A couple of days ago I wrote about Britain’s proposed super-tax on big bank bonuses.  Today, via Noam Scheiber, I see that it would work a little differently than I thought:

Banks will be charged a 50 percent tax on 2009 bonuses of more than £25,000, or $40,800. It will be imposed on the pool of bonuses paid by a bank, rather than individual payments, and it will be paid by the bank — not by the recipient of the bonus. It will take effect immediately and will affect banks’ 2009 profits.

For what it’s worth, I like this approach better than an individual tax because it gets more directly at what the immediate outrage is.  Basically, the banking system was about to go under last year as a result of its own folly and was rescued by the government.  With a couple of exceptions, however, instead of outright nationalizing the weakest banks, the rescue plans in both Britain and the U.S. were aimed at boosting bank profits and letting them earn their way back to solvency.  You can argue about whether this was the right approach or not, but it’s the approach we took.  Given that, it makes sense to give banks a strong incentive to retain their outsize earnings and use them to strengthen their balance sheets instead of paying out huge bonuses to their traders and executives.

Of course, this also puts paid to the whole idea that the tax might be a human rights violation.  Unless you want to argue that a bank has human rights.  Do you?

From Al Gore, on why climate deniers get so much attention:

If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn’t take place, I’m sure we’d have a robust debate about it right now.

I just happen to have a good example of this on tap.  Last night I read a post over at Volokh about how climate data was being faked.  I sighed and moved on.  Then, about an hour ago, I got an email from a conservative reader asking if the Volokh post undermined my faith in global warming.  I told him it didn’t.  Then, a few minutes later, I noticed Megan McArdle linking to the same post.  Obviously this thing wasn’t going to go away quietly.

Basically, the Volokh post (by Jim Lindgren) passes along an analysis by Willis Eschenbach claiming that the instrument data for Darwin Airport in Australia shows flat or declining temperatures if you look at the raw data, and only shows an increase if you “homogenize” it.  Conclusion: the evidence of warming isn’t from the data at all, but only from the manipulation of the data!  But via Tim Lambert, here’s an excerpt from the original NOAA paper that explains how the homogenization was done:

A great deal of effort went into the homogeneity adjustments. Yet the effects of the homogeneity adjustments on global average temperature trends are minor (Easterling and Peterson 1995b). However, on scales of half a continent or smaller, the homogeneity adjustments can have an impact. On an individual time series, the effects of the adjustments can be enormous. [Italics mine.]

So, if you’re a climate denier, what would you do?  You’d look for local effects and you’d look for an individual time series.  Look hard enough and you’re bound to find some with large changes due to the homogenization.  And then you’d cry foul.  The books are being cooked!

Well, as I told my emailer, I’m not qualified to judge this stuff.  Neither is he.  Neither is Willis Eschenbach.  But it’s easy to make a pretty graph that looks damning and then demand that the scientific community address it.  And when they don’t — because it’s amateur crap and isn’t worth anyone’s time — the deniers have a scalp.  Look!  The scientific community is so corrupt they won’t even look at our evidence!  And Fox and Drudge and the Wall Street Journal all merrily pass it along.

Rinse and repeat.  Unfortunately, it’s working pretty well.  More from Tim here.  Chris Mooney addresses the larger problem here.

Byron Dorgan (D–ND) has proposed an amendment to the Senate’s healthcare bill that would legalize reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada.  No big surprise there: Dorgan’s a Democrat, after all.  But drug reimportation has lots of Republican supporters too, including Olympia Snowe, David Vitter, Chuck Grassley, and John McCain.  Ezra Klein notes just how nonsensical this is:

The case for drug reimportation, as Vitter says, proceeds from the recognition that residents of other countries get much, much lower prices on drugs than Americans do. Many of these drugs were invented by American companies and produced in American factories. But Canada gets them at a discount. Why?

Well, Canada’s government bargains its prices down. So does the French government, and the German government, and the British government….But Medicare, and the federal government more generally, are barred from doing the same. And this isn’t just about drugs. The story is similar for everything from surgeries to doctor’s visits.

….In closing, Vitter urged the Senate to “take this step and do what we all say should be a top priority and actually lower health-care costs. I urge all my colleagues to come together and do this in a bipartisan way.” Boiled down to its essentials, Vitter just made a case for a bipartisan embrace of a single-payer system.

Drug reimportation is quite possibly the most ridiculous and hypocritical way conceivable to get lower pharmaceutical prices.  If you think the government should bargain down drug prices, then at least have the spine to say that the government should bargain down drug prices.  Don’t outsource the job to Canada’s government-run healthcare system, which, according to conservative conventional wisdom, is little better than an icy death factory that dooms its citizens to bad hips, painful cancer deaths, and endless waiting lines.

There are times when I feel that I’m pretty inured to political opportunism and duplicitousness.  But railing against any kind of government interference in the health industry as death panels and socialism, and then turning around and suggesting we take advantage of the benefits of an actual socialist healthcare system really takes the cake.

Thankfully, I haven’t yet seen a TV commercial for Reebok’s new EasyTone shoe.  But Sophia Lear brings me up to date here:

It took being assaulted by this ad a few times to pinpoint what makes it so horrifying. The message of the ad seems to be: what women really want is to have a butt so cute that they will be objectified like the woman in the ad.

It took a few viewings to figure this out?  Here’s the very first line of the ad:

Reebok EasyTone shoes not only look fantastic, they’ll help make your legs and butt look great too.

Emphasis very decidedly in the original, accompanied by the camera zooming in for a tight closeup on the woman’s butt.  This is not a subtle sales pitch.  You can see for yourself at the link.

Joe Lieberman’s latest excuse for not supporting a public option is that it would pay lower prices to hospitals, which would then make up the difference by charging higher prices to everyone else.¹  This is called “cost shifting,” and this morning I got a timely email from Austin Frakt telling me that there was some handy new high-quality research from Vivian Wu on exactly this question.  Is Lieberman right?  Is cost shifting real?

Wu’s main result is that on average prices paid to hospitals by private payers increases by 21 cents in response to each dollar reduction in public revenue. By way of comparison, this 21% rate of cost shift is about half of the lowest estimates produced by industry studies and is far below their common assumptions of 50% to 100%.

….The policy implications are clear. Wu doesn’t state them, but I will. Within the range of variation studied by Wu, with respect to hospital payments, overall health costs can be reduced by 79 cents per dollar of Medicare payment reduction, the other 21 cents being shifted to the private sector. However, the more competitive the hospital market the less the cost shift. For some hospitals in some markets Wu found cost shifting rates as low as 5%. Therefore, sound public policy would encourage greater competition among providers (wherever possible) in tandem with reductions in public payments. Doing both concurrently would reduce public health expenditures with minimal impact on private payments.

In other words, Lieberman is, at most, 21% right.  There’s a little bit of cost shifting, but the vast majority of payment reduction actually goes toward reducing payments.  Hospitals might not like that, but why shouldn’t the rest of us?

And this reminds me: I’ve got several posts from Austin bookmarked that I never quite got around to blogging about, and I suppose at this point I never will.  They tend to be pretty wonky, but if you like that kind of stuff you should check out his blog.  It’s called The Incidental Economist.

¹Actually, I don’t know for sure if this is his latest excuse.  He changes them too fast for me to keep up.  But I’m pretty sure this was one of the more recent ones.

As you all know, the Transportation Security Administration mistakenly posted a copy of its screening manual a few days ago, providing access to lots of interesting little nuggets about how they operate.  The manual was supposed to have sensitive portions blacked out, but as in so many previous cases, the people who did it didn’t realize that PDF documents come in several flavors:

Government workers preparing the release of a Transportation Security Administration manual that details airport screening procedures badly bungled their redaction of the .pdf file. Result: The full text of a document considered “sensitive security information” was inadvertently leaked.

….This is not the first time that redacted documents have leaked sensitive data.  AT&T lawyers defending their company in a spying suit made the same mistake three years ago in a redacted court filing. Confidential details discussed during a closed-door settlement hearing in a lawsuit against Facebook were revealed earlier this year when parts of the hearing transcript were insufficiently redacted. Federal prosecutors also made redaction errors in court documents they filed against two San Francisco reporters who covered the BALCO steroids story.

In 2003, the Justice Department botched the redaction of a controversial workplace diversity report, and in 2000 the New York Times inadvertently leaked the names of CIA collaborators when it published an improperly redacted CIA file on its website that documented American and British officials’ engineering of the 1953 Iranian coup.

I’ve long wondered when government agencies will finally figure out how PDF documents work, but so far the only answer is “not yet.”  In the meantime, my great fear is that some overzealous bureaucrat is finally going to get tired of this and decide that the only answer is a government-wide ban on PDFs.  Or perhaps a government-wide ban on searchable PDFs.  That would be a huge pain in the ass for the rest of us.  But you just know it’s coming if this kind of thing keeps happening.

From Alberto Gonzales, explaining why, in hindsight, it was wrong for the Bush administration to purge U.S. Attorneys on flimsy grounds:

We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn’t see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn’t see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it.

You know, most people would at least be smart enough not to admit something like this in public.  But not Gonzales.

A couple of months ago — if not earlier — it became pretty clear that this week’s Copenhagen conference wasn’t going to produce the big climate treaty everyone had been hoping for.  Ever since, participants have been trying to figure out how to salvage things, and today Jonathan Pershing, the Obama administration’s deputy special climate change envoy, took his crack at the spin machine.  David Corn reports:

Speaking to about 200 people from various environmental groups, Pershing made the case that a non-binding political agreement — in which the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases would pledge to take various actions to reduce their own emissions — would be more effective than a treaty establishing firm and legally enforceable commitments, according to several people who attended the session.

….Pershing, a well-known scientist who has worked on climate change for decades, maintained that a binding treaty — which would mandate emission reductions and contain penalties for noncompliance — could easily stall. It would have to be ratified by the U.S. Senate (which would require 67 votes) and winning Senate approval would be no easy feat for the Obama administration. (The Senate does not yet have the 60 votes need to block a filibuster of pending climate change legislation.) Other nations also would have to approve it. He pointed out that the 1997 Kyoto global warming accord, which the US Senate never approved, took five years to be ratified around the world. If Copenhagen did produce a binding treaty, Pershing said, it would be years before it could go into effect. In the meantime, emissions would continue to flow. A political deal, he contended, could kick in immediately

As spin goes, I suppose this isn’t bad.  It’s true, after all, that the prospect of getting 67 votes to approve a climate treaty in the Senate is piss poor.¹  So perhaps this really is our only realistic alternative.  Still, it’s the Obama administration’s biggest climbdown yet, and one that suggests that Obama believes Waxman-Markey is the best we’re going to be able to do in the near term.  Unfortunately, he’s probably right.

¹Though there’s always the possibility of ratifying it as an executive agreement with only 60 votes, as NAFTA and other international agreements have been.

On an ABC news segment about healthcare tonight, Jonathan Karl said, “Democrats in the Senate are more optimistic on this than I have seen them in a long time.”  Why?  Because they think they’ve struck a deal that can get 60 votes.  Most reports I’ve seen agree on the basics, including this one from Brian Beutler:

As has been widely reported, one of the trade-offs will be to extend a version of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan to consumers in the exchanges. Insurance companies will have the option of creating nationally-based non-profit insurance plans that would offered on the exchanges in every state. However, according to the aide, if insurance companies don’t step up to the plate to offer such plans, that will trigger a national public option.

Beyond that, the group agreed — contingent upon CBO analysis — to a Medicare buy in.

That buy-in option would initially be made available to uninsured people aged 55-64 in 2011, three years before the exchanges open. For the period between 2011 and 2014, when the exchanges do open, the Medicare option will not be subsidized — people will have to pay in without federal premium assistance — and so will likely be quite expensive, the aide noted. However, after the exchanges launch, the Medicare option would be offered in the exchanges, where people could pay into it with their subsidies.

It appears as if liberals lost out on a Medicaid expansion that would have opened the program up to everybody under 150 percent of the poverty line. That ceiling will likely remain at 133 percent, as is called for in the current bill.

In addition to the new insurance options, the group has tentatively agreed to new, and strengthened, insurance regulations, which the aide could not divulge at this time.

So: an OPM-administered national plan, a weak triggered public option, a limited Medicare buy-in between 55-64, and some new insurance regs.  If this sticks, it’s actually better than I expected.  I always figured we’d get a triggered public option and nothing more.

Of course, this still has a long way to go, and abortion is still a sticking point.  But for now, the prospects for healthcare reform are looking as good as they ever have.  Keep your fingers crossed.

The collapse of Dubai World was just a shot across the economic bow.  But the collapse of Greece?  That would be a little more spectacular.