IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME

A VERY GOOD FRIDAY

The good news today is that eight million people have now signed up for medical insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The better news is that, of those eight million,  more than a third were under the age of  35.

The best news is that, in addition to those eight million signees, three million more have signed up for expanded Medicaid made possible by the ACA, another three million young people are now covered under their parents' health insurance plans, and an additional five million individuals have signed up for non-exchange plans.

All of this is thanks to Obamacare.  The enrollment numbers exceeded projections by more than one million, and the fact that at least a third of those enrollees were under 35, with another three million under 26 year olds covered by Mom and Dad's plan, was especially important.  The 18-35 year olds are the so-called "young invincibles."  They must be part of the covered population if Obamacare is to succeed.  In fact, the only way to keep premiums down in a system that delivers health care through market based insurance is to make sure the insured pool is large enough for the healthy young to effectively absorb the cost of caring for  the aged sick.  And this is exactly what the ACA is doing.

Everyone should be cheering.

But, of course, everyone isn't.

John Boehner greeted the news of eight million enrollees by asserting that the President was ignoring the "havoc" the law ostensibly created for the "hundreds of thousands" who had plans they liked but had to re-enroll in new plans that met the ACA's minimal standards. Others complained that any claim of success was premature --either because the newly enrolled might not pay their premiums, or because it was not clear how many of those enrollees actually were uninsured prior to Obamacare, or because health care premiums and costs are still rising.  

None of these claims has merit. 

Private insurance companies are in the business of making money. For years, they did so by denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions and by otherwise cherry picking premium payers to increase the chances that those payers would never actually need health care.  The minimalist plans put out of business by the ACA simply aided and abetted this strategy.  Most of them were high deductible, minimal coverage or  catastrophic plans; as such, they did not encourage or incentivize wellness because they did not cover a lot of the routine care needed to do so, especially routine care for women.  

One of the goals of Obamacare is to radically reduce the rate of medical inflation which for decades has been running at well in excess of the inflation rate as a whole.  And one way to do this is to incentivize the preventive or routine care that cures small health problems before they become large, expensive ones. The minimalist plans did not do this.

The minimalist plans also threatened to capture the young.  The plans were cheap and the provided care was thin.  In other words, it was made to order for the young invincibles who thought they'd never get sick or be hospitalized.  An insurance system, however, can't keep costs down if it gives away the young and  healthy or, more particularly, if it allows the cost savings inherent in good health to be captured by the young and healthy -- in the form of much lower premiums,  but only for them --rather than being spread over the risk pool as a whole.

Nor do any of the remaining complaints carry weight.

As to overall cost, the available data from the Society of Actuaries -- in other words, from the people who know how to count -- tells us that premium hikes will actually be much less than expected. This is the reason the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently lowered its estimate of the federal budgetary cost of Obamacare by $104 billion over ten years.

As to the cry that enrollees will not pay their bills, this is simply chimerical. There is really no evidence for this claim and a lot that refutes it.  The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 80% of the enrollees already have paid their bills. And other than the rantings of the anti-Obama right wing, there is nothing about the other 20% which credibly  suggests they are a unique group of deadbeats.  

Finally, the notion that enrollment is not catching the uninsured is also baseless.  The CBO expects the number of uninsured to decline materially this year, and private survey data indicates that the share of Americans without insurance went down by about 20%  in the six months since the state and federal exchanges opened in October.

So, will the diehards be satisfied and stop demanding mindless votes to repeal  in the GOP House of Representatives?

Uh . . .

Never.

The problems with Obamacare are neither administrative nor economic.

They are political.

The GOP is hell bent on re-capturing the Senate. It needs a net gain of six seats to do so, and the conditions for re-capture are particularly auspicious this year.  Of the thirty six Senate seats up for election, twenty two are held by Democrats and fourteen by Republicans.  For the GOP, the Democrats who they believe can be beat are in seven states --  Montana, South Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, West Virginia and Alaska.  Obamacare is popular in none of them, and though  state exchanges, where they have been created, have worked very well, they haven't been created in thirty two states, nor in any of seven states the GOP is now targeting to take back the Senate.  

Similarly, while the ACA expands Medicaid eligibility and provides enormous federal subsidies to defer the cost, four of the seven GOP target states wouldn't do that either.  The result is that the voters in those states have little positive experience with Obamacare, a lot of negative experience (they all defaulted to the federal marketplace given the absence of state exchanges and thus were subject to the disastrous roll-out last fall), and an echo chamber of GOP opposition that will get progressively louder as we head toward November.

These political battles will continue. If past is prologue, they may even continue for generations, as has been the case with Social Security and Medicare since their inceptions. 

But for now,  this is still a very good Friday.   The early data from Obamacare is in.  And it undeniably proves that . . .

Sometimes . . .

Big Government works!

SNOW BLIND

SNOW BLIND

It snowed heavily in New York this week.

Again.

This winter has quickly developed into one that will be hard to shake. Here in the northeast, we've had what seems  like a long run of single digit temperature days.  So far this winter, there have been eighteen (18) in my county alone.  That's single digits, twenty-two degrees below freezing, all of them below 10 F, a number of them below even zero.  In the country as a whole, the average temperature dropped below 18 F on January 6.

The last time that happened was in 1998.

This has had a number of unfortunate consequences.  More traffic accidents, especially in places where snow and ice are an anomaly (see Atlanta, Georgia).  Accumulating snow days for suburban school kids (but not Mayor de Blasio's; NYC's new Mayor seems to have an aversion to shutting the schools).  A run on salt that has left many municipalities struggling to replenish supplies.  And . . . 

A renewed push by the crazies to brand global warming a hoax.

I suppose this last result was predictable.  The climate change deniers have been beating the "jury is still out" drum for years, asserting that we have neither sufficient evidence nor science to claim the earth is warming as a consequence of man's growing carbon footprint.  Every time we hit a cold snap, a number of them come out of the woodwork and dust off their Al Gore jokes.  This time has been no different.  The day after that average plummeted to 18 F, Ted Cruz was waylaid leaving the Senate by reporters seeking comment on the then on-going debate over extending unemployment benefits. Cruz ignored them.  "It's cold," he said, "Al Gore told me this wouldn't happen."

He, unfortunately, was not the worst.

On New Year's Day, Donald Trump weighed in with the suggestion that "This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice."  The curse and the caps are Trump's; the last reference was to the climate scientists trapped at year's end off the coast of Antarctica in the MV Akademik Shokalskij when that Russian-flagged vessel couldn't break through the ice. The next day, January 2, a Louisiana Republican, reacting to the cold winter, claimed that "'Global warming' isn't so warm these days."

For its part, the Drudge Report routinely pairs its "Global Warming Intensifies" headline with cold weather reports.  Its side by sides suggest that a record snowfall in Chicago, or record low temperatures nationwide, somehow refute Gore's inconvenient truth. Neither Drudge . . . nor the Congressman . . . nor The Donald explains how this occurs.

And the reason they don't is . . .

They can't.

Global warming is a long term climatological  phenomenon.  It is distinct from weather, which is localized and variable.  Though large numbers of weather-based data points -- after taking into account any relevant local variables -- can be used to help prove global warming (or disprove it if the evidence warranted), a single occurrence is useless. This in itself  should silence Trump and Drudge. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is real. The basis for this consensus is a mountain of data demonstrating the phenomenon over time and an equally large number of predicted outcomes consistent with the original hypothesis.

The deniers are simply ignoring this data and these outcomes.  In fact, they are in roughly the same position as the creationists who think the earth was formed in six days.  There is no support for their claim. Like the creationists, therefore, they invent proof.  In the case of the creationists, it's proof from the authority of an ostensibly inerrant Bible; in the case of the deniers, it's proof from their ostensibly inerrant observations (as Sen. Cruz put it, "It's cold").

Neither, of course, allows the conclusion its proponents desire. We learned long ago that the Bible is hardly inerrant, let alone sufficient to refute the Big Bang, and any elementary school kid can tell you not to  infer long term trends from single data points.  The additional irony on climate change, however, is that not even the single data points deniers fix upon support their denial.  The MV Akademik Shokalskij got stuck in ice that itself had broken away from the Antarctic glacier, turning a usually navigable part of the Ross Sea into an ice-laden obstacle course.

Guess why the ice broke away from the glacier, Donald?

Similarly, snow in Chicago is generally a lake effect phenomenon. Cold air from the north passes over unfrozen warmer water in Lake Michigan, creating the best recipe (below freezing ambient air coupled with a lot of moisture from the lake) for intense snowfalls inland.  As the earth has warmed, that lake has remained wet, as it were, for longer periods of time during the winter. What global warming predicts in Chicago, therefore,  is that winter snows will be worse than usual.

Something Drudge should note the next time he gets all wrapped up in winter in the windy city.

Meanwhile, I gotta run.

I live next to a lake.

And have to shovel the snow.

.

ELOQUENT ERRORS

ELOQUENT ERRORS

As the year ends, conservatives are awash in smug resurgence.

This is the product of Obamacare's faulty roll-out, the President's less than precise messaging on his signature accomplishment, and the right wing's ever present capacity for delusion.

No one captures this resurgence, either as a matter of attitude or for its sheer exuberance, better than George Will.  His ability to string together immeasurably silky sentences in the service of ostensibly substantive points knows no equal, and in today's Washington Post, he offers up  "2013's lesson for conservatives." Rather, however, than a set of policies that might credibly attack the problem he purports to analyze, Will's "lesson" turns out to be nothing more than a resurrected faith in market orthodoxy, underlined by a near-Churchillian penchant for cute ad hominems.

Thus,  we get the captain of conservative eloquence telling us that, on the Affordable Care Act,  progressives have been:

• "tone deaf in expressing bottomless condescension toward the public and limitless faith in their own cleverness"; 
• "convinced . . . that Pajama Boy", "the supercilious, semi-smirking, hot-chocolate-sipping faux adult who embodies progressives belief that life should be all politics all the time", "would be a potent persuader, getting young people to sign up for the hash that progressives are making of health care"; and
• oblivious to the ostensible reality that "events" have "ever so swiftly and thoroughly refuted [the] law's title", the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act."

The only problem with this fusillade is that . . .

It is demonstrably false.

Though folks like Will seem never to remember exactly who birthed Obamacare, it was not the liberals . . . or the progressives . . . or even the Democrats.  Frankly, it was not even Obama.  Instead, the individual mandate -- the cornerstone of Obamacare -- was invented by the Heritage Foundation -- the poster child for conservative think tanks -- in the mid-1990s.  It was then taken up by a Republican, Mitt Romney, and turned into actual policy in Massachusetts.

In the 2008 campaign, Obama actually opposed the mandate.  He and the Democrats in Congress only came around to accepting it in 2010, bowing to reality by realizing that neither a single-payer national health plan -- or "Medicare for all" in the parlance of the day --  nor one with even the so-called public option -- where patients could have chosen to be covered by an enlarged Medicare system -- was possible. Though Will obsequiously derides the progressives for their "limitless faith in their own cleverness", whatever faith they had was not in their cleverness.

It was in Governor Romney's.

A similar ignorance of the actual facts infects Will's claim that "events" have somehow  "refuted" the notion that Obamacare will either protect patients or be affordable.

The supposed proof of this proposition is the by now universally known fact that not all insurance policies previously offered in the market will meet the minimal standards imposed by the law and that, as a consequence, "patients" with those policies will have to upgrade and spend a little more.  While Obama is being roundly criticized for having promised that anyone who liked what they had would be able to keep it, the truth is that the number of policy holders who fall into this category is relatively small, as are the premium increases that will be necessary to buy the new policies that meet the law's minimal standards.  Though Obama was sloppy in his messaging, there is no proof that this was intentional.

Nor is there any empirical evidence for the claim by Will that a Presidential qualifier -- by for example, altering the campaign stump speech to say that "virtually everyone" who liked what they had would indeed be able to keep it -- would have made Obama's reelection "unlikely."  In fact, one might even call that claim an example of Will's . . .

"[L]imitless faith in [his] own cleverness."

Finally, there is "Pajama Boy."  In Will's world, their  "condescension" and self-cleverness "convinced" progressives that "Pajama Boy would be a potent persuader, getting young people to sign up for the hash [they] are making of health care."

In the week before Christmas, Organizing for America, which is Obama's grass roots advocacy operation, sent a tweet with the question:  "How do you plan to spend the cold days of December?" As Chris Cillizza described it, the answer came from a "a 20-something guy with hipster glasses, wearing a black and white onesie and cradling a mug",  who tells his audience to  "Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance."

This apparently drove New Jersey's Chris Christie around the bend. Dispensing with all pretense to the kinder and gentler Governor recently unearthed as a prelude to a Presidential run, Christie, in a soup kitchen,  told the tweeter to "Get out of your pajamas.  Put on an apron. And get Volunteering", the latter being, in Christie's mind, much better than any talk that might make Obamacare a success in resolving the tragedy that is our nation's now close to 50 million uninsured, and -- apparently -- something impossible for any 20-something to do after or before -- and in any case while -- he or she joined the Gov in the kitchen.

Thus was born "Pajama Boy," Will's "supercilious, semi-smirking, hot chocolate sipping, faux adult who embodies the progressives belief that life should be all politics all the time."

Wow!

And they wonder why they are losing the young.

There doesn't appear to be anything "haughtily disdainful" -- which is how the dictionary defines "supercilious" -- about encouraging a conversation about health insurance, and there certainly is nothing "faux adult" in being old enough to go to war.  

One of the 20-somethings I know who talks to his friends about Obamacare is my son.  When he does so, he recounts how he fell off a roof in the year after college but was able to go to the hospital because he was still covered under my health insurance policy.  He does this while also working full time at a non-profit that matches itinerant day laborers with jobs in the area.  And once a week he runs a town's homeless shelter.  He has done more "volunteering" in a year than Chris Christie has done in a life.

The fact is that Obamacare is still in its infancy but is, by and large, working.  The state exchanges that exist -- many states run by Republican governors or legislatures have refused to set them up -- are functioning well, the initial glitches in the federal government's web site are being ironed out, people are enrolling at rates sufficient to predict that the 2015 targets will be met , and premium costs have not been as high as was expected.  

It hasn't been perfect. 

But it also hasn't been the "hash"  Will claims "progressives" are making of it.

He can ask my son.

There is nothing "faux" about him.

THANKSGIVING 2013 -- HEMINGWAY AT HOME

THANKSGIVING 2013 -- HEMINGWAY AT HOME

Lots of married men hate their in-laws.

In fact, generations of comedians have made a living pointing this out. 

I am lucky.

I love mine.

So, this Thanksgiving, I give thanks for . . .

Mothers-in-law.

When I first met my mother-in-law, it was at a birthday party she was throwing for her oldest daughter, then turning thirty, who later became my wife.  I remember thinking that my future wife's mother was very smart, very determined, and very pretty.  She had become a young widow, her husband passing away just before he turned sixty and only a year after she turned fifty.  It was one of the many tragedies she had constantly dealt with in her life and would unfortunately continue to experience ever after. Her sister had died in her forties from breast cancer.  Later, her brother would pass away, also in his forties, and also from cancer.

Death never took a holiday in her family.

And it also always seemed to come early.

But I never heard her complain . . . or whine . . . or bemoan her fate.

She wasn't rich and she always worked. For years, she was an elected Councilwoman in her town, a trustee of the local library, and a volunteer for her local Republican Committee and her church's Mothers' Guild. On her beloved Great Sacandaga Lake, she served on the board of her breach club.

Though she never put it quite this way, my impression is that she pretty much kept her husband's law practice afloat, at least financially. He knew everyone in town, and saved all the Friday night revelers from some of their darkest destinies in New York's up-state night courts. Unfortunately, however, he apparently lost track -- from time to time -- of the need to actually bill people for his work.   He was Irish, and the Irish often refuse to allow money to stand in the way of nobility . . .

Or poverty.

She reminded him that billing wasn't optional.

And the girls graduated from college.

After he died, she continued to work.  She sold real estate, flipped houses, and worked for a nursery.   She ran Thanksgiving and Christmas. She was so good at it that her daughter volunteered her to throw Christmas Eve for my kids at her house during my divorce. From then on, I knew our planned blended family would work in ways better than I had ever expected.  In 2000, she was late for our wedding, but still cut a mean rug on the dance floor.   Later on, she moved in with us for the winter months, spending summers in the Adirondacks.  

I loved it . . .

She never let me do the dinner dishes.

But then she fell in love again.

And moved out.   

And I had to start cleaning again.

Last year, she was diagnosed with cancer.  She went through chemo and radiation and bought some time for herself.  There were trips to the grandchildren and my sister and brother in law in California. She sat down with my son, and they had a long talk about how he was feeling about her diagnosis.  She told the doctors that she did not want to die in December because she didn't want to ruin the girls' Christmas. Everyone reminded her that this was not about them.  A nurse told her she was thinking like a mother and, on this one, didn't have to.  

But she did anyway . . . 

Because she couldn't help herself.

She got through the winter. And the spring.  And remission.

And then it came back. 

She still never complained.  

She was overheard one night a month or so ago, on the phone with one of her girlfriends. "Everyone has to go sometime," she said, "I'm just going a little sooner."   Two weeks ago, she left the Adirondacks, her favorite place on earth, with Glen, her favorite guy (and one of mine too; I kinda like doing the dishes), undoubtedly for the last time.  But she still reminded us that, if all the sheets weren't cleaned before we left, she would do them next spring.

And she will. 

We’ll have clean sheets from heaven.

Hemingway defined courage as "grace under pressure."   And our Hemingway at home died this week, as she had lived . . .

With grace.

As I write this, my wife and sister in law are downstairs, laughing and preparing our Thanksgiving feast. They were worried yesterday about “getting the stuffing right” because somebody “forgot to ask Mommy” how to do it.  

But Mommy is part of their DNA.

So the stuffing is doing pretty well this Thanksgiving . . .

And so are we.

WANTED: SQUIRRELS

WANTED: SQUIRRELS

The federal government has been shut down now for almost two weeks.  

The immediate cause was the failure of Congress to agree to a continuing resolution that paid the bills already incurred.  A faction of the Republican House of Representatives -- the so-called Tea Party elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2012's gerrymandered red districts -- insisted that any CR -- which is beltway-speak for the "Continuing Resolution" needed  to fund the government in the absence of a legislatively approved and Presidentially-signed real budget -- include provisions that would have delayed the individual mandate that was about to take effect under the Affordable Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare, and repeal the medical devices tax, which the Act also authorized to in part fund it.  

Obama and the Democrats, to their everlasting credit, refused to be party to this extortion.  The individual mandate took effect on October 1. The Tea Party then shut down the government.

So the poor and the near poor can now start to get health insurance.

Which is good.

Because, as the shut down continues and the states begin to run out of funds,  they soon will not be getting food stamps or any other parts of America's increasingly frayed safety net.

John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, has taken on the aspect of a balloon losing air.

He has  moved erratically from one position to another, forever announcing new deals his caucus in the House will (or may) agree to in exchange for reopening the government.  One day it was delay the mandate and repeal the device tax. Another it was open the government in exchange for a laundry list of worn our GOP demands -- delay Obamacare, repeal the device tax,  fast-track authority to overhaul the tax code to lower taxes on corporations, approve the Keystone pipeline, more off-shore oil and gas production, and more energy permits to drill on federal land.

Lately, as we have approached the point in October when the debt ceiling will have to be raised, lest a defunded government also become a defaulting one, they have suggested they may agree to reopen in exchange for an unspecified amount of deficit reduction.

The House has also passed a series of bills to fund selective portions of the federal government -- the military, national parks, and a lot of the other stuff even their own constituents like.  This, of course, is more or less an a la carte approach to government.  If it ever takes hold, watch out.  The next time the Democrats own the House, they can shut things down in exchange for immigration reform, real curbs on climate change, or liberal judges.

I can't wait.

The parties' menus here are rather large.

Throughout this debacle, the GOP has been apoplectic in insisting that Obama and the Democrats "negotiate" with them. In truth, however, there is nothing to negotiate.  It is more than arguably the case that every demand made by the Tea Party in the course of the last month has been soundly defeated at the polls. Whatever else it was, the 2012 Presidential election was clearly  a referendum on Obamacare, and Obama won.

The same is true with the deficit, which in any case has been dropping like a rock for much of the last year and does not need any more assistance from Congress.  In fact, further deficit reduction can only imperil our shaky economic recovery, which itself is being kept in place largely by the Fed's quantitative easing in the face of Washington's inability to even contemplate, let alone fashion, effective (and expansionary) fiscal policy (like clean energy and infrastructure repair and development).  

Though Big Oil wants Keystone, the project is an environmental killer, helping to enlarge a fossil-fuel induced carbon footprint at precisely the point we need to reduce it.  And, in any case, the project will produce none of the benefits its proponents are claiming -- the bulk of the oil will be exported, the construction jobs are short term, and there is no local economic multiplier effect  from a pipe in the plains states.

Supporters claim extracting oil from the Alberta tar-sands for export abroad will happen anyway, via a transcontinental pipeline to the Pacific in the event Keystone is killed.   But tell that to the people in British Columbia,  who apparently haven't read the memo.  They oppose it.  And so, apparently, does President Obama.

But I digress.

On the shut down, none of what the GOP instantly demands is at all possible for them to even eventually get. Bills could be proposed. Committee hearings could occur.  But, at the end of the day, the Tea Party doesn't have the votes to dictate their agenda, or even all  that much of it, in the regular order of things. 

So, not to put too fine a point on it, they have become . . .

Irregular.

This is more than dangerous.  On the debt ceiling, Boehner and the Tea-Partiers are  flirting with another economic meltdown that has even their most committed financial backers on Wall Street frothing at the mouth.  In fact, Wall Street is starting to have a pretty bad case of buyer's remorse.  Though it funded the GOP House into existence, it can't herd the conservative cats now reeking havoc.

Still, however,  there is no real end game in sight. 

Q: When do squirrels gather nuts?

A:  When they are available.

Q:  When is that?

A:  Usually in the Fall.

Bring on the squirrels.

We have plenty of nuts.

OVERHEATED

OVERHEATED

July has been hot.

The economy has been not.

Contrary to the predictions of austerians worldwide, Paul Ryan, everyone else in the Republican party, the right wing blogosphere, and Germany on the whole, inflation these days is thin to non-existent and in no danger of rearing its ugly head anytime soon. The data is unimpeachable.  Apart from some commodity spikes largely a function of the volatile energy sector, basic inflation remains at a standstill across the globe.

The current US rate of inflation is 1.8%.  Last year it was .1% lower. In Europe, the rate as of this June was 1.6%.  As of this past May, the latest period for which there was data, the rate was actually negative in Japan, and has been for the entire year. Even China, where GDP is expected to grow by 7-8%, only had an inflation rate of 2.7% as of June.  Everywhere else, the inflation story is the same.  Here is some of the global data:

• Canada -- 1.2%
• Mexico --  4.09%
• Brazil --  6.7%
• Chile --  1.9%
• Israel --  2.0%
• Saudi Arabia --  3.5%
• India --  4.86%
• Russia --  6.9%
• South Africa --  5.5%
• Australia -- 2.4%
• New Zealand -- 0.7
• Indonesia -- 5.9%

These are historically low rates, all of which can be confirmed at www.tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate.

So why all the sturm und drang from the right wing?

Some say it's the combined effect of ignorance and arrogance. This appears to be the view of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who for the last few years has regularly berated the academics who refused to acknowledge the errors of their un-met inflation predictions and the politicians who quoted them.  It's not the ignorance that bothers Krugman, who is quick to note that everyone, himself included, has made economic predictions that turned out to be wrong.  Rather, it's the arrogance of those who refuse to admit their errors; those who behave as if, any day now, they will turn out to be right . . .

When for years they have not been.

Krugman is clearly on to something when it comes to the academics. My experience with professors across the board is that, in a world like theirs where ideas are the coin of the realm, being right really matters, at least to them.  The consequence  is that they become loathe to admit it when they are wrong.  The problem with this view, however, especially in the case of the current inflation-less world we now inhabit, is that the data is so overwhelmingly clear, and so obviously incriminating, that arrogance alone cannot explain continued adherence.

Something else is going on.

Here's my take on what that is.  

We have turned economics into a morality play.  Most, if not all, of the austerians share a visceral contempt for government deficits. They do not just think deficits are bad as a natter of policy.  They think deficits are bad, period.  In their world, "thou shalt not spend money you don't have" is the Eleventh Commandment. Governments are like families, so the morality play goes.  Neither can go into hock forever.  And debt is like sin.  When you commit it, there are consequences.

Adam and Eve had to leave the garden.

And all us deficit-spenders will have to suffer the ills of inflation.

Even if there is none. 

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of economic history rejects this narrative -- along with its false analogies -- out of hand.  Ben Bernanke, for example, has spent his life studying the Great Depression of the '30s and understands that, in the world as it now exists, where interest rates are at or near zero and monetary policy is running out of stimulative tools, deficits are largely irrelevant and deflation -- not inflation -- is the real risk. Governments should borrow and spend and not worry about price hikes that will not occur until all the available capacity has been utilized. 

For this, however, Bernanke is now being vilified as an apostate by conservatives and the GOP . . .

Who forgot that he was appointed by the most conservative President we have had in the last seventy years . . .

And is himself a Republican.  

Oh well.

Hell hath no furry  . . .

Like a scorned austerian.

META-DATA

META-DATA

It's a weird word.

For over two weeks now, the news is that the National Security Agency (or NSA) has for years been vacuuming "meta-data" from AT&T,  Verizon and  all our computer servers with the willing assistance of the Silicon Valley's best and brightest -- Google, Apple, Microsoft,  Skype, YouTube,  AOL, Paypal, etc. -- and then storing it on  government servers.  

According to the government, they haven't looked at the actual content of any conversation or email without first obtaining a warrant (from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court). So the "meta-data" just sits there all by its lonesome, as it were, until some patriot armed with the proper clearance mines it to foil a terrorist plot.  Also according to the government, this "meta-data" has been instrumental in stopping a number of terrorist acts, though no one can tell us any of the particulars, all of which are classified.  

So, what is "meta-data"?

One of my majors at Dartmouth College in the '70s was philosophy. As part of that major, I probably took a course in "metaphysics," though I can't remember doing so.  In any case, it was assuredly part of the core curriculum of courses offered to philosophy majors; then, as now, Dartmouth called it one of the "systematic fields of philosophy."  

Unfortunately, the field is very hard to define.  The term literally means "after" (meta) "physics" or the "physical."   According to Aristotle, it was what you studied after you mastered the sciences. I suppose the idea was that one had to be first firmly rooted in (and knowledgeable of) reality before tackling the abstract universe of first principles -- the "why is there something rather than nothing?" or "what's it all about, Alfie?" stuff of late nights in Greenwich Village bars.    The reality, however, is that reality is often the last thing touched upon in those late night   rap   sessions . . . 

Or in those college seminars on "metaphysics." 

Which is more or less the same thing now going on with "meta-data".

Like the philosopher's world of metaphysics, the NSA's world of meta-data clothes reality in an abstract lingo that suggests nothing all that personal -- or real -- is being examined.   In fact, the word itself has become part of the government's public defense. As Sen. Feinstein put it, "This is just meta-data, there is no content involved." 

Nothing, however,  could be further from the truth.

There is nothing abstract about meta-data. It is data that discloses the time, length and place of individual communications, the participants respective phone or digital IDs, and their respective locations. Companies have become enamored of the profit-making potential inherent in such data because, as the Guardian recently explained, it has "revelatory power." Quoting U. Penn. researcher Matt Blaze, the paper continued, "Meta -data is our context. [It] can reveal far more about us -- both individually and as groups -- than the words we speak. Context yields insights into who we are and the implicit, hidden relationships between us. A complete set of all the calling records for an entire country is . . . a record not just of how the phone is used, but, coupled with powerful software, of our importance to each other, our interests, values, and the various roles we play."

The government asserts it needs and gets individual warrants from the FISA court every time it lifts the veil and examines the contents of any actual communication.  It also asserts it does this solely to combat terrorism.  

But who knows?

The proof is as classified as the program Edward  Snowden illegally disclosed two weeks ago. 

We are not just being asked to trust the government here.  We are being asked to trust the government now and in the foreseeable future.  

We are also being asked to assume that no government -- either now or in the future -- will do with this information what all government has eventually done with information like it in the past, namely, look at it -- either at the "meta" or content level -- and, at some point, abuse it. This is what the CIA did with COINTELPRO before the Church committee blew the lid off its clandestine operations in the '70s. It is what J. Edgar Hoover -- who was especially good at blackmailing politicians and other personal enemies with knowledge of their secret relationships -- did for years as head of the FBI.

It not only can happen again.

It will.

And when it does, there will be nothing abstract, or impersonal or unreal about . . .

Meta-data.