Molly Jackman, Brookings
Paul Krugman:
Much of the media commentary on President Obama’s big inequality speech was cynical. You know the drill: it’s yet another “reboot” that will go nowhere; none of it will have any effect on policy, and so on. But before we talk about the speech’s possible political impact or lack thereof, shouldn’t we look at the substance? Was what the president said true? Was it new? If the answer to these questions is yes — and it is — then what he said deserves a serious hearing.
And once you realize that, you also realize that the speech may matter a lot more than the cynics imagine.
Why? Because ideas matter. You'd think pundits, of all people, would get that. But if the ideas aren't theirs...
Molly Jackman:
My findings are threefold. First, ALEC model bills are, word-for-word, introduced in our state legislatures at a non-trivial rate. Second, they have a good chance – better than most legislation – of being enacted into law. Finally, the bills that pass are most often linked to controversial social and economic issues. In the end, I argue that this is not good for ALEC, its corporate partners, or for the democratic process.
Rick Hasen:
Why Large Scale Voter Impersonation Plans Can’t Work
Because they are dumb.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Alex Seitz-Wald:
3 Ways You Can Tell the Health Care Website Is Working
Here's one: Republicans have stopped talking about it.
Alec MacGillis:
Those Media Hysterics Who Said Obama's Presidency Was Dead Were Wrong. Again.
Greg Sargent:
The point here is that GOP base voters may force Republican lawmakers to remain chained to a fantasy — that Obamacare’s demise is still a genuine possibility. While Democratic operatives fully recognize that the law is unpopular, that further problems are possible, and that Dems are still in danger, they believe Republican lawmakers and candidates are constrained in a way that will work against them, too.
Democratic lawmakers and candidates at least have some flexibility to deal with problems as they arise — they can call for fixes while defending the law’s broader goal of expanding affordable health coverage.
Interesting piece from
Nathan Kelly:
We observed that just as consensus among U.S. policymakers was diminishing, income concentration was increasing, so much so that the richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home 22.5 percent of all income. We were doubtful that this was a coincidence, and our intuition was that declining consensus produced obstacles to action thereby making it more difficult to fashion new policies or revise old ones to counter rising income inequality. We also wondered if institutional stasis might to feed on itself, with hurdles to policymaking exacerbating inequality to a greater extent as the gap between the rich and the poor grows. If incomes were becoming more equal, then doing nothing new would matter only to actors who want greater inequality. But when inequality is increasing, stasis might allow the process to accelerate. We gathered data and developed measures to test our ideas about gridlock and trends in income concentration from 1940 to 2006. The key results show that rules and institutional obstacles explain more than 50 percent of variation in the top income share over this period. As the ideological preference of the Senator whose vote is needed to overcome a filibuster diverges from the average member of the Senate, the income share going to the top one percent increases.
File this under "Why you should care about Congressional rules".
Reuters:
U.S. consumer sentiment surged in December as Americans' outlook on the economy and job prospects improved, a survey released on Friday showed.
The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's preliminary reading on the overall index on consumer sentiment jumped to 82.5 for December, up from a final reading of 75.1 in November. This was the highest reading for the index since July, and topped analyst forecasts for a reading of 76.
"All of the improvement was among households with incomes below $75,000, with upper income households showing no gain from last month's reading," survey director Richard Curtin wrote in a statement.
Follow-up on the
Katie Couric HPV debacle from
CBS:
Katie Couric’s talk show "Katie" has drawn ire from doctors and journalists for a recent segment on the HPV vaccine that presented what it called “both sides” of the “HPV controversy.”...
Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, did not feel it was appropriate to juxtapose the anecdotal stories with the medical evidence. He had hoped more weight would be given to the scientific evidence of the vaccine’s safety profile and effectiveness at preventing cervical cancer.
“The show was kind of inexcusable in terms of damage done versus positive contribution,” he told CBS News.
Any time you’re vaccinating hundreds of thousands of people, Caplan said, you can expect that some people in that population will have health incidents occur. But their ailments may not necessarily be connected to the vaccine. What needs to be weighed is the cause and effect, versus what may be just coincidence. Mentioning such incidents in that context would have been one thing, but giving them more air-time than the bevy of evidence about safety and efficacy is another.
“The problem in TV and all media, (is) the human interest drives the story,” said Caplan. “In science and public health, it doesn’t, or it’s at risk of grave harm.”
“If you want to do a show every day that spotlights anecdotal claims about the health effects of cell phones or curative powers of megavitamins or dangers of airplane contrail vapors, you can certainly fill up lots of programming,” said added. “But I don’t think you’re doing anyone a service