night.

First, while also affirming his qualifications, Trump claimed (falsely) that he didn’t know Whitaker. Yes, his claims here are narrower than the ones already debunked by his statements on Fox News the last time he tried to install Whitaker. He now admits to knowing Whitaker. But he falsely pretends that Sessions, not the White House, picked Whitaker. And he suggests, incorrectly, that he and others at the White House (including, per the NYT, Don McGahn when he was looking for an attack dog to work Trump’s defense) didn’t have direct contact with Whitaker.

President Trump first noticed Matthew G. Whitaker on CNN in the summer of 2017 and liked what he saw — a partisan defender who insisted there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. So that July, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, interviewed Mr. Whitaker about joining the president’s team as a legal attack dog against the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

[snip]

The decision to fire Mr. Sessions and replace him with Mr. Whitaker had been in the works since September, when the president began asking friends and associates if they thought it would be a good idea, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The goal was not unlike the first time the White House considered hiring Mr. Whitaker. As attorney general, he could wind down Mr. Mueller’s inquiry like the president wanted. Mr. McGahn, for one, was a big proponent of the idea. So was Leonard A. Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society who regularly advises Mr. Trump on judges and other legal matters. Mr. Whitaker had also developed a strong rapport with John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, was a fan, too.

A team that has spent over a year claiming intermittently that Robert Mueller has a conflict because he interviewed to be FBI Director the day before he got named Special Counsel has made a guy who interviewed to be part of his defense team Attorney General.

All this creates an overwhelming appearance of a conflict, one DOJ’s ethical advisors — if they get the opportunity — would surely say disqualifies Whitaker from overseeing the Russian investigation.

So Trump, with his first tweet, is making false claims to try to deny these conflicts. It’s an appeal to lawyers — ethics lawyers at DOJ, constitutional lawyers questioning the legality of the appointment, and probably Mueller’s lawyers, who’ve been Hoovering up evidence relating to this latest obstruction of justice. This is the kind of performance tweeting Trump does all the time. It has no legal value — the lawyers he’s trying to influence will instead work with actual evidence — but it might lead his supporters to overlook egregious conflicts.

I’m more interested in his second tweet, posted 12 minutes later, touting that Republicans — most who worked or fought campaigns with him in IA — think highly of him. Along with selling lawyers a lie, it seems, Trump feels the need to assure fellow Republicans (in the wake of losing many suburban women voters in part because of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process) that it will be worth fighting for Whitaker. Sure, Iowa politicians matter for anyone thinking of running for office. It definitely helps that the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee has driven to all Iowa’s counties with Whitaker.

But the key validator here, of course, is Leonard Leo, who has been pushing Whitaker as part of a defense strategy. That is, Leo is not (yet) pushing Whitaker to be a judge, though I think it likely that’s how he expects to be paid off, which makes Leo’s involvement even more suspect. For now, though, Leo is instead pushing Whitaker to help wind down the Mueller probe.

And Trump wants fellow Republicans, who just got shellacked in the House and may not even extend their advantage in the Senate, to risk political capital to defend Whitaker, all the while blowing up a half century of conservative beliefs about appointments.

Yet, even with these two bids to placate two different audiences about the Whitaker move (and all the related bullshit about not knowing what a hack Whitaker is), Trump simply doesn’t address all the glaring problems with Whitaker, starting with the question about whether the appointment is even legal.

It’s always a mistake to underestimate Trump’s survival ability, and it may be that he’ll find a way to persuade the two audiences he’s trying to reassure that Whitaker is worth the risk. But these tweets suggest a heavy-handed move he probably imagined would bring him salvation has just added to his headaches.

JOHN BOLTON WILL GET TO START HIS IRAN WAR BECAUSE NINE IRANIANS STOLE ACADEMIC DISSERTATIONS

Earlier today, Rod Rosenstein rolled out a dangerously vague indictment of nine Iranians, allegedly tied to the Revolutionary Guard, for hacking hundreds of universities and some private companies and NGOs.

I say it’s dangerously vague because, while it’s clear the Iranians compromised thousands of university professors, it’s not clear precisely what they stole. But it appears that most of data stolen from universities (some privacy companies, government agencies, and NGOs were targeted too) consists of scholarship.

[M]embers of the conspiracy used stolen account credentials and obtained unauthorized access to victim professor accounts, though which they then exfiltrated, or transferred to themselves, academic data and documents from the systems of compromised universities, including, among other things, academic journalist, these, dissertations, and electronic books.

The indictment describes the stolen data benefitting (along with the IRGC) “Iran-based universities.” And it specifies that the hackers sold the information so that Iranians could access US academic online libraries.

Magapaper sold stolen academic resources to customers within Iran, including Iran-based public universities and institutions, and Gigapaper sold a service to customers within Iran whereby purchasing customers could use compromised university professor accounts to directly access the online library systems of particular United States-based and foreign universities.

The indictment claims the Iranians stole “academic data and intellectual property” which cost the affected 144 US universities “$3.4 billion to procure and access.” But that’s reminiscent of the Aaron Swartz case (to which several people have likened this), where the prosecutor justified pursuing Swartz because he had downloaded “intellectual property that cost millions to create,” something like 4.75 million articles and 87 Gigabytes of data (See the extensive discussion about cost and damages in this MIT report.) DOJ accuses the Iranians of stealing 31 terabytes of data.

As I said, this is a dangerously vague indictment. And, from the metadata, it appears that the indictment may be more than a month old. ( h/t z3dster)

There are also not dates on any of the signature lines, so it may be this indictment has just been sitting in a drawer in southern Manhattan, waiting to serve as a casus belli.

Perhaps there was more sensitive data stolen here. Perhaps the professors who got hacked were more selectively targeted than the sheer number of academics targeted — 100,000 got phished, with almost 8,000 responding — suggests.

But absent far more details, this indictment seems to make an international incident out of people in a very closed society trying to access academic information that is readily available here.

I’ve long written about the potential downsides of indicting nation-state hackers, which is effectively what these guys are — particularly the possibility that doing so will invite retaliation against our own official hackers. But in some cases — with the OPM hack, with hacks of national security information, with the Russians who targeted the election — that might make sense.

But indicting nation-state hackers for stealing dissertations?

Update: This confirms what z3dster noted: this thing has been sealed since February 7. Why? And why did it get unsealed the day after Bolton was hired?

NOTHING HAPPENS IN A VACUUM: DIPLOMATIC SCUFFLES AND ACADEMIC SPEECHES IN MOSCOW

In front of a brick building one pre-dawn summer morning, a security guard tackled a man as he walked toward the entrance after exiting a cab. The security guard slammed the man onto the building’s concrete steps, choking him as he restrained the man. The man managed to open the door and gain partial egress into the foyer without use of his hands while the guard continued to choke him.

The guard was Russian.

The man was an American.

The building was the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

The two-man scuffle happened June 6, 2016, exactly one month before Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page would view the EUFA Portugal vs. Wales semi-final match at a Morgan Stanley-hosted event in Moscow.

On June 26, WaPo’s Josh Rogin wrote about increasing harassment of U.S diplomats across Europe by Russia. Episodes included breaking into diplomats’ homes and stalking diplomats’ children. Norm Eisen, U.S. ambassador the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014, called this harassment “gray war.”

On June 29, Rogin wrote about the June 6 scuffle; the American was not identified by name or by employment. He may have been a diplomat or a spy under diplomatic cover; different sources gave different possible explanations.

But the guard who beat up the American was an FSB employee. The American’s shoulder was broken; the severity of his injuries required a flight out of Russia for urgent medical care.

On June 30, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova issued a statement* and claimed WaPo, the U.S. State Department and ‘special services’ had spread false information about the June 6 event. The FSB guard acted when the American didn’t show his ID; further, the “police officer on duty was attacked” and can be seen in surveillance video.

On July 7, Josh Rogin wrote that Congress had begun to investigate the June 6 event, concerned the FSB guard’s actions violated the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations. The Obama administration had refused comment though State Department’s John Kirby said the Russian’s statements were “inaccurate” while administration officials quietly briefed members of Congress about the episode.

This same day Carter Page gave a speech at the New Economic School in Moscow, the day after he attended the EUFA semifinals viewing party, meeting Rosneft’s Directer of Investor Relations Andrey Baranov, Gazprom Investproekt’s CEO Oleg Nagovitsyn, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, and members of the Duma. A video of Page’s speech is uploaded that day to YouTube by a think tank.

On July 8, RT (Russia Today) publishes on YouTube a tightly edited excerpt from a surveillance camera videotape which captured the June 6 scuffle. The FSB guard clearly had the upper hand from the moment he slammed the unnamed diplomat to the concrete.

This same day Carter Page would give a commencement speech at the New Economic School; it, too, is captured on video and uploaded to YouTube, though not until months later.

How odd that it took a little over a month for RT to acquire the video and upload it to their YouTube channel.

How odd that RT never asked Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser, what he might recommend to Trump to prevent future “gray war” events like the June 6 scuffle.

How odd that the “gray war” episodes which concerned Republican members of Congress so much are now inert about the sanctions they placed on Russia, with little concern for the effect on NATO.

“The problem is there have been no consequences for Russia,” said Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who serves as president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. “The administration continues to pursue a false narrative that Russia can be our partner. They clearly don’t want to be our partner, they’ve identified us as an adversary, and we need to prepare for that type of relationship.”

What changed since June 2016 besides the presidency?

* Open with caution; link is to a Russian government site.

DEMOCRATS CAN DO BETTER THAN “WONK HARDER” ON OBAMACARE GOING FORWARD

Sarah Kliff has finally done what left wonk journalists should have done years ago: go interview people from Kentucky about their understanding of and feelings about ObamaCare. KY is, with WV, the state in which ACA achieved its best results, with the number of uninsured going from 25% to 10% of the state. And yet Democrats in KY have been utterly hammered since ACA passed.

Kliff spent a lot of time actually listening to voters to understand why they voted overwhelmingly for a guy who promises to scrap ACA in its existing form (though he always promised to replace it with something better).

Definitely go read the whole thing, because the degree to which Kliff let these voters speak for themselves (and the degree to which they appear like real and often thoughtful people) is admirable. Here’s how she summarizes what she heard.

Many expressed frustration that Obamacare plans cost way too much, that premiums and deductibles had spiraled out of control. And part of their anger was wrapped up in the idea that other people were getting even better, even cheaper benefits — and those other people did not deserve the help

There was a persistent belief that Trump would fix these problems and make Obamacare work better. I kept hearing informed voters, who had watched the election closely, say they did hear the promise of repeal but simply felt Trump couldn’t repeal a law that had done so much good for them. In fact, some of the people I talked to hope that one of the more divisive pieces of the law — Medicaid expansion — might become even more robust, offering more of the working poor a chance at the same coverage the very poor receive.

Significantly, Kliff dispels one explanation always given for why Kentuckians hate ObamaCare so much: purportedly because the state had hidden that the state’s program was actually ObamaCare. All but one of the people she talked with knew they were getting ObamaCare.

All but one knew full well that the coverage was part of Obamacare. They voted for Trump because they were concerned about other issues — and just couldn’t fathom the idea that this new coverage would be taken away from them.

Which leaves the two major complaints with the law: expense and the divisiveness associated with two-tiered benefit programs.

We’ve known since before the bill passed that it was too expensive, such that middle class families would still go into debt even with fairly normal life medical care, including normal childbirth. At the time, the wonk boys were talking among themselves about how they needed to push back against such claims.

But Kliff puts a face to the consequences of that expense, where people use precious disposable income for insurance they know they won’t use.

The deductible left Atkins exasperated. “I am totally afraid to be sick,” she says. “I don’t have [that money] to pay upfront if I go to the hospital tomorrow.”

Atkins’s plan offers free preventive care, an Obamacare mandate. But she skips mammograms and colonoscopies because she doesn’t think she’d have the money to pay for any follow-up care if the doctors did detect something.

Atkins says she only buys insurance as financial protection — “to keep from losing my house if something major happened,” she says. “But I’m not using it to go to the doctor. I’ve not used anything.”

She also focuses on something that got discussed during passage, but not in as much detail: the degree to which the two-tiered method of expansion, with some getting Medicaid and some getting subsidized shitty insurance, would poison the perception of the law, because the working poor would get fewer benefits than people who were or believed to be not working.

“I really think Medicaid is good, but I’m really having a problem with the people that don’t want to work,” she said. “Us middle-class people are really, really upset about having to work constantly, and then these people are not responsible.” This has long been the basis for (often GOP- stoked) opposition to government support in the US, the resentment that others are getting more, a resentment that often gets racialized via stereotypes about welfare queens.

Importantly, Kliff also dismisses those who complain these rube voters should have known the stakes of voting in Donald Trump, because she didn’t know either.

I spent election night frantically reporting and calling sources, trying to understand what parts of Obamacare Republicans could and couldn’t dismantle. I didn’t know at the time, nor had I devoted the necessary time to learn, until election night.

Mills was wrong about what Republicans would do to Obamacare. But then again, I write about it for a living. And I was wrong too.

In any case, it was a sobering, humanizing report. I hope Kliff follows up on as Governor Matt Bevin makes KY’s ACA worse this year.

Democrats need to learn this lesson because, even if they can’t impose a penalty on Bevin and other KY Republicans for taking away benefits that people currently have, the same process is bound to roll out in states across the country. That is, liberals need to understand this dynamic if they want to reverse the policy changes the GOP are about to roll out.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats are taking away the wrong lesson about ObamaCare from the election. Markos Moulitsas rather notoriously offered this lesson (though not in the context of Kliff’s report). But even Kevin Drum, after reading Kliff’s report, seems to have come up with the wrong lesson.

Obamacare has several smallish problems, but its only big problem is that it’s underfunded. The subsidies should be bigger, the policies should be more generous, and the individual mandate penalty should be heftier. Done right, maybe it would cost $2 trillion over ten years instead of $1 trillion.

Republicans wouldn’t have cared. If this were a real goal—like, say, cutting taxes on the rich—they’d just go ahead and do it. If the taxes didn’t pay for it all, they’d make up a story about how it would pay for itself. And if you’re Donald Trump, you just loudly insist that,somehow, you’re going to cover everybody and it’s going to be great.

But Democrats didn’t do that. They didn’t oversell Obamacare and they didn’t bust the budget with it. They could have. It would have added to the deficit, but that wouldn’t have hurt them much. Politically, the far better option was to go ahead and run up the deficit in order to create a program of truly affordable care that people really liked.

Even setting side whether the problem of providers exiting the marketplace is “smallish” or actually quite big, the one takeaway Drum takes from this article about how a technocratic solution sows hatred for that technocratic solution is just to wonk harder. That is, he wants to keep the existing program, and just throw more money at the providers via subsidies and more penalties at people who are literally choosing between paying for insurance they won’t use or making other choices with limited disposable income.

He ignores entirely how the two-tier system of benefits feeds resentments (not to mention all the unnecessary complexity it entails).

Luckily, being completely out of power, Democrats have another alternative besides just “wonk harder.” Since Republicans will already in in the difficult position of taking away benefits, Democrats can make that much harder — and play to what we’ve learned from the roll out of ObamaCare — by calling for what they should have called for in the first place: something that moves us towards true universal care, rather than just aspirationally universal insurance coverage. Not only is that what KY voters appear to want, but it is a more efficient way of providing health care. Implement it via subsidized Medicare (well-loved because it is universal) buy-in, I don’t care. But this is the opportunity for Democrats to turn the Republicans’ attacks on ObamaCare on their head, and make the policy much smarter at the same time. THE OBAMACARE NOT COMEY EFFECT

Just after the election I did two posts considering the relative impact of the Jim Comey letter announcing FBI was reviewing the Anthony Weiner derived emails and the announcement of a huge ObamaCare premium spike.

I still think we don’t have enough data about the relative effect of the two events.

But a number of people are pointing to this post from Sam Wang, which ends,

In the above graph of the Comey effect, each point shows the median margin for polls that were in the field on that day. As you can see, the immediate effect of Comey’s letter was a swing toward Trump of 4 percentage points, about half of which stuck. This was enough to swing Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin. It seems likely that Comey’s letter was a critical factor in the election outcome.

Nowhere in the post does Wang note what date Comey sent his letter, though. It was October 28. Unless Wang’s chart is totally mislabeled (Update: In an “explanation” added to his post, Wang effectively says his graph is off by three — though not four — days due to the way he presents multi-day polls; he has, at least, now told his readers when the actual letter came out) but what it shows seems to be consistent with what I showed in this post, which shows a Hillary dip and a Trump spike moving in concert on before October 28), then his chart show doesn’t support a Comey effect at all — it shows the opposite. The differential started narrowing after October 24. By October 28, when the letter was released, the differential had plateaued before it turned up again.

As it turns out, the ObamaCare spike was announced on October 24 (and reported heavily starting October 25).

That’s precisely when we see the differential moving.

If we’re assuming an immediate response in polls in response to an event, then the ObamaCare premium spike would be a far better explanation than the Comey letter, which took place later.

Frankly, I suspect both had an impact, and further suspect there may have been something else driving the differential late turn to Trump in the Rust Belt. And I suspect we still don’t have the data to explain what made a bunch of Rust Belt voters move to Trump right before the election. WHAT WAS THE ROLE OF OBAMACARE PREMIUM HIKES IN TRUMP’S WIN?

As I noted in my piece assessing the claims that the two letters Jim Comey wrote on the Hillary email investigation cost Hillary the election, the correlation between the October 28 Comey letter and what Trump’s camp reports as a surge is not exact. According to them (and they seem to have seen in real time far more clearly than the Hillary camp), the surge started before the letter.

Trump’s analysts had detected this upsurge in the electorate even beforeFBI Director James Comey delivered his Oct. 28 letter to Congress announcing that he was reopening his investigation into Clinton’s e-mails. But the news of the investigation accelerated the shift of a largely hidden rural mass of voters toward Trump.

So something else (which I posited could be nothing more than Gary Johnson voters deciding to vote Trump) has to have happened as well.

In comments, rollotomasi offered another suggestion, one I think may be significant: ObamaCare premium increases.

The press started reporting that increases would happen before they were announced. To prepare for that, on October 20, Obama, in what was treated by some as a campaign stop in Miami but what was technically a policy speech on the increases, had this to say (after having delivered a long explanation that ObamaCare was working just as planned).

Now, the second issue has to do with the marketplaces. Although the marketplaces are working well in most of the states, there are some states where there’s still not enough competition between insurers. So if you only have one insurer, they may decide we’re going to jack up rates because we can, because nobody else is offering a better price.

In those states where the governor or legislature is hostile to the ACA, it makes it harder to enroll people because the state is not actively participating in outreach. And so, as a consequence, in those states enrollment in the plan — especially enrollment of young people — has lagged.

And what that means is that the insurance pool is smaller and it gets a higher percentage of older and sicker people who are signing up — because if you’re sick or you’re old, you’re more likely to say, well, I’m going to sign up, no matter what, because I know I’m going to need it; if you’re young and healthy like you guys, you say, eh, I’m fine, life is good — so you have more older and sicker people signing up, fewer younger and healthier people signing up, and that drives rates up, because the people who use health care most end up being in the insurance pool; people who use it least are not.

And then, in some cases, insurers just set their prices too low at the outset because they didn’t know what the insurance pool was going to look like, and then they started losing money. And so now they’ve decided to significantly increase premiums in some states.

Now, it’s these premium increases in some of the states in the marketplace that sometimes attracts negative headlines. Remember, these premium increases won’t impact most of the people who are buying insurance through the marketplace, because even when premiums go up, the tax credits go up to offset the increases. So people who qualify for tax credits, they may not even notice their premiums went up because the tax credit is covered.

And keep in mind that these premium increases that some of you may have read about have no effect at all if you’re getting health insurance on the job, or through Medicaid or Medicare. So for the 80 [percent]-plus people who already had health insurance, if your premium is going up, it’s not because of Obamacare. It’s because of your employer or your insurer — even though sometimes they try to blame Obamacare for why the rates go up. It’s not because of any policy of the Affordable Care Act that the rates are going up.

But if you are one of the people who doesn’t get health care on the job, doesn’t qualify for Medicaid, doesn’t qualify for Medicare — doesn’t qualify for a tax credit to help you buy insurance, because maybe you made just a little bit too much money under the law — these premium increases do make insurance less affordable. And in some states, the premium increases are manageable. Some are 2 percent or 8 percent, some 20 percent. But we know there are some states that may see premiums go up by 50 percent or more.

One of the problems with ObamaCare is its complexity. If it takes 7 paragraphs to try to make a big rate hike sound better, it’s not going to work.

The actual rates for ObamaCare plan increases — with an average increase of 22% — came out October 24. There was a great deal of chatter between then and the election, especially around the November 1 start of sign-ups, as the Administration scrambled to get users to shop for a more affordable plan. Significantly, PA was one of the worst affected states.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation, the ObamaCare hikes should not have mattered. It released a poll showing even among Republican voters, just 5% thought heath insurance was the most important issue. Except the poll, which was released on October 27, right in the middle of the discussion about spiking rates, was actually conducted from October 12 to 18, before the rate increases were announced (which to my mind makes it a largely useless but politically timed poll release). Moreover, the poll sampled far more self-identified Democrats than self-identified Republicans (408 to 285), meaning the margins of error would be far higher for Trump-leaning voters.

But in polls of voters taken after the election, repealing ObamaCare was the top priority among Republicans. 74% of those polled wanted to repeal ObamaCare, versus 30% who wanted to build Trump’s wall.

Admittedly, this isn’t a good measure of the importance of premium hikes (though it does seem somewhat inconsistent with the Kaiser poll). It may be a measure of 7 years of relentless opposition to ObamaCare, compounded by Trump’s repeated description of the program as a disaster.

Moreover, while the October 24 premium hike may explain why Trump started surging before the Comey letter, it wouldn’t explain what Hillary’s camp describes as energizing of Trump’s base when the second letter revealed nothing had been in the emails after all.

All that said, the premium hikes were probably the most significant policy discussion that happened between the last debate and the election. And for the small segment of the electorate that actually uses the exchanges, that policy change may have been felt very viscerally as they started the tedious process of shopping for an affordable plan.

THE OBAMACARE “WONKS” ARE AWFULLY SELECTIVE ABOUT WHICH TAXES AND COSTS THEY SEE

Let me start this critique (what may be the first of two parts) of Jonathan Cohn’s scolding of Bernie Sanders on health insurance by looking at this passage, from the end of his piece:

[Bernie] might not get his plan through Congress, sure, but he could use his promise to extract other useful legislation from Congress. Maybe he could win approval for the “public option” insurance plan that was originally part of Obamacare, or for allowing the non-elderly to buy into Medicare.

These are legitimate arguments. But liberal policy wonks remember the struggle to enact and then implement Obamacare. They also also remember that universal health care was a progressive dream for nearly a century, one that proved impossible for presidents with names like Roosevelt and Truman (and Clinton!) to realize.

One reason reform took so long is that, for most of that period, activists and the wonks were pulling in different directions, with the activists pursuing single-payer and the wonks looking for compromises. The (mostly) unified front they showed in 2009 and 2010 was a big reason Obamacare became law. Now that unity is fading, creating a key divide in the Democratic campaign.

In this passage, Cohn talks about the things that Bernie Sanders might do as President that fall short of his goal of “single payer” health care (I put that in quotes because what we’re really talking about is government paid health insurance — as providers pull out of exchanges in Obamacare we’re actually moving closer to a much more alarming sort of single payer model).

He suggests that President Bernie, brought to earth by a reality of which, his critics suggest, he is woefully unaware right now, might set up the government as a competitor to private insurers within the Obamacare structure. Cohn then moves from that possibility (which I would suggest would be remote except for some realities about Obamacare as enacted) to saying “liberal policy wonks” know that Obamacare was a struggle and they know how hard it was to get even what we got (Bernie, who was in the Senate fighting to make Obamacare better at the time, apparently is too senile to remember all this, I guess).

As a reminder, one reason both the public option and Medicare buy-in were opposed by some Democratic Senators (and especially insurance state Independent Joe Lieberman, whom Bill Clinton had a big hand in getting reelected in 2006), meaning we couldn’t even pass it with a supermajority, is because they would make it too easy to move towards single payer. The idea was private companies could not compete, and so would slowly lose most exchange business to the government.

Now, if I were someone pushing for the improvement of healthcare delivery in this country, I’d say, “wow, if Bernie could pull off Medicare buy-in, that’d get us closer to single payer! That’d be a huge win!” I also might consider ways that true Medicare buy-in (rather than just gradually lowering the age at which you could buy in) might address some of the problems with cost sustainability with Medicare. I’d further applaud that getting more people into Medicare would expose more people to the innovations in delivery tied to it (one of the two best things about Obamacare), and therefore would move delivery as a whole down that path.

In short, I’d be applauding.

But Cohn doesn’t do that.

Instead, he decries what he calls a split between “wonks” and “activists.”

Can someone please define what those words mean for me? Can you explain how a man who has spent a decade writing about ways to improve health insurance and even sometimes healthcare, as Cohn has, is not an activist of sorts? Has he just been writing for a paycheck all these years?

Don’t get me wrong. I consider Cohn an expert in the subject, unlike some other people who get included in Paul Krugman’s club of wonks. I respect much of what he writes. And I have no doubt that he has become an expert on this topic because he’d like to improve a shitty system.

But setting up a dichotomy between “wonks” (“yes, I am one of those wonks,” Cohn says elsewhere) and “activists” is an insidious way of saying “some of the people who work on this issue are not as smart as me.” Would anyone suggest such a thing about insurance company lobbyists, who are themselves “activists”? Nope. They’re just experts who use different methods to press for their desired outcome. But somehow people who lobby and organize on the other side are presumed to be unicorn sniffing half-wits.

Calling oneself a wonk is also an easy way absolve oneself of examining what function wonk-scolding plays — a way to pretend one is delivering just unmediated rationality and not an argument designed to bring about some outcome. Here, the desired outcome seems to be the restoration of unity between those deemed “activists” and those deemed “wonks.” But not just to restore unity, mind you, but to restore unity by getting “activists” to be satisfied with what “wonks” tell them is realistic.

In other words, it’s a plea from one kind of activist for another kind of activist to fall back in line behind the policies the first kind of activist espouses, and, especially, to stop suggesting Obamacare (and, frankly, a whole bunch of other policies enacted by Obama and defended by Hillary Clinton, as well as some foreign policy ones that go beyond what Obama has done) isn’t an adequate solution.

So let’s go back to what else Cohn says. First, he explains why (unnamed) “liberals sympathetic” to government insurance consider it unrealistic by warning that even trying to move towards government insurance will “produce a major public backlash.”

Even many liberals sympathetic to the idea have said that Sanders’ scheme is simply not realistic. They worry that trying to push through another comprehensive health care package so soon after the Affordable Care Act’s tumultuous enactment would produce a major public backlash.

Note what Cohn has done here (besides putting his own argument in the mouths of unnamed anonymous liberals). In the rest of his piece, Cohn suggests that achieving government insurance is unrealistic. Fair enough — in a four year term it may well be. But here, he somehow ties what might fairly be considered the impossibility of actually achieving it with the specter of “major public backlash” if someone even tries.

I’m not sure if Cohn has noticed, but there is an ongoing major public backlash already. It was so bad in 2010 that it made predictable off year congressional losses far worse than they might have been. Much of that backlash is just Republican posturing. But not all of it. Some of the backlash comes from legitimate complaints about Obamacare: the government botched the original sign up, people actually weren’t able to keep their insurance plans, their selection of doctors has gone down, people are being forced to buy shitty insurance they can’t afford that won’t even make care affordable. Some of the backlash is unjustified, but some of it actually is justified.

But Cohn says we can’t talk about moving to government insurance because if so it will … cause what is already happening to continue happening? Or perhaps because it will legitimize some of the legitimate critiques of the Obamacare that activists like Cohn pushed back in 2009? Is that it? We can’t even talk about government insurance because doing so would bring people like Cohn in for some criticism?

Finally, here’s the line from the debate that Cohn frames this entire discussion around, where Hillary attacked Bernie’s plan because it would impose a $2,300 tax on the working poor.

But during the debate she also made another claim: That under the Sanders plan, some low-income people now on Medicaid would be much worse off. “A working woman on Medicaid who already has health insurance would be expected to pay about $2,300,” Clinton said.

[snip] Here’s why. If the federal government is going to provide everybody with health insurance, then it must raise enough money to pay for those benefits. To do this, Sanders has said, he’d create a new payroll tax, equal to 8.9 percent of wages. In theory, employees would pay only a portion of that, with employers covering the majority. In reality, economists say, the employer share also comes out of workers’ paychecks, if not right away then over time.

[snip]

An 8.9 percent payroll tax would work out to a new payroll tax burden of $2,314 — just as Clinton said.

Today, by contrast, you’d be getting Medicaid without having to pay any new taxes. The money for the program comes out of general revenue and if you’re one of the newly eligible folks, then the money is coming almost entirely from taxes that fall on the wealthy and on corporations in the health care industry.

Now, “wonks” love to criticize Bernie for promising things he can’t deliver. But note what Cohn has done in this last paragraph: under Obamacare this working poor mother of two gets health insurance “without having to pay any new taxes.” Her health insurance “comes out of general revenue” which comes from “taxes that fall on the wealthy and on corporations in the health care industry.”

I think Cohn means to suggest that the revenue passed under Obamacare fall on the wealthy and corporations. He surely doesn’t mean that general revenue funds generally come from taxes that fall on the wealthy and corporations, because many rich people and corporations actually don’t pay income taxes. Indeed, it’s all that we can manage to keep corporations — some of them the health care ones Cohn says pay for all this — paying any taxes at all. What he really means is the taxes that pay for Medicaid come largely from the affluent and middle class taxes and even borrowing. That single mom likely still isn’t paying for her own Medicaid, but it’s not actually rich corporations that are doing so.

But even if Cohn meant only to refer to the planned funding method for Obamacare, his claim is problematic. That’s because one of the taxes targeting the industry, on medical devices, has already been suspended. Another tax that Obamacare boosters liked to pretend will only affect the wealthy, the Cadillac tax, will actually affect more people than that, including unions (which is why Hillary has promised to scrap it, as has Bernie). Plus, the Cadillac tax boosters sold it with a claim that workers wages would go up after their companies cut their health insurance. Those claims always seemed like fantasy — at least to me and actual experts like Larry Mishel, the latter of whom was pretty much ignored by the “wonks” during the debate. In the last six years that has become even more clear.

This is important: In a key fight about funding during Obamacare, the “wonks” promised workers (especially union workers) a wage increase, but evidence now strongly suggests it would lead instead to a wage cut. Yet those same “wonks” (though Cohn wasn’t one of the more obnoxious Cadillac tax defenders) are now scolding Bernie about the realism of his claims. Why should we listen to the “wonks” when they too promised illusory unicorns?

Finally, though, I want to look at the premise of Hillary’s attack, that Bernie’s plan would be bad because it would impose an 8.9% tax on a working poor woman. Cohn admits that’s surely something Bernie would fix before implementation, but he apparently finds the criticism legitimate because “doing so would require new trade-offs.” Trade-offs like those that continue to need to be made on Obamacare to make up for the medical device and Cadillac tax, I’d respond.

But here’s the other thing about that 8.9% tax. I absolutely agree that an 8.9% tax on the working poor in exchange for health insurance would be steep. But let’s consider what Obamacare is for a segment of the middle class that are forced to buy insurance — spending up to 13% of their income — that they can’t use. Sure, it will minimize but by no means eliminate the problem of medically related financial crisis in the case of a catastrophe. But the rest of the time, it functions as a tax, a payment necessitated under this scheme to make care accessible for others. One that — unlike that poor woman who’d pay $2,300 if Bernie’s implementation of single payer somehow didn’t fix things along the way — wouldn’t necessarily provide care in response. (Note, in reality, 22% of Medicaid recipients also can’t afford to use their insurance, though unlike the general number of underinsured, that’s a number that Obamacare has improved.)

Now, we knew this was going to be a problem, though the “wonks” generally didn’t like to talk about it during the debate (though Cohn is actually one who did admit it at least once in response to me raising it), because somewhere between 16 and 21% of people in Massachusetts couldn’t afford to use their RomneyCare. Hillary has suggested she’d throw more money at the problem (and, ultimately, insurers) to address the problem, but she hasn’t actually explained what trade-offs she’d make to achieve that. Again, it seems okay for Hillary to remain silent about the trade-offs she’d have to make whereas when Bernie does he’s a fantasist.

Partly, though, Obamacare is designed to underinsure people, because there’s a belief that unless people feel the sting of obtaining care, they’ll get too much of it. “Bending the cost curve” under Obamacare is largely driven by increasing the costs of actually using insurance to the end user as opposed to, say, eliminating the many layers of private profit that doesn’t actually improve health care but makes it expensive.

In truth, the people the “wonks” deem “activists” aren’t actually stupid, or naive, or unicorn herders. Some of them are actually experts of longer standing than those writing in favor of Obamacare. Rather, they disagree about what acceptable costs are, as well as about whether it makes sense to continue pointing out that the US has an unbelievably ineffective healthcare delivery system with terrible outcomes that not only is immoral, but saddles our economy with a burden that other developed countries don’t have, making us less competitive in any industry not driven by this exorbitant spending. Yes, there is also a difference of opinion about whether it is more effective “activism” to set the goal where everyone agrees it should be — providing actual health care — or to instead set more moderate goals that also have the effect of naturalizing a particular ideology. But ultimately there is a real debate about policy here, and rather than use “activists” to continue to set the bar on the most efficient way to provide the best health care, a lot of those close to Hillary would prefer they just shut up.

Update: First, Cohn has corrected his piece to note that the single mom he discusses would actually pay $1,600, and that it would actually come from her employer.

Dean Baker (another expert often ignored during these debates) not only reminds that if Bernie were able to pass both his single payer and his $15 minimum wage proposals, the single mom would be better off overall (and he used Cohn’s uncorrected number). He also provides the equivalent example to the one Cohn offers, to note (as I did) that Obamacare requires some people to pay for insurance they won’t use.

Let’s take the case of a young African American woman just out of college, with $30,000 in debt. Let’s suppose this woman has an income of $35,000 a year. Let’s say she is in excellent health and from a family of people enjoying excellent health. In the pre-Obamacare days she might have opted to either buy one of the low-cost catastrophic plans that is no longer available under the ACA, or go without insurance altogether.

Under the ACA, this young woman will be expected to pay roughly 8 percent of her income, or $2,800 a year, for health insurance that she does not want. Should we feel bad about this young woman struggling to meet a large debt burden, while working at a low-paying job and now being forced to buy insurance?

Well, that is a bad story and there are many like them. But many of the same policy wonks who have endlessly highlighted the plight of the Medicaid mother under the Sanders plan (I have seen it featured as a news article in the Washington Post and also as a topic of numerous columns and editorials), have been content to largely ignore the plight of young people struggling to pay their ACA premiums. At least they don’t see it as a basis for rejecting the Affordable Care Act.

VACATION SUCKY BLOGGING SCHEDULE

Alright all you lugnuts that frequent the Emptywheel blog, as you may know, blogging gets a bit inconsistent Christmas week. And so it is again this year. Marcy is traveling, I am in New York City with my wife and daughter, and Jim is in Hawaii (surfing the big waves I presume) with his family.

So, we are all somewhat preoccupied. Feel free to use this post or the previous Real Housewives Trash Talk post to chat on any and all topics de jour. We will be along here or there, but in the meantime, if there is something to discuss, get on with it! Hope you all are having a great holiday week.