After losing her engagement ring on her family farm more than a decade ago, Canadian Mary Grams resigned herself to the idea she would never see it again. That is, until the diamond ring showed up this week – 13 years after she lost it –wrapped tightly around a misshapen carrot that had been freshly plucked from the garden.
Last night I posted a chart showing when all those Confederate statues were erected. Here it is again:
I wouldn’t normally bother with this, but I got a bunch of pushback from folks offering non-racist explanations for why these bursts of monument building happened to coincide with periods of white terror campaigns against blacks. For your entertainment, here are the three most popular arguments:
This is right around the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War. No. The first spike starts in 1895, the second in 1955. Those are the 35th and 95th anniversaries. Maybe those numbers have some special significance in the South?
The Civil War generation was dying right around 1895. The average Confederate trooper would have been about 55 then. They weren’t dying off. As for the Confederate leaders who seem to attract the most statue attention, I looked them up. Robert E. Lee died in 1870, Stonewall Jackson in 1863, Nathan Bedford Forrest in 1877, Roger Taney in 1864, and Jefferson Davis in 1889. Of the eight full generals in the Confederate army, only three died later than 1880.
Maybe there was just a big explosion of statue building right around then. Anything is possible, I guess. Knock yourself out if you want to dig up evidence for this.
A lot of people desperately want to find some reason why these statues aren’t actually symbols of white terror against blacks. And you know what? There are always multiple motivations for everything. But honestly, the primary motivation here is pretty clear. They were only incidentally meant as commemorations of honorable men in a brutal war. Far more often they were erected as very deliberate messages of white supremacy to brutalized blacks.
POSTSCRIPT: One other thing. I’ve heard a few liberal friends pick up on the slippery slope argument. Where do we draw the line? Which statues should we tear down? Did you hear what Al Sharpton said about the Jefferson Memorial? Just stop it. There are times for airy arguments like this, but this isn’t one of them. How about if we just start at the top with all the statues of Confederate leaders and then decide what to do next?
Apparently having learned nothing from Moochgate, Steve Bannon decided to call up the editor of the American Prospect yesterday to chew the fat. Mostly he wanted to shoot off his mouth about North Korea (nothing we can do, just have to live with it) and China (Sina delenda est). But he also had something to say about the news of the day. What do you think about combating racism and white supremacy, Steve?
“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
We sure have a charming bunch of folks in the White House these days, don’t we?
POSTSCRIPT: I can’t keep up with this stuff. It appears that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer got an email last night and decided to forward it to a bunch of administration officials and conservative journalists. According to the New York Times, it “echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter ‘has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.’ ” Plus this:
The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in glowing terms and equated the South’s rebellion to that of the American Revolution against England. Its subject line — “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville” — was a reference to comments Mr. Trump made earlier this week in the aftermath of protests in the Virginia college town.
….The email’s author, Jerome Almon, runs several websites alleging government conspiracies and arguing that the F.B.I. has been infiltrated by Islamic terrorists….In a telephone interview, Mr. Almon said he sent the email to follow up on a phone call he had last week with Mr. Dowd.
FFS. Is there anyone close to Trump who isn’t a racist?
Fox & Friends got a little more than it bargained for today when it invited a couple of guests to talk about Confederate statues. Abby Huntsman thought it would be fun to debate Donald Trump’s fascinating question about whether George Washington would be next if we started tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee. Her two guests were decidedly not interested in that. Instead they nearly broke down in tears:
I don’t think Huntsman was prepared for this display of raw emotion. I guess next time the Fox bookers will screen their black guests a little more closely.
The Berkman Klein Center at Harvard has just released a new report of the role of online media in the 2016 election. Some of it is stuff we’ve seen before: for example, coverage of Hillary Clinton was massively weighted toward her emails and other “scandals,” while coverage of Trump was weighted toward the issues.
Generally speaking, however, the big thread that runs through the whole report is the asymmetry of social media. Liberals tend to share items about equally from centrist sites and far-left sites. Conservatives, however, almost literally have no interest in centrist sites. They only share items from extremely partisan sites:
Here’s what the report has to say:
Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left. On the right, prominent media are highly partisan. From all of these perspectives, conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left….Breitbart emerges as the nexus of conservative media….Seven sources, all from the partisan right or partisan left, receive substantially more attention on social media than links from other media outlets….In this group, Gateway Pundit is in a class of its own, known for “publishing falsehoods and spreading hoaxes.”
The report also includes a detailed analysis of how the media got played on the story of the Clinton Foundation. I may have more on that later.
NAFTA talks begin this week. Just to set the stage, here’s a history of US trade deficits with Canada and Mexico for the past 15 years:
Our trade deficit with Canada is pretty much all oil. When you look at the trade deficit ex energy, it’s actually positive: we export more to Canada than we import.
In the case of Mexico, we import practically no oil anymore, so excluding energy makes little difference. In 2016, the trade deficit ex energy reached $70.8 billion.
For the past week or so I’ve been playing around with long exposures of our orchid tree when the wind is blowing. I wanted to let the breeze paint a sort of abstract image, but I wasn’t especially taken with the results, even after letting the camera operate on autopilot for a while and getting a couple hundred shots. This is the best of the bunch, I think. You’ll have to decide for yourself if you like it.
The “pressure,” of course, is for decent people to condemn Trump and resign from his sham councils. But there’s no need for these shows of principle now! After all, it might piss off the racists, and CEOs shouldn’t be expected to risk that. Nice work, Mr. President.
“Racism is evil,” the president said on Monday, delivering a statement from the White House that was written with aides during airplane and helicopter flights….But his unifying tone, which his staff characterized as more traditionally presidential, quickly gave way to a more familiar Trump approach. No sooner had he delivered the Monday statement than he began railing privately to his staff about the news media. He fumed to aides about how unfairly he was being treated, and expressed sympathy with nonviolent protesters who he said were defending their “heritage,” according to a West Wing official.
….The president’s fury grew Monday as members of a White House business council began to resign to protest his reaction to Charlottesville. As usual, Mr. Trump found his voice by tweeting angrily about the news media. By Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Trump’s staff sensed the culmination of a familiar cycle: The president was about to revert to his initial, more defiant stance. As Mr. Trump approached the microphone in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday, aides winced at the prospect of an unmediated president. With good reason.
They know what he believes, but they stick around anyway. You’d think there might be at least one with the integrity to resign in protest, but I guess not. After all, if they left they’d probably be on the receiving end of some pretty nasty presidential tweets. It would take a strong man to stand up to that.
I’m trying to better understand what would happen if CSR subsidies are eliminated, and I’m making a bit of progress. Two folks have made contributions to my understanding today.
First, though, a brief bit of background. Obamacare plans are grouped by actuarial value: bronze = 60 percent, silver = 70 percent, gold = 80 percent, and platinum = 90 percent. This means, for example, that bronze plans are designed to pay 60 percent of your total medical costs, while you have to pay the other 40 percent out of pocket. The higher metal levels pay a larger share of your costs and are more expensive.
For the poor, there’s an extra bump at the silver level thanks to cost-sharing subsidies. Depending on your income, silver plans with CSR have an actuarial value of 94 percent, 87 percent, or 73 percent. This extra value costs money, of course, so the federal government pays CSR subsidies directly to insurance companies who sell these plans. It amounts to about $8 billion this year. These are the subsidies that President Trump keeps threatening to take away.
So what happens if CSR subsidies go away? David Anderson says the basic state of play is this: Insurers are still required to maintain higher actuarial values for the poor, so they’ll raise the premiums of silver plans to cover the cost. However, they can’t charge different prices to people with different incomes, so the premiums for silver plans will go up across the board. But here’s the catch: federal tax credits are benchmarked on the cost of silver plans. If the cost of a silver plan goes up, so do the tax credits. That is, the tax credits go up for everyone. Four things happen:
The increased tax credits make up for the higher silver premiums. The net cost of silver policies will stay the same.
The tax credits go up enough that bronze plans become free for some people. This will attract more people into the Obamacare marketplaces.
The net cost of a gold plan is less than a silver plan. For many people, this means they can switch to gold plans with a higher actuarial value and actually save money compared to silver.
Outside of Obamacare, insurance companies will offer different policies that don’t include CSR. So for folks who don’t use Obamacare, the cost of insurance won’t change.
Anderson complains that this is, overall, an inefficient use of the extra money we’d be spending, but I’m OK with that. At the moment, extra money is not on the table in any way, efficient or otherwise, so I’ll take what I can get. If Republicans want to put something better on the table, I’m all ears.
On the less bright side, Stan Dorn tweets about a few problems (note that I’ve de-tweeted all abbreviations):
It’s mixed. Some get better subsidies. Some lose employer coverage. Some lose access to all individual plans….People < 200% of poverty lose because tax credits run into index limits. >200% poverty people gain, from higher tax credits and low gold premiums….Plus disruption. 3 million lose employer coverage by 2022. Those >200% of poverty leave silver plans; that’s about 1.5 million….Biggest problem: 5% of US in areas with no indiv mkt plans, unless CSRs cut after carriers set rates. If so, ENTIRE STATES have no qualified health plans.
This could really use a very detailed deep dive from a qualified analyst. My take is this: total federal spending on tax credits would go up, which means that the net result of all this would be positive. More people would get more subsidies. However, the benefits would be spread sort of haphazardly, and there would be both winners and losers. Some of the losers, however, would be temporary. The CBO report, for example, suggests a small reduction in the number of people covered and a small increase in the number of regions with no insurance carriers. However the effects are minor, and go away by 2020. In fact, after 2021 CBO estimates that eliminating CSR subsidies would lead to an extra million people being covered by Obamacare.
For the moment, then, I’ve tentatively changed my mind about CSR subsidies. I hope Trump lets them lapse. As Anderson says, it wouldn’t be the best possible use of an extra $194 billion (over ten years), but it’s still extra money. Let it rip, Mr. President.
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