Jon Stewart Rips Nancy Pelosi For Her Treatment of Rep. Tammy Duckworth ---
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/christinerousselle/2014/11/19/jon-stewart-rips-nancy-pelosi-for-her-treatment-of-rep-tammy-duckworth-n1920999?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

First Alternative Fuels, Now It's Alternative Foods:  Cows and Corn are Out
"Rise in Crop Production increasing levels of Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere," by Betty Lasete, Maine News. November 21, 2014 ---
http://mainenewsonline.com/content/14111747-rise-crop-production-increasing-levels-carbon-dioxide

Scientists have revealed that levels of carbon dioxide increase in the Northern Hemisphere during summers each year as plants absorb carbon dioxide to convert sunlight into food. The CO2 levels again rise as the plants release CO2 after the growing season.

Scientists have found that corn, rice, wheat and soybean are the four leading crops that account for maximum CO2 release in the atmosphere of Northern Hemisphere. Crops act as sponge for CO2 and it could be said that the sponge effect has become bigger because of the advancements in agricultural techniques, leading to more production. There is a sharp rise in demand of food production because of growing population across the world, which means that the levels of CO2 will only increase in coming years.

Researchers have also showed that agricultural production is likely to account for 25% surge in the seasonal carbon cycle. And corn will play a leading role.

Continued in article

The good things about the history of corn before we worried about it's carbon pollution
"Acknowledging the Corn," by Allan Metcalf, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 24, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/11/24/acknowledging-the-corn/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Moral Hazard --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

In economics, moral hazard occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else has agreed to bear the burden of those risks. A moral hazard may occur where the actions of one party may change to the detriment of another after a financial transaction has taken place.

Moral hazard occurs under a type of information asymmetry where the risk-taking party to a transaction knows more about its intentions than the party paying the consequences of the risk. More broadly, moral hazard occurs when the party with more information about its actions or intentions has a tendency or incentive to behave inappropriately from the perspective of the party with less information.

Moral hazard also arises in a principal–agent problem, where one party, called an agent, acts on behalf of another party, called the principal. The agent usually has more information about his or her actions or intentions than the principal does, because the principal usually cannot completely monitor the agent. The agent may have an incentive to act inappropriately (from the viewpoint of the principal) if the interests of the agent and the principal are not aligned.

Continued in article

"Los Angeles Schools to Pay $139 Million in Child Abuse Scandal," by Justin Worland, Time Magazine, November 21, 2014 ---
http://time.com/3600190/la-school-district-child-abuse/?xid=newsletter-brief

The Los Angeles public school system said Friday that it will pay $139 million to settle legal claims from students subjected to lewd sexual acts committed by a third-grade teacher.

The settlement with the Los Angeles Unified School District comes in a grisly case that has been ongoing since an employee at a photo development store uncovered inappropriate pictures of the teacher, Mark Berndt, with students in 2010. Berndt, a former teacher at Miramonte Middle School, pleaded no contest to charges of child abuse in 2013 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Parents of about 150 students filed legal claims arguing that the school district was negligent in protecting children.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Although the prison sentence is exceptionally long on first blush, I always wonder about the moral hazard of such enormous settlements. If Mr. Brendt or some person like him only anticipated a year or two in jail it could be extremely lucrative to scheme with a number of parents to split the take such as giving him $1 million for each year in jail as his share of the payout.

Even with such a long sentence the probability in California of his spending more than just a few years in prison is extremely low. Makes me wonder if and how much payola is waiting for him when he gets released.

It's likely that he had no partnership with parents to split the award in this instance. But the moral hazard of the $139 million settlement may well encourage such acts by other devious white collar teachers in the future --- that's the moral hazard of it all.

Bob Jensen's threads on why white collar crime pays even if you know you are going to get caught ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#CrimePays

How to Mislead With Statistics
"U.K. Report Is Latest Evidence That Crime Stats Heavily Undercount Rape," by Carl Bialik, Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog, November 18, 2014 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/u-k-report-is-latest-evidence-that-crime-stats-heavily-undercount-rape/

. . .

A similar problem has occurred in the United States. Far more than a quarter of rapes reported to New Orleans police weren’t followed up on, according to a report released last week by the city’s inspector general. The office randomly audited five sex-crimes detectives’ cases; it found the detectives designated 65 percent of reports of sex crimes as “miscellaneous,” rather than as sexual assaults, and followed up with supplemental reports on just 14 percent of calls. 

Continued in article

"In Torrent of Rapes in Britain, an Uncomfortable Focus on Race and Ethnicity," by Katrin Bennhol, The New York Times, November 1, 2014 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/world/in-torrent-of-rapes-in-britain-an-uncomfortable-focus-on-race-and-ethnicity.html 

"Norway Says Enough, Deports Record Numbers of Immigrants to Reduce Crime," Alipac, November 18, 2014
http://www.alipac.us/f12/norway-says-enough-deports-record-numbers-immigrants-reduce-crime-314610/

The Norwegian paper The Local reported in September that asylum seekers and illegal immigrants (euphemistically called "persons living in Norway without papers") are over-represented in the country's crime statistics:

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Such deportations don't do much good in the USA. Persons that "were living in the USA without papers" return in a matter days.

Question
Why is the biggest economic problem in Japan virtually unsolvable?

Hint
The USA has basically the same problem, but the USA can willingly or unwillingly solve this problem to a point.

"Japan's Biggest Problem Is Basically Unfixable," by Shane Ferro, Business Insider, November 19, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-unfavorable-demographics-2014-11

. . .

One-fourth of Japan's population is older than 65, and that number isn't going down anytime soon. That means a shrinking percentage of the population is working. Meanwhile, a growing percentage of the population is receiving benefits, living on a fixed income, and being supported by that shrinking population of workers.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-unfavorable-demographics-2014-11#ixzz3JXN4ae2a
 

Jensen Comment
The USA has a similar problem as more and more older people (the "Boomers") are being supported by fewer and fewer workers. But the USA willingly or unwillingly is making strides with legal and illegal immigration providing tens of millions of workers.  Cultural and language barriers against immigration are much greater in Japan.

The unknowns in all of this are robotics and other forms of technology. In nations having low population growth, like Japan, technology can increasingly become an economic break.

In the USA, with rapidly rising population, technology is a mixed blessing. If the rising population cannot find work due to technology displacements people have to be supported on unemployment benefits, thereby exacerbating an aging population problem living on entitlements.

"The Human-Rights Charade," by Eric A. Posner, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, November 19, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Peace-LoveGrandstanding/149961/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

In August, Yale University announced a new undergraduate program in human rights. It joins numerous other human-rights programs, institutes, and clinics that have spread like kudzu across campuses in the United States and around the world. By one count, the number has increased from one in 1968 to almost 150 in 2000, with most of the growth in the 1990s. The U.N. provides links to more than 300 academic institutions that offer human-rights instruction. These programs raise numerous questions about the role of political advocacy in the university.

What explains the rise of human rights on campuses? It is in part the result of international human-rights law and the worldwide human-rights movement. Most of the major human-rights treaties were ratified in the 1970s and 80s. These treaties helped create an international system of committees, commissions, and courts that churn out reports and opinions. As a result, "human rights" has become an idiom in the diplomatic vernacular of states. Scholars in turn have put it on their research agendas. The use of "human rights" in English-language books has increased 200-fold since 1940, and is used today 100 times as often as terms like "constitutional rights" and "natural rights."

But the increasing prominence of human rights cannot by itself explain the growth of interest at universities. Something else is going on. One factor is the interest among donors, students, and professors in forging an international image, as shown by the feverish opening of campus colonies in foreign lands. In the era of globalization, a university that pursues traditional academic research in a purely national setting risks looking provincial.

Another factor is the vast ideological appeal of human rights. It’s become the lingua franca for political action, and the always-present temptation for professors and students to use the university as a vehicle for political advocacy has found its motor in human-rights law. Under the guise of teaching and studying human rights, academics can use university resources to engage in political activism.

Some programs are clear about this. The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, at Harvard, says its mission is "to partner with human rights organizations to help them respond to current and future challenges. … Thus, we seek to expand the reach and relevance of human rights considerations to all who influence their outcomes." The Institute for the Study of Human Rights, at Columbia, fashions itself a "leader in bridging the academic study of human rights and the worlds of advocacy and public policy." The director of Yale’s program denies that it is a training program for human-rights advocates.

But these and other university programs frequently form partnerships with law-school human-rights clinics, and these clinics, animated by law schools’ mission to train advocates, are not shy about their agendas. According to its mission statement, Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights "promotes activism through summer and postgraduate fellowships … and fosters human rights activities throughout Yale University." The University of California at Berkeley’s clinic says it "is engaged in cutting-edge research, policy work, and advocacy." The international human-rights clinic at my institution, the University of Chicago Law School, "works for the promotion of social and economic justice globally, including in the United States."

What does it mean for law-school clinics, and other university programs, to "promote" human rights? Should the university be involved in such advocacy? Law-school clinics, like clinics in medical school, are designed to give students practical skills that cannot be taught in normal classroom settings. Most legal clinics allow students to participate in the representation of criminal defendants and in other forms of legal advocacy, as well as to draft contracts, fill out legal forms, and conduct interviews of clients. In fulfilling those roles, students both learn skills and help people who cannot afford a lawyer. While many students are motivated by political and ideological goals—many clinics, for example, assist defendants in capital cases because professors and students oppose the death penalty—the projects are rooted in the legal system, which ensures that students learn skills consistent with the pedagogic mission of the law school.

But human-rights clinics are different. They engage in a bewildering array of programs and strategies that have little in common but a left-wing orientation. These include helping undocumented migrants obtain asylum; developing a best-legal-practices guide for responding to domestic violence in Mexico and Guatemala; advocating for public housing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; drafting a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights after a local government denied dialysis funding to certain immigrants; and writing reports to help Haitian residents in the Dominican Republic who suffer from political repression and discrimination. (These examples are taken from an academic article.)

Other examples include a successful effort to persuade the City Council of Chicago to recognize in a resolution that domestic violence is a human-rights concern; traveling to Congo to help ensure that mining profits are shared with citizens; teaching residents of California’s Central Valley that their rights to housing, water, and political participation have been violated, and that international institutions could be helpful in vindicating them; and issuing a report that argues that laws intended to ban sex-selective abortions in various U.S. states are actually intended to reduce the number of abortions.

In short, a human-rights clinic can do anything it wants, as long as it can argue that its project will (or is intended to) benefit (some) people. In some cases, participants do not even pretend that their projects advance human-rights law—there is no international human right to abortion, and the report (issued by the clinic at the University of Chicago Law School) does not suggest otherwise. But in most cases, a clinic can link its political advocacy to human-rights law because, thanks to the extraordinary proliferation of human rights in treaties and other legal instruments, virtually every facet of human existence is governed by one or another international human right.

How did this come about?
A bit of background may be helpful. The core idea in modern human-rights law is that governments are responsible for the well-being of the people living in their territories. While this idea is actually very old, and received a significant boost during the Enlightenment, its embodiment in international law dates back only a few decades. And its development was accompanied by intense controversies—controversies that were never resolved but instead papered over for the sake of diplomatic progress.

The story begins with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After World War II, the victorious Allies sought to repudiate Nazism and establish the principle that governments owe obligations to their citizens. But a cleavage immediately opened up. The United States sought to enshrine the liberal democratic values that its Constitution (imperfectly) embodied, but which were utterly inconsistent with the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. By contrast, the U.S.S.R. advocated economic and social rights—jobs, income, health care, education, and the like. Europe and developing countries sought something of a middle path. As a compromise, the Universal Declaration contained all these rights but in vague and aspirational terms. It was not regarded as a treaty; instead, it was issued in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly, which does not possess the authority to make law. The U.S.S.R. and a handful of other countries abstained from the vote.

Negotiations toward a treaty regime then followed two tracks. Political and civil rights were set forth in a treaty that was eventually known as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, while economic and social rights were embodied in what became the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Those treaties went into force in 1976.

Over the following decades, countries negotiated and ratified numerous other treaties that, among other things, banned torture and discrimination against women, and recognized rights for children and disabled people. Not all countries ratified all these treaties. Notably, the United States never ratified the covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights. But nearly all countries ratified nearly all the treaties, leading many scholars to claim that the body of human-rights law was effectively an international bill of rights, binding on all countries, even those that have not ratified some of the treaties.

The treaty regime has given rise to a fantastically complex set of international institutions that monitor countries’ compliance with their human-rights obligations, interpret the law, and propose reform. However, these institutions possess no enforcement power. And as a large body of empirical research has shown, many countries completely disregard their treaty obligations. Indeed, there is little evidence that human-rights treaties have improved the well-being of people or even resulted in respect for the rights in those treaties.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This article caught me by surprise since 99+% of the articles in the Chronicle Review are usually to the left of liberal progressive.

"Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education," by Josh Jones, Open Culture, November 2012 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/noam_chomsky_spells_out_the_purpose_of_education.html

E + ducere: “To lead or draw out.” The etymological Latin roots of “education.” According to a former Jesuit professor of mine, the fundamental sense of the word is to draw others out of “darkness,” into a “more magnanimous view” (he’d say, his arms spread wide). As inspirational as this speech was to a seminar group of budding higher educators, it failed to specify the means by which this might be done, or the reason. Lacking a Jesuit sense of mission, I had to figure out for myself what the “darkness” was, what to lead people towards, and why. It turned out to be simpler than I thought, in some respects, since I concluded that it wasn’t my job to decide these things, but rather to present points of view, a collection of methods—an intellectual toolkit, so to speak—and an enthusiastic model. Then get out of the way. That’s all an educator can, and should do, in my humble opinion. Anything more is not education, it’s indoctrination. Seemed simple enough to me at first. If only it were so. Few things, in fact, are more contentious (Google the term “assault on education,” for example).

What is the difference between education and indoctrination? This debate rages back hundreds, thousands, of years, and will rage thousands more into the future. Every major philosopher has had one answer or another, from Plato to Locke, Hegel and Rousseau to Dewey. Continuing in that venerable tradition, linguist, political activist, and academic generalist extraordinaire Noam Chomsky, one of our most consistently compelling public intellectuals, has a lot to say in the video above and elsewhere about education.

First, Chomsky defines his view of education in an Enlightenment sense, in which the “highest goal in life is to inquire and create. The purpose of education from that point of view is just to help people to learn on their own. It’s you the learner who is going to achieve in the course of education and it’s really up to you to determine how you’re going to master and use it.” An essential part of this kind of education is fostering the impulse to challenge authority, think critically, and create alternatives to well-worn models. This is the pedagogy I ended up adopting, and as a college instructor in the humanities, it’s one I rarely have to justify.

Chomsky defines the opposing concept of education as indoctrination, under which he subsumes vocational training, perhaps the most benign form. Under this model, “People have the idea that, from childhood, young people have to be placed into a framework where they’re going to follow orders. This is often quite explicit.” (One of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary defines education as “the training of an animal,” a sense perhaps not too distinct from what Chomsky means). For Chomsky, this model of education imposes “a debt which traps students, young people, into a life of conformity. That’s the exact opposite of what traditionally comes out of the Enlightenment.” In the contest between these two definitions—Athens vs. Sparta, one might say—is the question that plagues educational reformers at the primary and secondary levels: “Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?”

Chomsky goes on to discuss the technological changes in education occurring now, the focus of innumerable discussions and debates about not only the purpose of education, but also the proper methods (a subject this site is deeply invested in), including the current unease over the shift to online over traditional classroom ed or the value of a traditional degree versus a certificate. Chomsky’s view is that technology is “basically neutral,” like a hammer that can build a house or “crush someone’s skull.” The difference is the frame of reference under which one uses the tool. Again, massively contentious subject, and too much to cover here, but I’ll let Chomsky explain. Whatever you think of his politics, his erudition and experience as a researcher and educator make his views on the subject well worth considering.

Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.
William F. Buckley

"Moving Further to the Left," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, October 24, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/24/survey-finds-professors-already-liberal-have-moved-further-left

Anat R. Admati --- https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/anat-r-admati

"When She Talks, Banks Shudder," by Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times,  August 9, 2014 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/business/when-she-talks-banks-shudder.html?_r=0

Bankers are nearly unanimous on the subject of Anat R. Admati, the Stanford finance professor and persistent industry gadfly: Her ideas are wildly impractical, bad for the American economy and not to be taken seriously.

But after years of quixotic advocacy, Ms. Admati is reaching some very prominent ears. Last month, President Obama invited her and five other economists to a private lunch to discuss their ideas. She left him with a copy of “The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It,” a 2013 book she co-authored. A few weeks later, she testified for the first time before the Senate Banking Committee. And, in a recent speech, Stanley Fischer, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, praised her “vigorous campaign.”

Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, a nonprofit that advocates stronger financial regulation, said Ms. Admati has emerged as one of the most effective advocates of the view that regulatory changes since the 2008 crisis remain insufficient. “She has been, as one must be,” Mr. Kelleher said, “dogged from the West Coast to the East Coast to Europe and back again and over again.”

Ms. Admati’s simple message is that the government is overlooking the best way to strengthen the financial system. Regulators, she says, need to worry less about what banks do with their money, and more about where the money comes from.

Companies other than banks get money mostly by selling shares to investors or by reinvesting profits. Banks, by contrast, can rely almost entirely on borrowed funds, including the money they get from depositors. Ms. Admati argues that banks are taking larger risks than other kinds of companies because they use other people’s money, and the results are that they keep crashing the economy.

Her solution is to make banks behave more like other companies by forcing them to reduce sharply their reliance on borrowed money. That would likely make the banking industry more stodgy and less profitable — reducing the economic risks, the executive bonuses and, for shareholders, both the risks and the profits.

“My comparison is to speed limits,” Ms. Admati said in an interview near the Stanford campus. “Basically what we have here is the market has decided nobody else should be driving faster than 70 miles an hour and these are the biggest trucks with the most explosive cargo and they are driving at almost 100 miles an hour.”

For all her success in stimulating debate, however, Ms. Admati and like-minded critics face long odds. Since the financial crisis, the government has already required banks to reduce their reliance on borrowed money by increasing capital standards, which dictate the share of funding that must come from equity. Mr. Obama recently described that increase as massive, and officials are considering further increases for the largest banks. But the net effect is tiny in comparison to the change sought by Ms. Admati. Officials worry that larger changes would hamstring American banks, driving business both to other kinds of domestic financial firms and to foreign rivals. Continue reading the main story

In his speech, Mr. Fischer said Ms. Admati’s arguments made sense in principle. “At one level, the story on capital and liquidity ratios is very simple: From the viewpoint of the stability of the financial system, more of each is better,” he said. But the United States, he said, was constrained by practicality. If other countries aren’t willing to impose stricter capital requirements on their own banks — and they don’t appear to be — then unilateral increases would hurt the American banking industry and the broader economy.

Andrew Metrick, a Yale finance professor, said that such rules could also push activity into the less regulated corners of the domestic financial system.

He compared the situation to a pair of parallel highways, echoing Ms. Admati’s metaphor. “If you lower the speed limit on one highway, you’ll have fewer accidents on that highway,” he said. “But the other road will just get more crowded.”

Ms. Admati compares this logic to letting American manufacturers pollute so that they can compete more effectively with companies in China. And she says she is looking for new ways to press her fight. In January, she debated bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In May, she delivered a 15-minute TED talk to an audience at Stanford. Next year, she is planning a conference in Washington. She says it’s hard to imagine a return to the kind of theoretical work that absorbed her before the crisis.

“This is not fun,” she said of her campaign. “But I know that this is a bad system. There is no justification for this — zero. The only reason we are staying where we are is that the status quo has staying power. And if we are stuck with the status quo, then we are going to have to suffer the consequences.”

‘Something Is Very Wrong’

Before the financial crisis in 2008, Ms. Admati spent most of her time working with complicated financial models. She had never paid much attention to banking or to public policy. But as the crisis unfolded, she began reading and talking with colleagues — “like a doctor from another field of medicine visiting the emergency room,” she said — and grew increasingly disconcerted by what she learned.

Even after the crisis, banks continue to rely on debt financing far more than other kinds of corporations. Last year, the eight largest American banks together derived less than 5 percent of their funding from shareholders, according to Thomas M. Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The average equity financing for nonfinancial corporations was about 60 percent.

Ms. Admati said she started asking one question repeatedly: Why were banks behaving so differently? Companies with more debt are more vulnerable to financial setbacks. Banks were in the danger zone, so why not raise more equity?

Four years later, she says she’s still waiting to hear a good answer. She recalled the explanation in one prominent banking textbook, which she read in 2010, as a particular spur to action. “It was shocking,” she remembered. She said she went to the office of a Stanford colleague, her frequent collaborator Paul Pfleiderer, and told him: “Something is very wrong. I’ve never heard so much nonsense in all of my life.” She still becomes visibly angry as she recalls the conversation. “They are denying what we know about financial markets. It’s like they are saying gravity is not a force in nature.”Ms. Admati decided to enter the public square because she felt that academics and policy makers weren’t listening. “The Bankers’ New Clothes,” which she wrote with Martin Hellwig, an economics professor at the University of Bonn, proved a turning point in her campaign. But the first step was much smaller. She was not sure how to reach a popular audience, so in 2010 she enrolled in a program that teaches prominent women to write opinion articles. Her first, published in The Financial Times in the fall of 2010, was a letter co-signed by 19 other academics that criticized an international agreement on minimum bank capital standards as “far from sufficient to protect the system from recurring crises.”

Banking is the only industry subject to systematic capital regulation. Borrowing by most companies is effectively regulated by the caution of lenders. But the largest lenders to banks are depositors, who generally have no reason to be cautious because federal deposit insurance guarantees repayment of up to $250,000 even if the bank fails. This means the government, which takes the risk, must also impose the discipline.

In the decades before the financial crisis, banks gradually convinced regulators to reduce capital requirements to very low levels. In the aftermath, banks acknowledged that some increases were necessary — they had just needed enormous bailouts, after all — but they fought to minimize those increases. The day after Ms. Admati’s article ran, the same paper ran one by Vikram S. Pandit, then the chief executive of Citigroup, arguing that the proposed standards were excessive. “The last thing the global economy needs is another economic dampener,” Mr. Pandit wrote.

‘Add a Digit’

The industry has benefited from, and sometimes encouraged, public confusion. Banks are often described as “holding” capital, and capital is often described as a cushion or a rainy-day fund. “Every dollar of capital is one less dollar working in the economy,” the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade association representing big banks and financial firms, said in 2011. But capital, like debt, is just a kind of funding. It does the same work as borrowed money. The special value of capital is that companies are under no obligation to repay their shareholders, whereas a company that cannot repay its creditors is out of business.

The industry’s more serious argument is that equity is more expensive than debt. If governments require banks to raise more equity, the industry warns, the results would be higher interest rates, less lending and slower economic growth.

A 2010 analysis funded by the Clearing House Association, a trade group, concluded that an increase of 10 percentage points in capital requirements would raise interest rates by 0.25 to 0.45 percentage points.

Jensen Comment
I think this is a great subject for debate in economics and finance courses. It's important to note how banks differ from other types of business. Probably the main difference is that commercial banks create the money in the money supply. Naive people think the government prints the money supply. The government prints money for the money supply created by the banks. Printed cash money is only one type of "money." For example, if you borrow $10,000 from a bank and put it into your checking account, $10,000 has been created for the USA money supply. If you write a check you can spend this money without ever converting it into cash money.

A central government can also create money by spending without taxing or borrowing (or equivalently borrowing from itself). States in the USA cannot create money, but the criminals in Washington DC and Zimbabwe get away with it. However, in the USA most of the money supply is created by the banks.

The gray zone is bartering. For example, if panned gold nuggets are bartered for a log cabin in Alaska the transaction bypasses the money supply.

Bitcoins and other forms of digital currency are extended forms of bartering that bypass the money supply ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

Money Supply --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

"The Future of Money Four surprising ways we might pay for stuff in the next 15 years," by Heather Schlegel, Reason Magazine, December 2014 ---
http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/18/the-future-of-money

"Toyota Is Bringing In The Future With A New Fuel Cell Car," by Stefano Pozzebon, Business Insider,  November 18, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/toyota-launches-mirai-hydrogen-car-2014-11

Toyota is launching a new hydrogen-powered car that will first be available in Japan in mid-December this year. 

The Mirai — a Japanese words that means future — uses a hydrogen fuel cell generate electricity instead of batteries, as in Toyota's Prius. 

The car is powered by an electric engine of 113 KW (152 bhp) and has a maximum speed of 110 mph (almost 180 km/h), the company said in a statement. It has a recharging time of three minutes. The benefit of this car is that it emits no carbon dioxide pollutants as its being driven. 

The Mirai will be available in the UK, Germany, and Denmark in September 2015.

The Guardian reports that that the new energy-efficient car will retail in Japan for about 6.7 million yen (£37,000 or $57,000).

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/toyota-launches-mirai-hydrogen-car-2014-11#ixzz3JQdbklLj
 

Electrolysis for Splitting Water into Oxygen and Hydrogen --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis#Electrolysis_of_water

"Stanford scientists develop water splitter that runs on ordinary AAA battery," Stanford News, August 22, 2014 ---
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/august/splitter-clean-fuel-082014.html

Jensen Comment
Unlike Tesla, Japanese and South Korean automobile manufacturers are betting on electric cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. This makes me wonder about the sensibility of Tesla's forthcoming investment in a $1.3 billion dollar battery plant in Nevada ---
http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2014/09/10/nevada-governor-orders-extra-session-for-13b-deal-to-land-tesla-electric-car/?intcmp=us_topics

"Medicaid Spending Has Exploded, And It Will Keep Rising Faster Than Expected," by John R. Graham, Daily Caller, November 12. 2014 ---
http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/12/medicaid-spending-has-exploded-and-it-will-keep-rising-faster-than-expected/

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), spending on Medicaid, the jointly funded state-federal welfare program that provides health benefits to low-income people, increased 6.7 percent in 2013 to $449.5 billion. And it will keep growing at a fast rate.

In 2014, total Medicaid spending is projected to grow 12.8 percent because Obamacare has added about 8 million dependents. A large minority of states have chosen to increase residents’ eligibility for Medicaid by expanding coverage to adults making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

Unfortunately, more states are likely to expand this welfare program. This is expected to result in a massive increase in the number of Medicaid dependents: From 73 million in 2013 to 93 million in 2024. Medicaid spending is expected to grow by 6.7 percent in 2015, and 8.6 percent in 2016. For 2016 to 2023, spending growth is projected to be 6.8 percent per year on average.

This comprises a massive increase in welfare dependency and burden on taxpayers. Further, official estimates often low-ball actual experience. This is because it is hard to grapple with how clever states are at leveraging federal dollars.

The Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has just released a report that summarizes a decade of research on how states game the system to increase spending beyond that which the federal government anticipated.

The incentive lies in Medicaid’s perverse financing merry-go-round. In a rich state like California, for example, the federal government (pre-Obamacare) spent 50 cents on the dollar for adult dependents. So, if California spent 50 cents, it automatically drew 50 cents from the U.S. Treasury. And most states had a bigger multiplier. Which state politician can resist a deal like that?

Continued in article

Jonathan Gruber --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gruber_%28economist%29#Controversies

. . .

In January 2010, after news emerged that Gruber was under a $297,000 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services, while at the same time promoting the Obama administration's health care reform policies, some conservative commentators suggested a conflict of interest.^[17][18][19] While he did disclose his HHS connections in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine, his oversight in doing this earlier was defended by Paul Krugman in The New York Times.^[20]

One heavily-scrutinized part of the ACA reads that subsidies should be given to healthcare recipients who are enrolled "through an Exchange established by the State". Some have read this to mean that subsidies can be given only in states that have chosen to create their own healthcare exchanges, and do not use the federal exchange, while the Obama administration says that the wording applies to all states. This dispute is currently part of an ongoing series of lawsuits referred to collectively as King v. Burwell. In July 2014, two separate recordings of Gruber, both from January 2012, surfaced in which he seemed to contradict the administration's position.^[5] In one, Gruber states, in response to an audience question, that "if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits",^[21] while in the other he says, "if your governor doesn't set up an exchange, you're losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens."^[22] When these recordings emerged, Gruber called these statements mistaken, describing them as "just a speak-o — you know, like a typo".^[21]

In November 2014, a series of four videos emerged of Gruber speaking at different events, from 2010 to 2013, about ways he felt the ACA was misleadingly crafted and marketed to get the bill passed; in several of these videos he specifically refers to American voters as ill-informed and "stupid." In the first, most widely-publicized video taken at a panel discussion about the ACA at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2013, Gruber said the bill was deliberately written "in a tortured way" to disguise the fact that it creates a system by which "healthy people pay in and sick people get money." He said this obfuscation was needed due to "the stupidity of the American voter" in ensuring the bill's passage. Gruber said the bill's inherent "lack of transparency is a huge political advantage" in selling it.^[23] The comments caused significant controversy.^{[24][25][26][27][28]} In two subsequent videos, Gruber was shown talking about the decision (which he attributed to John Kerry) to have the bill tax insurance companies instead of patients, which he called fundamentally the same thing economically but more palatable politically. In one video, he stated that "the American people are too stupid to understand the difference" between the two approaches, while in the other he said that the switch worked due to "the lack of economic understanding of the American voter."^[29] In another video, taken in 2010, Gruber expressed doubts that the ACA would significantly reduce health care costs, though he noted that lowering costs played a major part in the way the bill was promoted.^[30]

"Yes, Jonathan Gruber Is An Obamacare “Architect” The health law’s allies are trying to distance themselves from the economist’s remarks about the deception involved in passing the law. But they’re only proving him right," by Peter Suderman, Reason Magazine, November 18, 2014 ---
http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/18/yes-jonathan-gruber-is-an-obamacare-arch

Jonathan Gruber --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gruber_%28economist%29#Controversies

Obamacaregate Question
Who disclosed the embarrassing Johathan Gruber videos?

Vox is a liberal/progressive Website, and this is a pretty good explanation of the Gruber embarrassment to date.
"The Jon Gruber controversy and what it means for Obamacare, explained," by Sarah Kliff, Vox, November 16, 2014 ---
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/13/7211279/obamacare-jon-gruber-controversy

. . .

4) Who keeps finding all these clips?

 

Rich Weinstein, a forty-something investment advisor whose insurance policy was canceled under Obamacare, has surfaced the last three videos. Dave Weigel has written a great profile of him, including this part where Weinstein describes how he got started:

"When Obama said 'If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period'-frankly, I believed him," says Weinstein. "He very often speaks with qualifiers. When he said 'period,' there were no qualifiers. You can understand that when I lost my own plan, and the replacement cost twice as much, I wasn't happy."

So Weinstein, new plan in hand, started watching the news. "These people were showing up on the shows, calling themselves architects of the law," he recalls. "I saw David Cutler, Zeke Emanuel, Jonathan Gruber, people like that. I wondered if these guys had some type of paper trail. So I looked into what Dr. Cutler had said and written, and it was generally all about cost control. After I finished with Cutler, I went to Dr. Gruber. I assume I went through every video, every radio interview, every podcast. Every everything."

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
What are the biggest mistakes when the ACA was enacted?

Answer
In my opinion, apart from the technical things that need to be corrected such as foisting patient bad debts (due to premium payment lapses) on doctors and hospitals, the biggest mistake was the CBO's estimates of ACA costs, cost estimates that are largely traceable to Johathan Gruber.

"Pelosi Claims Health Care Reform to Save $1.3 Trillion," by Matt Cover, CNS News, March 26, 2010 ---
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/63373

According to the Congressional Budget Office, (in 2014) the latest projections for the net cost of ObamaCare over the next ten years are just over $1.4 trillion.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/11/13/3-things-white-house-doesnt-want-to-know-about-obamacare-plus-3-things-coming/?cmpid=NL_opinion

Jensen Comment
Doesn't that add up to a $2.7 trillion change in estimated costs in four years?

Another embarrassment is how RomneyCare in Massachussets that preceded the ACA for the USA foisted RomneyCare costs on to Federal taxpayers. Governor Romney (and Ted Kennedy's legacy) should be embarrassed along with President Obama about Professor Gruber's revelations. ---
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/17/gruber-romneycare-just-a-way-to-rip-off-the-feds-for-400-million-a-year/

Obama personally asked me to help disguise unhelpful Obamacare facts.
Jonathan Gruber --- http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/17/gruber-obama-personally-asked-me-to-help-disguise-unhelpful-obamacare-facts/

"Jonathan Gruber’s ‘Stupid’ Budget Tricks:  His ObamaCare candor shows how Congress routinely cons taxpayers," The Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/articles/jonathan-grubers-stupid-budget-tricks-1416009107?tesla=y&mod=djemMER_h&mg=reno64-wsj

As a rule, Americans don’t like to be called “stupid,” as Jonathan Gruber is discovering. Whatever his academic contempt for voters, the ObamaCare architect and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his candor about the corruption of the federal budget process.

In his now-infamous talk at the University of Pennsylvania last year, Professor Gruber argued that the Affordable Care Act “would not have passed” had Democrats been honest about the income-redistribution policies embedded in its insurance regulations. But the more instructive moment is his admission that “this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.”

Mr. Gruber means the Congressional Budget Office, the institution responsible for putting “scores” or official price tags on legislation. He’s right that to pass ObamaCare Democrats perpetrated the rawest, most cynical abuse of the CBO since its creation in 1974.

In another clip from Mr. Gruber’s seemingly infinite video library, he discusses how he and Democrats wrote the law to game the CBO’s fiscal conventions and achieve goals that would otherwise be “politically impossible.” In still another, he explains that these ruses are “a sad statement about budget politics in the U.S., but there you have it.”

Yes you do. Such admissions aren’t revelations, since the truth has long been obvious to anyone curious enough to look. We and other critics wrote about ObamaCare’s budget gimmicks during the debate, and Rep. Paul Ryan exposed them at the 2010 “health summit.” President Obama changed the subject.

But rarely are liberal intellectuals as full frontal as Mr. Gruber about the accounting fraud ingrained in ObamaCare. Also notable are his do-what-you-gotta-do apologetics: “I’d rather have this law than not,” he says.

Recall five years ago. The White House wanted to pretend that the open-ended new entitlement would spend less than $1 trillion over 10 years and reduce the deficit too. Congress requires the budget gnomes to score bills as written, no matter how unrealistic the assumption or fake the promise. Democrats with the help of Mr. Gruber carefully designed the bill to exploit this built-in gullibility.

So they used a decade of taxes to fund merely six years of insurance subsidies. They made-believe that Medicare payments to hospitals will some day fall below Medicaid rates. A since-repealed program for long-term care front-loaded taxes but back-loaded spending, meant to gradually go broke by design. Remember the spectacle of Democrats waiting for the white smoke to come up from CBO and deliver the holy scripture verdict?

On the tape, Mr. Gruber also identifies a special liberal manipulation: CBO’s policy reversal to not count the individual mandate to buy insurance as an explicit component of the federal budget. In 1994, then CBO chief Robert Reischauer reasonably determined that if the government forces people to buy a product by law, then those transactions no longer belong to the private economy but to the U.S. balance sheet. The CBO’s face-melting cost estimate helped to kill HillaryCare.

The CBO director responsible for this switcheroo that moved much of ObamaCare’s real spending off the books was Peter Orszag, who went on to become Mr. Obama’s budget director. Mr. Orszag nonetheless assailed CBO during the debate for not giving him enough credit for the law’s phantom “savings.”

Then again, Mr. Gruber told a Holy Cross audience in 2010 that although ObamaCare “is 90% health insurance coverage and 10% about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control. How it’s going to lower the cost of health care, that’s all they talk about. Why? Because that’s what people want to hear about because a majority of Americans care about health-care costs.”

*** Both political parties for some reason treat the CBO with the same reverence the ancient Greeks reserved for the Delphic oracle, but Mr. Gruber’s honesty is another warning that the budget rules are rigged to expand government and hide the true cost of entitlements. CBO scores aren’t unambiguous facts but are guesses about the future, biased by the Keynesian assumptions and models its political masters in Congress instruct it to use.

Republicans who now run Congress can help taxpayers by appointing a new CBO director, as is their right as the majority. Current head Doug Elmendorf is a respected economist, and he often has a dry wit as he reminds Congressfolk that if they feed him garbage, he must give them garbage back. But if the GOP won’t abolish the institution, then they can find a replacement who is as candid as Mr. Gruber about the flaws and limitations of the CBO status quo. The Tax Foundation’s Steve Entin would be an inspired pick.

Democrats are now pretending they’ve never heard of Mr. Gruber, though they used to appeal to his authority when he still had some. His commentaries are no less valuable because he is now a political liability for Democrats.

Question
Will these same universities burn books that do not conform to a liberalism dogma?

At Least Two Universities And Counting
"Universities Are Now Taking Down Their Jonathan Gruber Videos," by Brendan Bordelon, National Review, November 18, 2014 ---
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/392900/universities-are-now-taking-down-their-jonathan-gruber-videos-brendan-bordelon 

Universities that hosted Jonathan Gruber are now removing videos of the MIT professor from their websites after a series of candid admissions from the Obamacare architect ignited a firestorm against the health-care law.

Videos from college conferences and Washington think tanks over the last few years show Gruber bragging about the law’s deliberate complexity and belittling American voters’ intelligence.

Now at least two colleges who hosted the professor have tried to scrub Gruber from the internet. The University of Pennsylvania removed Gruber’s October 2013 panel appearance — in which he laughed about “the stupidity of the American voter” — on November 10, but quickly reposted the video after withering criticism.

On Monday the University of Rhode Island took a page out of Penn’s book, removing a 2012 discussion where Gruber explains how the law was passed to “exploit” the American voters’ “lack of economic understanding.” URI offered no explanation on its webpage as to why the video was pulled.

Continued in article

"Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education," by Josh Jones, Open Culture, November 2012 ---
http://www.openculture.com/2012/11/noam_chomsky_spells_out_the_purpose_of_education.html

E + ducere: “To lead or draw out.” The etymological Latin roots of “education.” According to a former Jesuit professor of mine, the fundamental sense of the word is to draw others out of “darkness,” into a “more magnanimous view” (he’d say, his arms spread wide). As inspirational as this speech was to a seminar group of budding higher educators, it failed to specify the means by which this might be done, or the reason. Lacking a Jesuit sense of mission, I had to figure out for myself what the “darkness” was, what to lead people towards, and why. It turned out to be simpler than I thought, in some respects, since I concluded that it wasn’t my job to decide these things, but rather to present points of view, a collection of methods—an intellectual toolkit, so to speak—and an enthusiastic model. Then get out of the way. That’s all an educator can, and should do, in my humble opinion. Anything more is not education, it’s indoctrination. Seemed simple enough to me at first. If only it were so. Few things, in fact, are more contentious (Google the term “assault on education,” for example).

What is the difference between education and indoctrination? This debate rages back hundreds, thousands, of years, and will rage thousands more into the future. Every major philosopher has had one answer or another, from Plato to Locke, Hegel and Rousseau to Dewey. Continuing in that venerable tradition, linguist, political activist, and academic generalist extraordinaire Noam Chomsky, one of our most consistently compelling public intellectuals, has a lot to say in the video above and elsewhere about education.

First, Chomsky defines his view of education in an Enlightenment sense, in which the “highest goal in life is to inquire and create. The purpose of education from that point of view is just to help people to learn on their own. It’s you the learner who is going to achieve in the course of education and it’s really up to you to determine how you’re going to master and use it.” An essential part of this kind of education is fostering the impulse to challenge authority, think critically, and create alternatives to well-worn models. This is the pedagogy I ended up adopting, and as a college instructor in the humanities, it’s one I rarely have to justify.

Chomsky defines the opposing concept of education as indoctrination, under which he subsumes vocational training, perhaps the most benign form. Under this model, “People have the idea that, from childhood, young people have to be placed into a framework where they’re going to follow orders. This is often quite explicit.” (One of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary defines education as “the training of an animal,” a sense perhaps not too distinct from what Chomsky means). For Chomsky, this model of education imposes “a debt which traps students, young people, into a life of conformity. That’s the exact opposite of what traditionally comes out of the Enlightenment.” In the contest between these two definitions—Athens vs. Sparta, one might say—is the question that plagues educational reformers at the primary and secondary levels: “Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?”

Chomsky goes on to discuss the technological changes in education occurring now, the focus of innumerable discussions and debates about not only the purpose of education, but also the proper methods (a subject this site is deeply invested in), including the current unease over the shift to online over traditional classroom ed or the value of a traditional degree versus a certificate. Chomsky’s view is that technology is “basically neutral,” like a hammer that can build a house or “crush someone’s skull.” The difference is the frame of reference under which one uses the tool. Again, massively contentious subject, and too much to cover here, but I’ll let Chomsky explain. Whatever you think of his politics, his erudition and experience as a researcher and educator make his views on the subject well worth considering.

Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.

"Academic Built Case for Mandate in Health Care Law," by Catherine Rampell, The New York Times, March 28, 2012 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/business/jonathan-gruber-health-cares-mr-mandate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

After Massachusetts, California came calling. So did Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

They all wanted Jonathan Gruber, a numbers wizard at M.I.T., to help them figure out how to fix their health care systems, just as he had helped Mitt Romney overhaul health insurance when he was the Massachusetts governor.

Then came the call in 2008 from President-elect Obama’s transition team, the one that officially turned this stay-at-home economics professor into Mr. Mandate.

Mr. Gruber has spent decades modeling the intricacies of the health care ecosystem, which involves making predictions about how new laws will play out based on past experience and economic theory. It is his research that convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance.

And it is his work that explains why President Obama has so much riding on the three days of United States Supreme Court hearings, which ended Wednesday, about the constitutionality of the mandate. Questioning by the court’s conservative justices has suggested deep skepticism about the mandate, setting off waves of worry among its backers — Mr. Gruber included.

“As soon as I started reading the dispatches my stomach started churning,” Mr. Gruber said of the arguments on Tuesday, while taking a break from quizzing his son for a biology test. “Losing the mandate means continuing with our unfair individual insurance markets in a world where employer-based insurance is rapidly disappearing.”

Mr. Gruber, 46, hates traveling without his wife and three children, so he is tracking the case from his home in Lexington, Mass. There he crunches numbers and advises other states on health care, in between headbanging at Van Halen concerts with his 15-year-old son and cuddling with the family’s eight parrots. (His wife, Andrea, volunteers at a bird rescue center.)

If the court rules against the mandate, Mr. Gruber says he believes the number of newly insured Americans could fall to eight million from the projected 32 million. He insists that without a mandate, the law will result in a terrible spiral: only relatively sick Americans will choose to get insurance, leading premium prices to rise and causing the healthier of even those sick people to drop their insurance, sending prices higher and higher.

Some other economists quibble, though, with Mr. Gruber’s pessimistic assessment.

“My general thought about the mandate is if insurance is affordable and accessible, most people will buy it anyway,” said David Cutler, an economist at Harvard and longtime collaborator of Mr. Gruber’s.

Others, like Paul Starr, a Princeton sociologist, say they believe Mr. Gruber’s work does not account for how hard it will be to enforce the mandate.

“There is this groupthink about how important the mandate is,” Mr. Starr says. “Most people don’t understand or won’t acknowledge how weak the enforcement mechanism is.”

Mr. Starr said he thought Mr. Gruber in particular was overstating the effectiveness of the mandate because “it’s his baby.”

 That said, it is difficult for too many other experts to categorically refute Mr. Gruber’s work, since he has nearly cornered the market on the technical science behind these sorts of predictions. Other models exist — built by nonprofits like the RAND Corporation or private consultancies like the Lewin Group — but they all use Mr. Gruber’s work as a benchmark, according to Jean Abraham, a health economist at the University of Minnesota and former senior economist in both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.

“He’s brought a level of science to an issue that would otherwise be just opinion,” Mr. Cutler says. “He’s really the only person who has been doing all this careful modeling for so long. He’s the only person you can go to for that kind of thing, which is why the White House reached out to him in the first place.”

Mr. Obama had made health care reform a cornerstone of his campaign, and wanted to announce a credible proposal quickly after taking office. But members of the Obama administration’s transition team said they had inherited an executive branch that had vastly underinvested in modeling research on health care, especially compared to the technical modeling that had been done in areas like tax policy.

“Creating a good model from scratch would have taken months, maybe years,” said Lawrence H. Summers, who was the director of President Obama’s National Economic Council and had advised Mr. Gruber on his dissertation when they were at Harvard.

Mr. Gruber had already spent years researching government mandates, starting with his 1991 dissertation about how mandated employer benefits cut into workers’ wages.

He also did similar analyses, on a broader range of public policies for the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration from 1997-98. He was recruited by Mr. Summers, who was then deputy secretary of Treasury.

Then in 2001, after returning to M.I.T., Mr. Gruber received an e-mail from Amy Lischko, who was then an assistant commissioner in the Massachusetts healthy policy department under then-Gov. Jane M. Swift, a Republican.

She was familiar with his work, and contracted him to model some potential ways that Massachusetts could expand health insurance coverage.

“He certainly wasn’t as well known then as he is now in the health care arena,” said Ms. Lischko, now a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. “We couldn’t exactly kick the tires on these kinds of models back then, but we knew he had done work on simulations before.”

Mr. Gruber calls himself a “card-carrying Democrat.” He and his wife host a “great quadrennial Democratic victory party” whether or not the Democratic candidate wins, he said. But given his reputation and relatively rare expertise, he still ended up working for two Republican governors in Massachusetts.

When Mr. Romney succeeded Ms. Swift in 2003, he proposed using an individual mandate to help the state achieve universal health care coverage. Mr. Gruber was again brought in to analyze the idea, which he had not formally modeled before.

“Romney saw it as a traditional Republican moral issue of personal responsibility, getting rid of the free riders in the system, not as much of an economic issue,” Mr. Gruber said. “Not only were the Republicans for it, the liberals hated it. People forget that.”

Mr. Obama had vehemently opposed an individual mandate before his election in 2008.

After the Massachusetts plan passed in 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the Republican governor of California, invited Mr. Gruber to Sacramento to help model a similar proposal.

“That was awesome,” Mr. Gruber says, his eyes widening at the memory. “I got to see the sword from Conan the Barbarian.”

The California proposal fell apart, but soon Mr. Gruber had a little cottage industry helping states model potential health system changes. He also serves on the Massachusetts board that oversees the state’s new health care exchanges.

Along with these credentials, Mr. Gruber’s position as an adviser to the influential Congressional Budget Office also left him perfectly positioned to advise the White House on health reform.

“The most important arbiter of everything was the C.B.O.,” said Neera Tanden, who was a senior adviser for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The C.B.O.’s assessment of a bill’s efficacy and costs strongly influences political debate, but the office does not publicly reveal how it calculates those numbers.

“We knew the numbers he gave us would be close to where the C.B.O. was likely to come out,” Ms. Tanden said. She was right.

After Mr. Gruber helped the administration put together the basic principles of the proposal, the White House lent him to Capitol Hill to help Congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation.

This assignment primarily involved asking his graduate student researchers to tweak his model’s software code. It was also almost entirely conducted from his home office, while his children were at school and then after they had gone to bed.

“If I wanted to be in Washington, I’d have taken a job in Washington,” he said. “I wanted to be around for my family.”

Even though he was brought in by the White House, Congressional staff members from both parties trusted him because he was seen as an econometric wonk, not a political agent. But soon his very involvement with the bill caused questions about his objectivity to be raised in the news media.

During and after the bill’s slog through Congress, he frequently spoke with reporters and wrote opinion pieces supporting the Affordable Care Act but did not always mention his role in helping to devise it.

He says he regrets not being more upfront about his involvement with the administration. But he does not apologize for publicly advocating the legislation, and continuing to do so — including through a comic book he wrote to explain the law.

“Yes, I want the public to be informed by an objective expert,” he says. “But the thing is, I know more about this law than any other economist.”

 

The unintentional Obamacare Wrecking Ball Professor from MIT
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber is one of the foremost architects of Obamacare, having bragged that he "knows more about this law" than anyone else in his field. He's also emerged as an unintentional one-man wrecking ball against Obamacare, making public statements that have undermined the Obama administration's legal and political defenses of the president's signature domestic legacy.
http://www.townhallmail.com/zlzjrctbjjwkrbjbkbrptkgllfkllbftddpcqrwdbwmdms_wzvdnjvgdsn.html

The Astonishing Omission in the Wall Street Journal's Story About Obamacare Enrollment
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120268/wall-street-journal-article-latinos-obamacare-omits-medicaid

"Watch Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Explain Why "Lack of Transparency" Was Key to Passing the Health Care Law," by Peter Suderman, Reason Magazine, November 10, 2014 ---
http://reason.com/blog/2014/11/10/watch-obamacare-architect-jonathan-grube

. . .

It's even harder to believe now that he has admitted that he thinks it's fine to mislead people if doing so bolsters the policy goals he favors. It's really quite telling, about the law and also about Gruber. Gruber may believe that American voters are stupid, but he was the one who was dumb enough to say all this on camera.

Jensen Comment
Condoning the misleading of the public for political purposes by a scientist borders on fabrication of data and may be in violation of his university's (MIT) academic integrity policy.

Similar issues arose in the allegations against Phil Jones regarding integrity of his climate temperature recordings ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy
Professor Jones stepped aside temporarily but was reinstated. Nevertheless these and similar allegations badly damaged the public's confidence in climate change data.

Jon Krosnick, professor of communication, political science and psychology at Stanford University, said scientists were overreacting. Referring to his own poll results of the American public, he said "It's another funny instance of scientists ignoring science." Krosnick found that "Very few professions enjoy the level of confidence from the public that scientists do, and those numbers haven't changed much in a decade. We don't see a lot of evidence that the general public in the United States is picking up on the (University of East Anglia) emails. It's too inside baseball."[139]

The Christian Science Monitor, in an article titled "Climate scientists exonerated in 'climategate' but public trust damaged," stated, "While public opinion had steadily moved away from belief in man-made global warming before the leaked CRU emails, that trend has only accelerated."[140] Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times, argued that this, along with all other incidents which called into question the scientific consensus on climate change, was "a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media."[141] But UK journalist Fred Pearce called the slow response of climate scientists "a case study in how not to respond to a crisis" and "a public relations disaster".[142]

A. A. Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale University Project on Climate Change, and colleagues found in 2010 that:

Climategate had a significant effect on public beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists. The loss of trust in scientists, however, was primarily among individuals with a strongly individualistic worldview or politically conservative ideology. Nonetheless, Americans overall continue to trust scientists more than other sources of information about global warming.

In late 2011, Steven F. Hayward wrote that "Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively."[143] An editorial in Nature said that many in the media "were led by the nose, by those with a clear agenda, to a sizzling scandal that steadily defused as the true facts and context were made clear."

Jensen Comment
Professor Gruber's confession will similarly affect the public opinion of the way Obamacare was foisted on the public. This is not a proud moment in science or the life of a scientist and his university.

Also see ethics issues at
http://www.ethicssage.com/2014/11/gruber-should-be-fired-from-mit-for-violating-academic-integrity.html

Flackcheck Patterns of Deception ---
http://www.flackcheck.org/patterns-of-deception/affordable-care-act/?gclid=CMWP97rJhsICFWxk7AodCA8AqQ

Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize

From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on November 6, 2014

Health insurers woo consumers in crowded market
http://online.wsj.com/articles/health-insurance-deadline-prompts-marketing-blitz-to-drum-up-business-1415202655?mod=djemCFO_h
Health insurers are unleashing a blizzard of ads, letters, live events and other efforts to reach consumers, as the industry ramps up for the reopening of the health law’s marketplaces on Nov. 15. Meanwhile, small-business owners test-driving the federal government’s new online health-insurance exchange report a mixed experience with the site ahead of its planned opening in 10 days.

Jensen Comment
Health insurance is currently a very good business for companies, because bad debts from people who do not pay contracted premiums are passed on to the doctors and hospitals after 30 days. In any case Obamacare promises guaranteed profits for insurance companies at taxpayer expense if necessary. This is not capitalism since one of the tenants of capitalism is that businesses take risks risks of losses and failure.

It's the doctors and hospitals that take the financial risks. In New Hampshire nearly half the hospitals refuse to admit patients with ACA insurance except in dire emergencies. Many doctors are turning patients away unless they have something other than ACA medical insurance.

Another good thing for insurers is that the deductibles have become so huge (40% to 60%) that insured people put off getting medical care until absolutely necessary --- thereby greatly reducing the number of claims to be processed and paid.

My point is that just to say that more people now have ACA health insurance is not saying a whole lot about the quality of health care that this insurance is buying. There will probably be gridlock for years in Washington DC for any attempts to bring quality health care to all citizens of the USA. I favor national health insurance, although national health insurance plans in most non-OPEC nations like Sweden, Denmark, and the UK are doing badly these days. I consider Canada to be an OPEC nation. Germany is doing better because it allows people to take on supplemental health insurance using their own savings.

The USA is now an one of the world's largest oil producers, but gridlock politics have all but destroyed possibilities for great health care for all citizens. It's one of the best nations for health care for people who can afford to pay for the services, including those lucky enough to be on Medicaid or Medicare.

"Even the New York Times Now Agrees with Us on Obamacare," by Nick Sorrentino, Townhall, November 19, 2014 ---
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/nicksorrentino/2014/11/19/even-the-new-york-times-now-agrees-with-us-on-obamacare-n1920665?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

It’s about time, but it’s too late now. I guess there is some comfort in knowing that the even the statist Gray Lady sees what Obamcare actually is. Though I am going to guess that the New York Times editorial board isn’t going to come out for repeal even though the program was sold with out and out lies and is pouring billions in taxpayer dollars into the pockets of the health insurance companies.

 

(From The New York Times)

But since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, the relationship between the Obama administration and insurers has evolved into a powerful, mutually beneficial partnership that has been a boon to the nation’s largest private health plans and led to a profitable surge in their Medicaid enrollment.

The insurers in turn have provided crucial support to Mr. Obama in court battles over the health care law, including a case now before the Supreme Court challenging the federal subsidies paid to insurance companies on behalf of low- and moderate-income consumers. Last fall, a unit of one of the nation’s largest insurers, UnitedHealth Group, helped the administration repair the HealthCare.gov website after it crashed in the opening days of enrollment…

…“These companies all look at government programs as growth markets,” said Michael J. Tuffin, a former executive vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main lobby for the industry. “There will be nearly $2 trillion of subsidized coverage through insurance exchanges and Medicaid over the next 10 years. These are pragmatic companies. They will follow the customer.”

The relationship is expected only to deepen as the two sides grow more intertwined.

This is why the only real way to fight crony capitalism is to reduce the thing which enables the cronies – intrusive government. You can’t regulate cronies away. Cronies LOVE regulation. It’s how they make their bones. No regulation, no need for crony deals. Less regulation, fewer crony deals. That’s the way it goes.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Health insurance is currently a very good business for companies, because bad debts from people who do not pay contracted premiums are passed on to the doctors and hospitals after 30 days. In any case Obamacare promises guaranteed profits for insurance companies at taxpayer expense if necessary. This is not capitalism since one of the tenants of capitalism is that businesses take risks risks of losses and failure.

"The Real Cost of “High-Priced” Drugs," by Michael Rosenblatt, Harvard Business Review Blog, November 17, 2014 --- Click Here
https://hbr.org/2014/11/the-real-cost-of-high-priced-drugs?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Jensen Comment
This still does not explain why the USA has to pay so much more for medications than other nations pay for the exact same products, which is why so many of my neighbors make a run for Canada to re-fill their prescriptions.

This still does not explain why the big pharmaceutical companies lobbied our whores in Washington DC to ban negotiating lower prices for Medicare D prescriptions.