Archive for August, 2022

A Few Weekend Thoughts On Biden’s College Loan Forgiveness Program

Saturday, August 27th, 2022

On Wednesday of this week, President Biden issued an Executive Order to forgive some of the debt owed by those who had received college loans. In doing so, Biden was attempting to fulfill a campaign promise to forgive undergraduate student debt for people earning up to $125,000 ($250,000 for a family). “I made a commitment that we would provide student debt relief, and I’m honoring that commitment today,” he said in remarks at the White House.

According to the Office of Federal Student Aid (OFSA), an office within the US Department of Education, Biden’s plan comes in three parts. The first part extends the repayment loan pause a final time (again) to the end of 2022. Part 2 is what’s getting all the attention at the moment. It says:

To smooth the transition back to repayment and help borrowers at highest risk of delinquencies or default once payments resume, the U.S. Department of Education will provide up to $20,000 in debt cancellation to Pell Grant recipients with loans held by the Department of Education and up to $10,000 in debt cancellation to non-Pell Grant recipients. Borrowers are eligible for this relief if their individual income is less than $125,000 or $250,000 for households.

Part 3 of the President’s plan is different in that it is in the form a  proposed rule “to create a new income-driven repayment plan that will substantially reduce future monthly payments for lower-and middle-income borrowers,” according to the OFSA. The proposal would:

  • Require borrowers to pay no more than 5% of their discretionary income monthly on undergraduate loans. This is down from the 10% available under the most recent income-driven repayment plan.
  • Raise the amount of income that is considered non-discretionary income and therefore is protected from repayment, guaranteeing that no borrower earning under 225% of the federal poverty level—about the annual equivalent of a $15 an hour wage for a single borrower—will have to make a monthly payment.
  • Forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments, instead of 20 years, for borrowers with loan balances of $12,000 or less.
  • Cover the borrower’s unpaid monthly interest, so that unlike other existing income-driven repayment plans, no borrower’s loan balance will grow as long as they make their monthly payments—even when that monthly payment is $0 because their income is low.

Part 3 is consequential, and the fourth bullet point of Part 3 even more so. Interest payments can easily double the size of a student loan, and anything that reduces the interest burden will reduce the size of the loan and, consequently, the time required to pay it off. But a proposed rule is not an Order and will take time before being finalized, perhaps a lot of time.

Right now we are in the knee jerk phase of this issue. Republicans categorize Biden’s move as political and unfair to those who worked hard to pay off their loans. Why should their tax dollars now subsidize the millions who haven’t? The far right, more rabid of the bunch, have been raining tweet storms condemning the very idea of forgiving the loans, all the while forgetting to mention their own Paycheck Protection Act loans, most well over $100,000, have all been forgiven.

In thinking about this, the first question one might want to ask is: Does the President have the authority to do it? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t think so. “The president can’t do it,” she said in July. “That’s not even a discussion.”

We can expect this decision to be challenged in the courts. But, at the very least, it offers President Biden a chance to say he is honoring a commitment, a promise, even if the Judiciary ultimately won’t let him do it.

How and why has going to college come to this? I think the answer can be found in the long, winding, potholed road to higher education of the last 55 years. It’s complicated, and people have devoted entire careers to studying it.

I’m concerned, in a practical sense, with what changed from the time I and my peers affordably attended college in the late 1960s. For instance, how and in what manner have costs increased? To what degree and why is there now a far greater percentage of high school graduates attending four year, or even two-year colleges? Have wages commensurately grown with college costs to allow parents and their children to be able to afford it all? How has the for-profit boom in colleges contributed to the college loan crisis, if it has?

To begin to answer those questions, let’s first take a look at where we are now.

Adam Looney, the Nonresident Senior Fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution and the Executive Director of the Marriner S. Eccles Institute at the University of Utah, is one of our foremost experts on college loans and costs. He has argued for quite some time against across-the-board loan forgiveness, because a disproportionate amount goes to people who don’t need it, Ivy League educated doctors, lawyers, etc. He has produced the following table to demonstrate his argument. The table categorizes all colleges and graduate programs represented in the College Scorecard by their selectivity using Barron’s college rankings. The left panel of the table describes the debts owed by students at these colleges. The right panel describes their family economic background and their post-college outcomes. From top to bottom, the schools are categorized by their selectivity—how hard it is to get accepted. Note that the more selective the school, the greater the average debt (with the exception of the for-profits). The same holds true for the two far right columns. The more selective the school, the greater the after college earnings. Note also that, with the exception of the Ivy Plus graduates, the average after college earnings for every other category are less than the President’s cap of $125,000 for loan forgiveness qualification.

I’m going to ignore the harm done by for-profit colleges, except to say the largest single source of student debt in America is one of them—the University of Phoenix, the gigantic online for-profit chain. Students who graduated or dropped out in 2017-2018 owed about $2.6 billion in student loans; two years after graduation, 93 percent of borrowers had fallen behind on their loans, which caused interest owed to grow like festering weeds. These are people Looney agrees need to be helped—a lot.

I thought it might be instructive to look at this through the lens of one, typical, highly reputable, selective public university. As Looney’s table shows, graduates of selective public colleges and universities make up 33.7% of the total share of college debt. I’ve picked the University of Massachusetts. UMass is representative of all state universities, and, because I’m from Massachusetts and long ago was a Trustee at one of its foundations, I know the school better than, say, Penn State or Connecticut.

The UMass flagship campus in Amherst sits on more than 1,400 acres and has about 24,000 students. Out of more than 850 US public colleges, it is #68 in US News & World Report’s current rankings. Tuition, fees, room and board total $32,168 for in-state residents, about $50,000 for out-of-staters. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts currently contributes (subsidizes) 31% of the university’s total costs, or $14,287 per student, which means students’ tuition would be considerably more without that help, somewhere in the range of the cost of a selective private college, or an out-of-state UMass student. Every state subsidizes its selective public colleges to some degree.

Nationally, in 1967, 47% of high school graduates moved on to college. Seventeen percent would drop out, 15.4% white, 28.6% black. Today, less than 10% drop out; 10.7%% of drop outs are Black. We are approaching equality in that regard.

That’s where UMass is now. Fifty-five-years-ago, when I was young, things were different. Facts And Figures 1967, from the then UMass Office of Institutional Studies, is a 163-page, deeply detailed report of the university as it was then, all of it in one spot. I do not think you’d find a similar study today.

In 1967, annual tuition and fees were $336; room and board, $939, for a total cost of $1,275. The university employed 729 full-time faculty for 9,439 students. Today, there are about 1,400 full-time faculty. In 1967, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts picked up 67% of the university’s operating costs (as opposed to the aforementioned 31% today).

What you bought in 1967 for $1.00 would now cost $8.87, with a cumulative rate of inflation of 787%. Over that time, tuition, fees, room and board at the University of Massachusetts have increased by a factor of more than 24. If the tuition at UMass had just grown by the rate of inflation, it would now be $11,310, not $32,168.

So, extrapolating from current demographic and UMass data to the national picture, four things have been at work over the last 55 years. First, student costs have grown at nearly three-times the rate of inflation. Second, the state has reduced its share of student costs by more than 50%, which is representative of the nation. Third, the percent of high school graduates who go on to college has grown from 47% to nearly 62%. And fourth. wages have not even remotely kept up with the cost of college. According to the Congressional Research Service, real wages (wages adjusted for inflation), grew only 8.8%, at the 50th percentile level of all earners, since 1979.

President Biden’s initiative will likely remain a political football at least until the mid-terms, probably beyond. My own conclusion is that it will help a lot of people who need it and will be unnecessary largesse, at taxpayers expense, for those many who don’t. And it does nothing to solve the real problem.

Unless and until we can control the cost of college, this crisis will continue for future generations.  College cost growth at three times the rate of inflation is unsustainable.

We need to do much more than forgive a slice of college loans. That’s like trying to save a sinking ship by tossing the first mate a rope of sand.

 

Paid Sick Leave: Public Policy That Makes Ethical And Economic Sense

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022

Do Right To Carry Laws Make Us Safer?

Monday, August 15th, 2022

America is awash in guns.

According to a 2018 report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based organization, Americans in that year had in their possession 393.3 million weapons, which is 16% more than the country’s population of about 330 million people. And since that year, especially beginning in 2020, we  have been on a gun buying spree. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which the FBI collects and is widely used as a proxy for firearms purchases, jumped 40% in 2020 from 2019 to 39.7 million background checks. The frenzy only cooled slightly to 38.9 million checks in 2021.

With all those guns, it is only natural that people want to be able to take them with them when they leave their homes. Enter Right To Carry laws, RTCs.

In January of 2023, Alabama will become the 25th state that won’t require permits to carry a gun in public. In recent years, more and more states have enacted similar legislation. Indiana, Georgia and Ohio, did so this year. The change in Indiana made headlines as it happened just two weeks before a deadly mass shooting at a mall in an Indianapolis suburb, where a gunman killed three and wounded two more before being shot dead by a bystander who also carried a gun.

The rationale for RTC laws is always the same: They will keep us safer, because people will be able to defend themselves and their families from bad people with guns, a la the Indianapolis situation. But is that even remotely true?

To find out, John J. Donohue, Samuel V. Cai, Matthew V. Bondy, and Philip J. Cook, writing in the National Bureau of Economic Research Paper Series, in June of this year published their study, More Guns, More Unintended Consequences: The Effects Of Right To Carry On Criminal Behavior And Policing In US Cities.

The conclusion of their heavily researched, 36 page paper? “The rate of firearm violent crimes rises by 29 percent due to RTC, with the largest increases shown in firearm robberies.”

Consider this chart, which compares the incidence of violent crime in major cities in the year before  passage of Right To Carry laws and the year after.

From the Report:

The statistically significant estimates that RTC laws increase overall firearm violent crime as well as the component crimes of firearm robbery and firearm aggravated assault by remarkably large amounts with an attendant finding of no sign of any benefit from RTC laws represent a remarkable indictment of permissive gun carrying laws. Perhaps the most noteworthy and novel result is the finding that RTC laws increase firearm robbery by a striking 32 percent.

This study shoots a great big hole through the idea that Right To Carry laws keep us safer. In fact, the reverse is true.

Another consequence of RTC laws is the effect they have on the capacity and ability of police to solve crimes. That is, they cause crime to go up so much that police turn into the Ed Sullivan Plate Spinner.

 

The increasing firearm violence that RTC laws perpetuate is facilitated by a massive 35 percent increase in gun theft (p = 0.06), with further crime stimulus flowing from diminished police effectiveness, as reflected in a 13 percent decline in violent crime clearance rates.

The study authors say RTC laws may generate a host of demands on police time and resources that reduces the amount of time they have to fight crime. Processing complaints about the increased gun thefts, accidental discharges and injuries, processing RTC permit applications, and taking time to check for permit validity by those carrying guns will all encumber police resources.

For example, if the police only have the ability to solve 40 out of 100 crimes, and if crime rises by 20 percent and they still can only solve 40 crimes, the clearance rate would fall from 40 percent to 33 percent (40 out of 120).

Nonetheless, it appears we are stuck with at least half the states falling in love with Right To Carry laws. We are also stuck with the horrid consequences.

The Grinding Wheels Of Justice

Friday, August 12th, 2022

 

To paraphrase 2nd century philosopher Sextus Empiricus, the wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind fine.

This afternoon, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post all reported gaining access to the search warrant the FBI executed on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Monday. Shortly afterwards, the Trump team agreed to the release of the search warrant. Following that, the warrant was officially unsealed.  According to the Times:

A list of documents removed from former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, includes materials marked as top secret and meant to be viewed only in secure government facilities, according to a copy of the warrant reviewed by The New York Times.

Federal agents who executed the warrant did so to investigate potential crimes associated with violations of the Espionage Act, which outlaws the unauthorized retention of national security information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary; a federal law that makes it a crime to destroy or conceal a document to obstruct a government investigation; and another statute associated with unlawful removal of government materials.

What can we now expect from Donald Trump, Republican leaders, rank and file legislators and the rest of the MAGA universe? For one thing, we can hope Republican influencers will do their best to tamp down the heat, because up till now language has been pizza oven hot and dangerous.

Extremism researcher Caroline Orr Bueno, PhD, has compiled a collage of vituperation, tweets from MAGA extremists calling for violence following the FBI search.  Trump’s supporters (a kind word) call it a “raid,” with its implied breaking-down-the-door routine, sort of like what happened to Breonna Taylor.

Yesterday, the irresponsible and incendiary reactions of the Trump cultists claimed a life. Forty-two-year-old Ricky Walter Shiffer, who is reported to have been at the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, shot into the FBI field office in Cincinnati with a nail gun yesterday morning while brandishing an AR-15-style weapon and wearing body armor. After the attack, he fled, chased by law enforcement, and lost his life in a shootout in an Ohio cornfield. Don’t spend a lot of time waiting for those who egged him on with their rants about the end of life as we know it to apologize, or even utter a word of remorse.

We have come to the point where anyone who criticizes Donald Trump, or anything MAGA, can expect a tsunami of threats to life and limb. As Paul Miller reported in The Dispatch:

Death threats have surged across the country. As terrorists realize death threats work, they are using them more often—including against Republicans who voted for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package. Death threats to congressmen doubled by May of last year, compared to the year before. “These are not one-off incidents,” according to Vox, “Surveys have found that 17 percent of America’s local election officials and nearly 12 percent of its public health workforce have been threatened due to their jobs during the 2020 election cycle and Covid-19 pandemic.” Reuters tracked more than 850 individual threats against local election workers by Trump supporters last year, up from essentially zero in previous elections.

The Mar-a-Lago search put an arc light on violent and dehumanizing political speech, but, as Miller notes, it has been lurking in the background all along. Examples in the past year include Jarome Bell, a Republican running for Congress in Virginia, who tweeted a call to put to death anyone convicted of voter fraud: “Arrest all involved. Try all involved. Convict all involved. Execute all involved.” Wendy Rogers, a far-right state senator in Arizona, told a white nationalist convention in Florida that “we need to build more gallows” to handle “traitors.” Ms. Rogers, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, was still at it last night, sending emails around America calling for the defunding of the FBI, the IRS and the DOJ. And she ended by asking people to send more money vitally necessary for her to carry on the fight.

Now, with the release of the search warrant, perhaps the adults in the room, presuming there are any, will exercise the control needed to cool the ridiculous rhetoric, if that is even possible. It is apparent Attorney General Garland and the Department he leads will continue to follow the evidence in the matter of Donald Trump like a red rope in the snow, wherever it leads.

There can be no doubt any longer that, regardless of what Trump’s cult-like followers say, do, scream, or suggest, the wheels of justice are grinding fine, as the US Constitution means them to.

My only questions today are: When will we we see the rats deserting the ship, and what kind of life preservers will they be wearing?

Two Stories – Only One Of Them Good

Thursday, August 11th, 2022


Photo credit – The Economist, 2018

There are two major stories roiling America this week in August 2022. One concerns the major accomplishments of the Biden administration, and the other is the political cyclone that is anything having to do with Donald Trump.

By any basic measure, Joe Biden’s presidency is off to a rip-roaring start. Not even halfway through his term, Congress has passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrading American infrastructure. It’s approved the first major piece of gun reform in decades and expanded health care benefits to millions of veterans. And once the House returns from its recess tomorrow, Congress will have authorized hundreds of billions of dollars in green energy and health care subsidies. While the first and last measures were enacted entirely along party lines, the others passed with large, bipartisan majorities.

And this week President Biden signed another bi-partisan major piece of legislation into law, the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, boosting domestic semiconductor manufacturing, a stroke of the pen we desperately needed to compete globally with the Chinese. Following the signing, the Micron company announced a $40 billion investment in new chip-manufacturing facilities in the United States through the end of the decade, and Global Foundries and Qualcomm announced a $4 billion partnership to produce chips in the U.S. that would otherwise have gone overseas.

Also this week, we learned the price of gasoline has dropped below $4.00 per gallon and inflation has decreased from 9.1% to 8.5%.

I defy anyone to prove any administration in the last fifty years has done more in such short a time (I know, it feels like forever, but it’s only the first one and a half years of a four year term).

But while that story of accomplishment should be celebrated around the country, such is not the case. It’s the other story, the Trump crazyness, that continues to suck all the available oxygen out of everywhere. And it doesn’t help when Republican congressional legislators hypocritically put on the mantle of persecuted victimhood and defend their cult leader like Davy Crocket at the Alamo.

I won’t go into all the nausea-inducing idiocy delivered with intergalactic significance by those “patriots,” but I will point out that in a time crying out for calm, patience and legislative leadership, we are given nothing but disingenuous histrionics with all the honesty of a Potemkin Village.

Here is what we know: Donald Trump is being investigated by two agencies, the New York Attorney General and the Justice Department. We know the particulars of the first, but not the second. We know a federal judge authorized the FBI to execute a search warrant at Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago (After firing James Comey, Trump appointed the current FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Republican). To do that, the FBI would have had to persuade the Judge it had probable cause that a crime had been committed. Second, we know the former President testified in New York on Wednesday of this week in the New York Attorney General’s long-running civil investigation into his business dealings. We know his testimony consisted entirely of his invoking his Fifth Amendment rights (we also know Trump has said in the past, “You see, the mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”).*

That is all we know for sure. Everything else has been speculation and a hair-on-fire, Hellzapoppin horror show in which Republicans see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping over the nearest hill to bring fire and destruction to them and their Dear Leader. They have also pledged massive vengeance if (they say “when”) they retake control of the House in November’s election.

While there is some excellent reporting happening, especially in long form, I blame the Washington media for much of this. Yes, it has to cover the swill that comes out of Trump’s mouth and the chaos that comes next, but it has given, and continues to give, every bombastic bloviator a national soapbox from which to spill their screed. There is a rampant and profound false equivalency going on, and, reporters covering this for the national and cable networks should know better. As someone I respect said, “They should be investigative reporters, not stenographers.”

Maybe at some point in the future Americans will stand back and take a hard look at all of this. Maybe they will come to appreciate the monumental legislation that’s come out of the Biden administration. Maybe they will realize the good it will do for our country and our neighbors. Maybe Republican leadership will instruct congressional members to stand down and let things play out. Maybe Joe Biden’s approval rating will rise. Maybe pigs will begin flying past my second floor window. Maybe…

We can be certain of one thing. The Trump drama will resolve eventually. The question is, will it right the ship of Democracy, or sink it?

 

*It is not the first time that Mr. Trump has taken the fifth in a civil case. During his divorce proceedings against Ivana Trump in 1990, he invoked his right against self-incrimination close to 100 times according to Wayne Barrett’s book “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth.” Most of the questions he was avoiding concerned his infidelity. In Mr. Barrett’s words, “mostly in response to questions about ‘other women.’”

On Health, History And The Fine Art Of Fudging Data

Wednesday, August 10th, 2022

The cost of insulin, or, half a loaf is better than none

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed this past Sunday in the Senate and now sitting for certain passage in the House this week, will cap the cost of an insulin vial at $35 for Medicare beneficiaries with diabetes. However, for those not on Medicare, insulin costs will remain unchanged.

Of the 30 million Americans who have diabetes, more than 7 million of them require daily insulin. A Kaiser Family Foundation study released in July, 2022, found 3.3 million of the 7 million are Medicare beneficiaries  and documented the rise in insulin’s cost since 2007.

Aggregate out-of-pocket spending by people with Medicare Part D for insulin products quadrupled between 2007 to 2020, increasing from $236 million to $1.03 billion. The number of Medicare Part D enrollees using insulin doubled over these years, from 1.6 million to 3.3 million beneficiaries, which indicates that the increase in aggregate out-of-pocket spending was not solely a function of more Medicare beneficiaries using insulin.

The IRA is great news for the Medicare beneficiaries who make up nearly half of the population needing daily injections of insulin to live, but a provision in the original bill that would have capped the cost at $35 for all diabetics, not just those on Medicare, never made it to the final bill. Left out in the cold are the 3.7 million diabetics requiring insulin to keep living who are privately insured or not insured at all. That was an expense bridge too far for Republicans.

Will you permit a bit of cynicism here? Needing 60 votes to pass, 57 senators voted in favor of capping insulin at $35 per vial for all diabetics, 50 Democrats, seven Republicans.  Americans overwhelmingly support this as is shown in this Kaiser Family Foundation poll taken recently:

Eighty-nine percent consider this a priority, 53% a top priority. I suggest Republican leadership, never intending to allow this to pass, permitted those seven, standing for reelection this fall, to vote for the bill to give them cover in the upcoming election. Is that too cynical?

If that’s not bad enough, a study by Yale University researchers, published in Health Affairs, also in July, concluded that “Among Americans who use insulin, 14.1 percent reached catastrophic spending over the course of one year, representing almost 1.2 million people.” The researchers defined “catastrophic spending” as spending more than 40 percent of postsubsistence family income on insulin alone. Postsubsistence income is what’s left over after the cost of housing and food.

Nearly two-thirds of patients who experience catastrophic spending on insulin, about 792 thousand people, are Medicare beneficiaries. The IRA will help these people immensely. However, as it stands now it will do nothing to assist the non-Medicare diabetics who annually face catastrophic spending due to the cost of insulin. This group numbers about 408 thousand who need insulin just to go on living, and, yes, these are poor people with few resources.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we should not forget that insulin isn’t the only medical resource diabetics use and need. There are also the syringes used to inject the stuff, not to mention the testing strips and glucose monitors that analyze the levels of blood glucose, which diabetics have to track religiously. Diabetes is an expensive disease, and insulin is only one part of the expense.

Every time I and others write about the cost and quality of health care in the US, it almost seems as if we’re all standing on the shore throwing strawberries at a battleship expecting some sort of damage. The Inflation Reduction Act contains the first significant health care move forward since the Affordable Care Act of 12 years ago. It’s progress at last, but so much more is needed.

A great historian and better American is now history himself

David McCullough has died. We have lost a giant.

McCullough had that special gift of telling stories of our past in ways that made us think we were there when they happened. He put us solidly in the shoes of the people he was writing about. For him, history is not about a was; it is about the is of the time. Like us, his subjects lived in a present, not a past. He never judged the choices made in the past; he just told the truth through stories meticulously researched and empathically written. That’s how he could win two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

I first met McCullough in the 1980s through his first book, The Johnstown Flood, published in 1968. I could not put it down. Read it through in one sitting. It was the start of his brilliant career, and its success gave him  hope he could actually devote himself to history and do well at it. But he never wrote for the money. What drove him was his love for and curiosity about understanding from whence we came.

In a 2018 interview for Boston Magazine with Thomas Stackpole, he was discussing his latest, and last, historical work, The Pioneers, about a group of New Englanders in the 19th century who picked themselves up, headed west,  settled Ohio, and courageously kept it an anti-slavery state. During the interview, he said:

There are an infinite number of benefits to history. It isn’t just that we learn about what happened and it isn’t just about politics and war. History is human. It’s about people. They have their problems and the shadow sides of their lives, just as we do, and they made mistakes, as we do. But they also have a different outlook that we need to understand. One of the most important qualities that history generates is empathy—to have the capacity to put yourself in the other person’s place, to put yourself, for example, in the place of these people who accomplished what they did despite sudden setbacks, deaths, blizzards, floods, earthquakes, epidemic disease. The second important thing is gratitude. Every day, we’re all enjoying freedoms and aspects of life that we never would have had if it weren’t for those who figure importantly in history.

Today’s Americans seem to think history begins about ten years ago. It is a modern day tragedy, and we own it.  Consequently, humanity keeps making the same mistakes over and over again, never learning from those who showed us where the land mines were lying, hidden underfoot. McCullough did that for 50 years. He leaves a large hole in our American universe.

Fudging data with style

Heading back to diabetes for a moment. You may recall the old adage, “Figures lie, and liars figure.” Well, this is not about that. The fudging I’m going to show has not a lie in it. What it does have is deception on a grand scale, and it comes from our CDC, which, usually, I greatly admire. But not this time.

As we’ve all learned throughout the COVID pandemic, the CDC tracks and reports data — a lot of it.

One of the things the CDC  reports about is Diabetes Mortality By State. It’s been doing it since 2005, and it’s in the last six years that we see, if we look, deception.

Here is how the CDC reported this data in 2015:

The redder things are, the worse they are, so this looks bad, and it is.  The scale above shows the distribution of the colors for the states, starting at 13.4 in Colorado and Nevada and ending at 32.4 in West Virginia. Those are deaths per 100,000 people.

Now, here is how the CDC reported diabetic mortality six years later in 2020:

In 2015 there were three dark red states, eight almost dark red states, and 20 almost almost dark red. But now we have only two dark red, three almost dark red, and those 20 semi dark states have turned to light tan. Wow! What an improvement.

One could be forgiven for going away happy….if one did not look at the actual numbers.

In 2015, Mississippi and West Virginia were the highest mortality states, 32.4 and 31.7 deaths per 100,000 people, respectively. Their numbers in 2020 soared about 30% to 41.0 and 43.1. The states with the lowest mortality in 2015, Nevada and Colorado (13.4 and 15.9), in 2020 are 18.0 and 24.2 deaths per 100,000. Wyoming now comes in with the second lowest mortality at 20.7.

But things look so much better. The distribution scale is different, but who looks at that?

The CDC has done something shameful; it has moved the goalposts and didn’t tell anyone. In reality, diabetic mortality has gotten much worse over the last six years, but unless you dug deep, not only would you not know that, you’d think there was an actual big improvement.

This is another reason why the insulin provision in the Inflation Reduction Act is a big deal.

 

 

Friday Thoughts About Precrime: Alive And Well In The Florida Of Ron DeSantis

Friday, August 5th, 2022

Precrime: A predictive policing system dedicated to apprehending and detaining people before they have the opportunity to commit a given crime. The term was coined by Philip K. Dick and became the basis for the plot of The Minority Report, a short story of his, published in Fantastic Universe Science Fiction magazine in 1956.*

On Thursday of this week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, surrounded by Tampa Bay Area sheriffs (fifteen of them, all male), suspended Andrew Warren, the twice-elected Hillsborough County State Attorney, saying he violated his oath of office and has been soft on crime.

DeSantis then appointed Susan Lopez to serve as acting state attorney during Warren’s suspension. Lopez was appointed by the governor to serve as a Hillsborough County judge in 2021. She previously served as the Assistant State Attorney in the 13th Judicial Circuit.

DeSantis suspended Warren because in June, following the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision of 1972, Warren joined 91 other attorneys general and district attorneys around the country in signing a statement  declaring they would “decline” to prosecute “reproductive health decisions.”

Florida’s Senate will now take up Warren’s suspension. If it upholds the governor’s move, Lopez will remain State Attorney until an election can be held to choose Warren’s permanent replacement, permanent, that is, until the next election, or until another suspension if DeSantis becomes annoyed again.

I would like to mention a few points to consider about all this:

First, Florida’s Constitution gives its Governor the right to remove any elected official “for reasons of misfeasance, malfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony.”

Governor Rick Scott, DeSantis’s predecessor and a politician about whom we have written before, exercised this power twice. In 2018, he suspended Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes on the heels of a tumultuous recount, citing a litany of well-publicized problems, including the misplacement and inadvertent mixing of ballots. A year before, he had reassigned more than two dozen potential death penalty cases away from Orlando state attorney Aramis Ayala after she declared she wouldn’t pursue capital punishment.

As the Editorial Board of the Tampa Bay Times wrote yesterday, “That remedy was more appropriate than a blanket removal from office.” But still, DeSantis does have the power to do what he did.

Second, everything Ron DeSantis does from morning till night must be colored in the light of his presidential ambitions. He, like so many other politicians who believe they deserve to be President, is forever circling above the bloated body of Donald Trump, waiting and hoping for the former President to stumble and fall, so he may swoop down and grab the political gold ring. Sadly, there is no Cincinnatus here, Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer of 458 BCE revered for his virtue, who left his farm to become General and in 16 days rescued Rome from imminent defeat and promptly retired to his farm.

Third, what exactly did Warren do? Answer: Nothing, except signing a group statement saying “we decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions.” Yes, the wording could have been better, much better, actually. It should have made clear the prosecutors would make decisions on an individual basis. Regardless, Warren has yet to refuse to prosecute anybody for violating Florida’s anti-abortion law. DeSantis’s suspension is a pre-emptive strike by the Ron DeSantis Precrime Unit, a bone thrown to his political base for his upcoming 2022 gubernatorial reelection and presidential run in 2024. If you doubt that, ask yourself why DeSantis spent so much time at his Thursday press conference talking about San Francisco, George Soros and “woke” criminal justice reform? Ask yourself why the sheriffs he called upon to speak spent so much time talking about the “evils’ found in other parts of the country, the very blue parts?

Finally, if Governor DeSantis can “suspend” Andrew Warren because he thinks Warren will do something he has yet to do, then he can suspend any legitimately-elected Florida official with whom he disagrees. That is scary.

Who’s next?

 

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Two Months Worth Of News In Ten Days

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022

I’ve been away from the magic keyboard for the last ten days. Why?

Well, I don’t know whether you’ve ever had the urge to take a bouncy tumble down a flight of stairs in the middle of the night, but for those of you who might be considering such an appealing leap of faith, my counsel is to abandon that notion. Rock climbing will provide the same degree of terror and has the potential to be a lot more fun.

What could have been really bad was only mildly bad. A bit of blood, some bruised ribs and a torn medial collateral ligament that will heal without surgery in about four weeks. My tennis buddies can expect me back on the court in early September a little worse for wear, but just as energetic.

A couple of months of news has happened in the last ten days, some stories entirely predictable, some infuriating, and a couple quite sad, yet uplifting.

The entirely predictable

Entirely predictable was Mr. Sophistication, the loathsome Florida Representative Matt Gaetz once again going out of his way to insult women of all stripes. Currently under investigation for allegedly paying women for sex and, separately, sleeping with a minor and transporting her across state lines, Gaetz, whose standard of ethics would take about as much strain as a newly formed cobweb, distinguished himself in May by tweeting: “How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?”

However, that was not good enough for this cretin who somehow is permitted to cast a vote during lawmaking. Speaking before a group of students at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, the Trump wannabe told them people who are upset about the devastation of abortion rights across the country needn’t worry about a lack of access to medical care because no one in his cohort would want to get them pregnant anyway.

Gaetz, who’s been elected three times now in what must be an “interesting” congressional district, asked the young conservatives, “Have you ever watched these pro-abortion, pro-murder people? The people are just disgusting. But why is it is that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb. These people are odious on the inside and out. They’re like 5’2”, 350 pounds…”

Have I mentioned that Mr. Gaetz, whose morality seems as hard to find as a condom in the Vatican, is currently under investigation for allegedly paying women for sex and, separately, sleeping with a minor and transporting her across state lines? I did? Sorry.

But the Congressman, whose mind is about as deep as a pool table’s side pocket, may not only have met his match this time, but been seriously outgunned by one of the “odious” and “disgusting” women he viciously insulted.

Nineteen-year-old college student Olivia Julianna, who goes by her first and middle name due to safety concerns, took to Twitter to respond to the conservative Republican, calling him “alleged pedophile.”

“It (has) come to my attention that Matt Gaetz — alleged pedophile — has said that it’s always the “odious, 5’2, 350 pound” women that “nobody wants to impregnate” who rally for abortion,” the Houston resident said. “I’m actually 5’11, 6’4 in heels. I wear them so the small men like you are reminded of your place.” Gaetz, although he tries to appear taller for the camera, is actually 5’7.

Over five days, Olivia started a fundraiser for the Gen Z For Choice Abortion Fund, and raised more than $1.3 million, in the process gaining more than 250,000 new followers on social media platforms.

Gaetz, who is 20 years older (chronologically) than Olivia, still appears to have no idea his clock has just been thoroughly cleaned.

The infuriating

As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, 2 August, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has just announced he is scheduling a vote tonight on the PACT Act, a bill enhancing health care and disability benefits for millions of veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. This bill was personal for President Biden, because his late son, Beau, was one of those exposed.

By now, everyone knows Republicans overwhelmingly supported this bill when it was first before the Senate in June. Everyone also knows that because of an administrative error the bill was corrected in the House and sent back to the Senate for a final vote, where it was defeated when Republicans no longer supported it, after which they fist-bumped and high-fived each other for their courageous stand.

This entire shoot-yourself-in-the-head idiocy came about because of the Constitution’s Originations Clause, which says all revenue raising must originate in the House. The PACT Act, as originally voted in the Senate flipped that on its head. Consequently, the one sentence in the Bill that violated the Originations Clause was taken out in the House and the bill returned to the Senate for what everyone thought would be a simple approval vote. Ah, but such was not to be. Complaining about what Senator Ted “Cancun” Cruz called a “budgetary gimmick,” Republicans threw down their gantlet, which veterans groups, President Biden, and, most tellingly, John Stewart, picked up and beat them senseless with.

Tonight, the PACT Act will overwhelmingly pass, as it did in June, and Senate Republicans will take credit for making it better.

The sad, but uplifting

In the last few days, we’ve lost two giants, Bill Russell and Nichelle Nichols, who are being celebrated as Black America’s Greatest Generation.I cannot disagree with this more strongly. Yes, Nichols and Russell were Black, and yes, they were Great. And, yes, they were monumental leaders in the civil rights movement. But, more than all of that, they were Great Americans. Both of them would have preferred to be remembered for that, rather than being pigeonholed into a racial silo.

Neither Russell nor Nichols let profound racism dissuade them from their quest to be the best at what they did. They both broke solid, well-manned barriers, vanquishing those ignorant bigots who had nothing better to do than to persecute them.

Today, the New York Times reprinted a 1987 essay written by Bill Russell’s daughter Karen, who had just graduated from Harvard Law School. Ms. Russell described in searing detail the racism her family faced in Massachusetts, even though her father was the toast of the town in Boston every time he stepped on the parquet floor of the Boston Garden. But off the court? Life wasn’t such a bowl of cherries back in their home in Reading, Massachusetts. You should read Karen’s essay for one reason above all others—when you reach the end you will know she could have written it yesterday. So much still resonates.

Rest in peace, Nichelle and Bill. You’ve earned it.

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