Kevin Drum

A blog of my opinions. Plus charts and cats.

  • Trump’s Twitter War Against Jeff Sessions Continues

    July 25, 2017

    The president’s Twitter war against his own attorney general is now going into its fifth day:

    Sarah Sanders, our shiny new press secretary, says we should look forward to more of this:

    Look, I know that he is certainly frustrated and disappointed in the attorney general for recusing himself, but as we’ve said, I think that’s a decision that if the president wants to make, he certainly will. And, he’s continuing to move forward and focus on other things, but that frustration certainly hasn’t gone away, and I don’t think it will.

    Come on, Donald, you’re not a waffler like that Obama guy. You’re a man of action. So order Jeff Sessions to start investigating this stuff. Or just fire the guy. The American people want Rudy Giuliani as attorney general and it’s up to you to give them what they want.

  • Here’s What Donald Trump Told the Boy Scouts

    July 25, 2017

    Jeff Gritchen/The Orange County Register via ZUMA

    By now you’ve heard about President Trump’s address to the Boy Scout Jamboree yesterday. But to really get a feel for it, you need to read a few excerpts. He treated it like a campaign rally, full stop. After all, some of these kids will be old enough to vote in 2020, amirite?

    So here it is. Your president addressing a bunch of boy scouts.

    Tonight, we put aside all of the policy fights in Washington, D.C. — you’ve been hearing about with the fake news and all of that. We’re going to put that aside

    Secretary Tom Price is also here. Today Dr. Price still lives the Scout Oath, helping to keep millions of Americans strong and healthy as our Secretary of Health and Human Services. And he’s doing a great job. And hopefully, he’s going to get the votes tomorrow to start our path toward killing this horrible thing known as Obamacare that’s really hurting us, folks.

    AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA!

    THE PRESIDENT: By the way, you going to get the votes? He better get them. He better get them. Oh, he better — otherwise, I’ll say, Tom, you’re fired. I’ll get somebody.

    He better get Senator Capito to vote for it. You got to get the other senators to vote for it. It’s time. After seven years of saying repeal and replace Obamacare, we have a chance to now do it. They better do it. Hopefully they’ll do it.

    THE PRESIDENT: I’m waving to people back there so small I can’t even see them. Man, this is a lot of people. Turn those cameras back there, please. That is so incredible. By the way, what do you think the chances are that this incredible, massive crowd, record-setting is going to be shown on television tonight? One percent or zero?

    The fake media will say: President Trump — and you know what this is — President Trump spoke before a small crowd of Boy Scouts today.

    That’s some — that is some crowd. Fake media. Fake news. Thank you. And I’m honored by that, by the way, all of you people they can’t even see you. So thank you. I hope you can hear.

    AUDIENCE: We love Trump! We love Trump! We love Trump!

    THE PRESIDENT: By the way, just a question, did President Obama ever come to a jamboree?

    AUDIENCE: No!

    I have to tell you our economy is doing great. Our stock market has picked up — since the election November 8th. Do we remember that date? Was that a beautiful date? What a date. Do you remember that famous night on television, November 8th, where they said — these dishonest people — where they said there is no path to victory for Donald Trump? They forgot about the forgotten people. By the way, they’re not forgetting about the forgotten people anymore. They’re going crazy trying to figure it out. But I told them, far too late. It’s far too late.

    But do you remember that incredible night with the maps and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red, it was unbelievable, and they didn’t know what to say?

    And you know we have a tremendous disadvantage in the Electoral College — popular vote is much easier. Because New York, California, Illinois — you have to practically run the East Coast. And we did. We won Florida. We won South Carolina. We won North Carolina. We won Pennsylvania.

    We won and won. So when they said, there is no way to victory, there is no way to 270. I went to Maine four times because it’s one vote, and we won. But we won — one vote. I went there because I kept hearing we’re at 269. But then Wisconsin came in. Many, many years — Michigan came in.

    THE PRESIDENT: And I’ll tell you what, we are, indeed, making America great again. What’s going on is incredible.

    We had the best jobs report in 16 years. The stock market on a daily basis is hitting an all-time high. We’re going to be bringing back very soon trillions of dollars from companies that can’t get their money back into this country, and that money is going to be used to help rebuild America. We’re doing things that nobody ever thought was possible.

    And by the way, under the Trump administration, you’ll be saying, merry Christmas again when you go shopping. Believe me. Merry Christmas. They’ve been downplaying that little, beautiful phrase. You’re going to be saying, merry Christmas again, folks.

    But do you remember that incredible night with the maps and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red, it was unbelievable, and they didn’t know what to say?…We won Florida. We won South Carolina. We won North Carolina. We won Pennsylvania. We won and won….And we worked hard there. My opponent didn’t work hard there because she was told —

    AUDIENCE: Booo!

    THE PRESIDENT: She was told she was going to win Michigan, and I said, well, wait a minute, the car industry is moving to Mexico. Why is she going to move — she’s there. Why are they allowing it to move?

    THE PRESIDENT: And I’ll tell you what, we are, indeed, making America great again. What’s going on is incredible.

    We had the best jobs report in 16 years. The stock market on a daily basis is hitting an all-time high. We’re going to be bringing back very soon trillions of dollars from companies that can’t get their money back into this country, and that money is going to be used to help rebuild America. We’re doing things that nobody ever thought was possible.

  • Market Volatility Is Low, But It Doesn’t Really Mean Anything

    July 25, 2017

    The Wall Street Journal reports that the VIX volatility measure is near its all-time low:

    A key measure of market volatility is on pace to set a new all-time low for the first time since 1993….The VIX tends to rise when investors are anxious and stocks are falling. The opposite is happening Tuesday, as equities are rising around the world thanks to a positive reading of business sentiment in Europe and some good corporate earnings results from companies including Caterpillar Inc. and McDonald’s Corp.

    With a close under 10 on Tuesday, the VIX will have closed in single digits in nine straight sessions—by far its longest streak ever….Many investors and analysts say markets are eerily calm this year and that a surge in volatility could be on the horizon if stocks slip from their recently-set record highs.

    So what does it all mean? Beats me:

    The VIX was low in 1994 and nothing happened. It spiked in 1998 and nothing happened. It was low again in 2006, and nothing happened. It spiked in late 2008, long after the Great Recession had already started. Now it’s low again.

    My gut tells me that a low VIX spells complacency and leads to a greater tolerance for stupid risks, which eventually produces a recession. But the data doesn’t really suggest that it means much of anything.

  • Republicans Prepare to Vote on Something or Other

    July 25, 2017

    It’s Tuesday. Mitch McConnell has promised to vote on repealing Obamacare today, so that means senators will finally be told exactly what they’re voting on. Right? Politico has the deets:

    At stake is not just the seven-year-old campaign pledge to repeal Obamacare, but also demonstrating that Republicans — when given full control of Washington — can govern….The vote count was unclear as of Tuesday morning. About a half-dozen senators were publicly undecided about whether to allow debate to start on rolling back the Affordable Care Act.

    ….It is still unclear what policy the Senate is going to vote on. To get their members on board, Republican leaders are being as vague as possible about what the final bill to replace Obamacare would include, after two recent drafts met fatal opposition.

    Credit where it’s due: this is a very creative strategy. Just keep everyone in the dark and don’t tell them what they’re voting for. This kind of fuzziness worked great on the campaign trail for the past seven years, so why not try it on an actual floor vote? And who knows? Maybe there’s a last-minute provision in the bill that names Mitch McConnell king of the world. Who would ever know?

  • Blame Hospitals for the Big Spike in Out-of-Network ER Charges

    July 24, 2017

    I finished reading Elisabeth Rosenthal’s An American Sickness a few days ago, so the depradations of the American health care system are even fresher on my mind than usual right now. Unsurprisingly, one of the things she talks about is the surge in hospitals surreptitiously employing doctors who are out-of-network and therefore not covered by a patient’s insurance. The result is gigantic bills for people who thought—quite reasonably—that if they went to an in-network hospital they had nothing to worry about.

    It turns out this scam is especially common in emergency rooms, precisely the place where patients are least likely to be thinking clearly. Today, the New York Times writes about what happens when ER services are outsourced to a company called EmCare. A chart is worth a thousand words, so here’s 8,000 words on the subject:

    When EmCare takes over, out-of-network billing jumps almost instantly from about zero to about 100 percent. But is EmCare really the culprit? Here’s an excerpt from the Times piece:

    Early last year, executives at a small hospital an hour north of Spokane, Wash., started using a company called EmCare to staff and run their emergency room….Although the hospital had negotiated rates for its fees with many major health insurers, the EmCare physicians were not part of those networks and were sending high bills directly to the patients.

    ….“Fiona Scott Morton, a professor at the Yale School of Management and a co-author of the paper, described the strategy as a “kind of ambushing of patients.” A patient who goes to the emergency room can look for a hospital that takes her insurance, but she almost never gets to choose the doctor who treats her.

    ….When emergency room doctors work for a company that has not made a deal with an insurer, they are free to bill whatever they want, insurers say. “The more they bill, the more they get paid,” said Shara McClure, an executive with Blue Cross of Texas.

    Hospitals know perfectly well that patients expect doctors at in-network hospitals to also be in-network. That’s why hospitals negotiate with insurers in the first place: to get a place in the insurer’s network so they can attract the insurer’s customers.

    Likewise, if they contract with a third-party firm to run a part of their hospital, they know perfectly well what will happen if the third-party hasn’t negotiated with the same set of insurers: their patients will get outrageous out-of-network bills.

    Unlike patients, hospitals are sophisticated actors. They know enough to ask whether or not EmCare’s doctors belong to their networks. Obviously they did ask, and just as obviously the answer was no. But they signed up with EmCare anyway.

    So whose fault is it that ERs are increasingly turned over to outfits like EmCare and that EmCare charges sky-high rates? It’s the fault of the hospitals who knowingly do this because it helps them run more profitably.

    EmCare is hardly blameless here. Scams like this depend on everyone buying into a clever new idea. But if hospitals refused to deal with EmCare unless EmCare signed up for the same networks the hospital advertises itself belonging to, none of this would happen.

  • Productivity Growth Has Been Declining For a Long Time

    July 24, 2017

    Speaking of cherry-picked statistics, Brad DeLong is unhappy with John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard, John Taylor, and Kevin Warsh, who insist that Donald Trump might very well produce sustained economic growth of 3 percent. They back up their view with this chart of labor productivity:

    Aside from looking like something a first-grader would put together, real economists don’t just draw miscellaneous arrows through data. DeLong shows how it’s done correctly, drawing a nonparametric smoothed lowess trend through a scatterplot. However, he admits that us amateurs could show the same thing using a standard-issue curve fitted by Excel. Here it is:

    Hmmm. When it’s plotted with no particular bias to produce a specific result, it looks like productivity has been on a steady downward trend for the past 65 years, with a brief and modest uptick during the 90s.

    Is it possible that tax cuts for the rich will produce a sudden, gigantic surge in productivity and therefore a sudden, gigantic surge in economic growth? Sure. Tax cuts for the rich have never produced this before, but anything is possible. Should you bet on it based on a crude chart drawn by folks who have an axe to grind? Well, it’s your money.

  • The Economy Is Collapsing Under Donald Trump!

    July 24, 2017

    The American economy has been collapsing ever since Donald Trump took office. Our trade deficit with Mexico has ballooned. Consumer confidence has cratered. Auto sales are plummeting. And job growth is slowing down. Check out the numbers:

    This is, of course, ridiculous. I cherry-picked these statistics; plotted them in a way that made their decline look enormous; and provided no context about what any of them looked like in the year before Trump took office. It’s an easy game to play, and it’s all meaningless.

    So why bother? Just to make a point. Right now the economy is doing about as well as it’s been doing for the past few years. Nothing great, nothing terrible. You should pay no more attention to anyone who says the economy is booming under Trump than you should to anyone who says it’s collapsing. Right now, it’s just puttering along.

  • Medicare for All About to Get a Democratic Test

    July 24, 2017

    How far has the Democratic Party shifted in its support for truly universal health care? Jeff Stein reports:

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is about to put Democrats’ newfound embrace of single-payer health care to the test….Despite the rise of “Medicare-for-all” as a political slogan in the party, Democrats don’t have a clear plan to translate that aspiration into policy, and their efforts to implement single-payer at the state level have been rebuffed — including in blue states like Vermont and California.

    ….Sanders will soon change that. The Vermont senator is expected to release his own revised Medicare-for-all bill, the path to single-payer health care. When he does so, Senate Democrats will have to make a choice they’ve thus far avoided: Are they for Medicare-for-all in practice, or just in theory?

    Is this a good idea? On the one hand, Republicans never bothered with this during seven years of their “repeal and replace” campaign against Obamacare, and it worked great. Until they actually took power, that is.

    On the other hand—well, I’m not sure I see the other hand. An actual bill gives Republicans a concrete target to rail against. It would include a bunch of new taxes. If its sums don’t add up, liberal analysts will say so because, for better or worse, that’s how liberal analysts roll. Its tradeoffs will all be front and center. It will make divisions within the Democratic Party sharper and more visible. From a purely political view, there’s not a lot of upside here to introducing actual legislative text.

    If this bill came from anyone else, I’d assume there might be some give and take before it was made public. With Sanders, who knows? Stay tuned.