Kevin Drum - March 2010

Chart of the Day: Getting Rich in the Stock Market

| Fri Mar. 12, 2010 3:07 PM EST

CJR's Ryan Chittum points us to the chart below, which compares S&P 500 stock market returns over the past 50 years (blue bars) to those same returns after accounting for trading and management costs, dividend and capital-gains taxes, and inflation (red bars). It's part of a Bloomberg piece by David Wilson summarizing a report prepared by David Bianco, chief U.S. equity strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Once you take into account all the adjustments, the annual average return of the S&P 500 goes from 9.5% to 1.3%. Chittum comments:


Of course, your basic money market account is returning about 0% these days, give or take a few mils, so it's not as if we little guys have a ton of other great investment opportunities. Luckily, the Wall Street tycoon set is still doing well. It's not all bad news out there, my friends.

Advertise on

The Future of Healthcare Reform

| Fri Mar. 12, 2010 2:29 PM EST

Charles Pierce has some questions for me about healthcare reform:

I am not unsympathetic to the arguments made by Kevin Drum or Matt Y. here, even though I think the opprobrium heaped on Jane Hamsher is wildly disproportionate.....Ask me what I'd do, and I'd probably vote for the ongoing POS that is the Senate bill. However, I would like both Kevin and Matt [] to explain the "stepping-stone" argument to me. Why, precisely, should I believe that, that once we pass the POS, any opportunity to improve it, largely by the process of political evolution, will remain?

....After all, it's unlikely that the new system proposed in the ongoing POS will become so wildly popular, and so seriously armored by public approval, that there will be a substantial political risk to having opposed it in theory, or to opposing it in practice. Not by next autumn, anyway....Why shouldn't the Republicans run on a promise to repeal the new system, and then follow through by doing exactly that?....Can somebody explain to me how the surviving Democratic politicians, even if they hang onto their majorities, will muster the will and skill to move toward "further reform in the future," as Mr. Drum puts it, given what we've seen of their performance with overwhelming congressional majorities?....Again, everyone, please show your work.

Obviously there's no kind of geometric proof for this, but let's take a crack at it anyway. There are two separate questions here.

First, if healthcare reform passes, what's to stop Republicans from repealing it if they get control of Congress in November? That one is easy: Barack Obama's veto pen. As it happens, I also think that Republicans will find that it's far more difficult to repeal an actual existing bill with a bunch of popular provisions (pre-existing conditions, subsidies for the poor, etc.) than it is to make cheap, stemwinding speeches about onrushing socialism to tea party crowds, but that's really secondary. They couldn't muster 60 votes for repeal, and if they did, they certainly couldn't muster 67 votes in the Senate and 290 votes in the House to overturn a veto.


But the United States is different! Fine. Take a look at social programs in the United States. Social Security provided meager benefits and only modest coverage when it was first passed. Over the course of the next 40 years it became a full-fleged universal pension plan. Medicare passed in 1965 with a limited payment structure and has been improved ever since. Prescription drug coverage wasn't added until 2003. You see a similar direction for things like federal home loan programs, civil rights measures, S-CHIP, gay rights, and practically every other social program ever passed. Progress is uneven, and sometimes even goes backward, but the general trend is pretty clear.

Once healthcare reform is passed, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief and move on to other issues. Republicans will huff and puff, but they don't have the votes to overturn it and they know it. (Why do you think they're resisting it so rabidly? They know perfectly well that entitlement programs practically never go away once they've been passed.) Then, down the road, future congresses will start to make changes. Maybe a Medicare buy-in. Maybe bigger subsidies. Maybe a public option outside of Medicare. It won't happen overnight, but within 20 or 30 years the current bill will almost certainly turn into de facto national healthcare. It's likely to be based on private health insurers in some way, but that's how they do it in Germany and the Netherlands too, and it works fine. Eventually it'll work fine here too.

Shifting Into Neutral

| Fri Mar. 12, 2010 1:28 PM EST

Fair warning: I haven't paid a ton of attention to the whole Toyota sudden acceleration thing, so maybe this has all been discussed to death. But I keep wondering what's really going on. If your engine is racing and you stand on the brakes, your car will stop. Right? Or, at the very least, it will certainly slow down a lot. And while I understand why you might not want to turn off the ignition, since that can lock up your steering, you can always put your car into neutral and coast to a stop. Why didn't the drivers of runaway Toyotas do this?

Obviously panic is part of it. If my car suddenly started racing off at a hundred miles an hour, maybe I wouldn't be thinking clearly enough to put the car into neutral. But a couple of days ago a guy in San Diego got plastered all over my TV when his Toyota went crazy and eventually had to be stopped by a CHP patrol car. Today, someone asked him about his reaction:

Sikes called 911 on Monday to report that his gas pedal was stuck and his blue 2008 Prius was speeding at 94 mph down a freeway near San Diego. A CHP officer helped bring the car to a stop, but not before two calls to police dispatchers that spanned 23 minutes.

Asked why he didn't simply put his car in neutral, Sikes said: "You had to be there. I might go into reverse. I didn't know if the car would flip. I had no idea how it would react."

Seriously? His car was speeding at 94 mph for 23 minutes and he was afraid to put his gearshift into neutral? Or just turn the ignition off once he got to a relatively straight portion of the freeway? The linked story gives plenty of other reasons to think this whole thing might be a hoax too.

But even for the non-hoaxsters, what's the deal? A few seconds of panic I can understand, but your first reaction would be to jam on the brakes, and once that got you into non-heartpounding territory wouldn't you just shift into neutral and slow to a stop? Do I only think this way because I've spent most of my life driving stick shifts, where neutral plays a bigger role than it does in an automatic transmission? Does this have something to do with it? What am I missing here?

The Left and Healthcare

| Fri Mar. 12, 2010 12:13 PM EST

Matt Yglesias made a good and underappreciated point about the Democratic healthcare bill yesterday. There's a core group of lefties that oppose it for idiosyncratic reasons, "But the point I want to emphasize is that theirs is a pretty marginal point of view. 'The left,' in both its traditional institutional forms (unions, civil rights groups) and its online grassroots forms (MoveOn) is very firmly behind this bill." Greg Sargent amplifies:

Americans United for Change is set to announce a $500,000 ad campaign in the districts of multiple House Dems across the country, a source familiar with the plans says. The labor federation AFSCME is preparing a "significant push in the weeks ahead," according to an AFSCME official, who adds that ads could air before and after the House votes on the Senate bill, providing cover for Dems who find themselves under assault after voting Yes. Americans for Stable Quality Care, a pro-reform coalition which is working with the labor powerhouse SEIU, is finalizing plans for a major buy in multiple districts, an official familiar with the plans says.

So unions are spending heavily in support of the bill, MoveOn's members support it 83%-17%, Nancy Pelosi is putting the screws on her caucus members, Harry Reid is doing the same in the Senate, and President Obama is finally pulling out all the stops too — both in front of the cameras and behind the scenes. Among the netroots, Markos Moulitsas says it's time to stop screwing around and pass the bill, and virtually every liberal member of the wonkosphere favors it as well. Ditto for church groups and civil rights groups. That's an enormous amount of firepower, and that's why, despite all the last-minute posturing and kvetching and preening, I think this bill is going to pass. In the end, that's just too much pressure to bear. Nancy Pelosi is going to get her 218 votes.

But it'll be close! If you haven't called your member of Congress, do it today. For a full list of congressional names and phone numbers, go to Type in your representative's name and it will pop up an information page that includes a phone contact. Don't know who your representative is? Enter your zip code and it will tell you.

The Problem With CDS, Cont'd

| Fri Mar. 12, 2010 1:21 AM EST










Grammar Police

| Thu Mar. 11, 2010 6:39 PM EST

Ezra Klein:

Like most bloggers, I'm not too fond of e-mails correcting my grammar.

Really? I like getting emails about grammar and spelling. I mean, don't be a dick or anything, but if there's a mistake to be corrected or a usage issue to be debated, bring it on. We strive for linguistic greatness around here.

Advertise on

Losing the Forest for the Weeds

| Thu Mar. 11, 2010 6:01 PM EST

Let's recap: If the current plan is for the House to pass the Senate healthcare bill followed by a small "sidecar" of amendments, exactly how is this going to be done procedurally? House Democrats, who don't trust the Senate to follow through on the sidecar, have been proposing ever more baroque methods for passing everything at one time, culminating yesterday with.....oh, forget it. You don't want to know. (But click here if you're masochistic.) And anyway, it doesn't matter, because the Senate parliamentarian has apparently ruled that their latest fanciful scheme violates Senate rules.

Frankly, it violates common sense, too, and probably the U.S. constitution, for that matter. Plus, it's just plain dumb. At some point, you have to trust that your co-partisans aren't going to shaft you completely. Steve Benen:

Sure, there are tensions between the chambers — a common phenomenon over the last 200+ years — but there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to think the Senate would promise to pass a budget fix, and then decide not to. Indeed, the leadership is not only putting this in writing, but let's also not forget that senators want to pass the budget fix — it makes changes the senators themselves want to see — and have no incentive to pull a fast one on the [House].

We know the upper chamber can obviously be dysfunctional, but Senate Dems aren't insane — why on earth would they want a budget fix, ask the House to pass a budget fix, declare their support for a budget fix, promise to pass a budget fix, and then decide not to vote for it? Knowing that it would make all future negotiations between the chambers completely impossible?

I get that the House is nervous, but this fear doesn't make sense.

I wouldn't go as far as Steve. There are some senators who probably like the Senate bill just the way it is and don't want to pass the sidecar. There are others in the centrist caucus who'd like to vote against it for other reasons. And even if 51 senators are on board, there's always the chance that Republicans can successfully gum up the works or that the parliamentarian will make some weird ruling that kills some provision of the sidecar. Who knows?

So House Dems do have some reason to be suspicious. Hell, I'd be suspicious. But I wouldn't be paranoid. At some point, if Harry Reid and the appropriate committee chairmen all sign on, and Barack Obama signs on, and the House leadership feels comfortable, then you pull the trigger. The odds of getting screwed aren't zero, but they're pretty damn small.

We've been at this for over a year, and at long last the time for posturing and gameplaying is over. The holdouts need to dig into their consciences and do the right thing. Let's get on with it.

This War is Different

| Thu Mar. 11, 2010 3:14 PM EST

Andy McCarthy thinks that lawyers who represent detainees who have been designated enemy combatants are guilty of "coming to the enemy’s aid during wartime." Orin Kerr counters that McCarthy "strangely overlooks the basic fact that much of the litigation for the Guantanamo detainees concerns whether they are in fact the enemy." (Italics mine.) To make things more concrete, Conor Friedersdorf recounts the story of Fouad al-Rabiah, a relief worker who was hauled into the American net in Afghanistan in 2001, eventually deemed innocent by interrogators, but kept in custody anyway:

Thus Mr. al-Rabiah. It isn’t just that he was an innocent man thrown into Gitmo, or that he was held even after a CIA analyst concluded that he was innocent, or that National Security Council Staffers were aware of his innocence and actively trying to bring about a review of his detention — Mr. al-Rabiah’s case is apt because after the CIA’s 2002 determination of his innocence, he spent another seven years wrongly imprisoned, regaining his freedom and seeing his children only after retaining the help of American attorneys.

Ms. Cheney, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Thiessen and Mr. McCarthy assert that American lawyers who represent Guantanamo Bay detainees are helping the enemy in a time of war. Here is a case, however, where the Guantanamo Bay detainee was innocent, languished for years in custody without a lawyer despite official knowledge of his innocence, and ultimately achieved his freedom with legal help. Ms. Cheney, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Thiessen and Mr. McCarthy have no answer for people like Mr. al Rabiah and his attorneys — their poorly reasoned McCarthyite rhetoric is bankrupt because they are unable or unwilling to acknowledge the distinction between being accused of being an enemy of America in war time, and actually being an enemy of America.

The Andy McCarthys of the world endlessly lecture us about how this war is different because it's fought on one side by non-uniformed terrorists. And there's some truth to that. It is different. But one of the ways it's different is that it's not always simple to know who's a real enemy combatant and who's not. And if that decision is left entirely up to the executive branch, you're practically begging for the same kinds of abuses that you get if you let the executive branch operate without oversight in any other area. Thus, lawyers and judges have a role to play. They aren't aiding the enemy during wartime, they're trying to figure out who the enemy really is. Even Andy McCarthy ought to be interested in that.


| Thu Mar. 11, 2010 2:43 PM EST

Matt Yglesias comments on an op-ed about the misuse of PSA screening for prostate cancer:

A kind of odd piece of conventional wisdom has hardened that it’s dishonest of Barack Obama or Matt Yglesias or anyone else to suggest that there are some free lunches to be had in the realm of health reform....[But] in the health care domain, in particular, a mix of weak science, bad economic incentives, and poor mathematical understanding leads to a fair amount of over-treatment. And over-treatment for cancer isn’t just an issue of spending money that didn’t need to be spent — treatment for prostate cancer normally has very unpleasant side effects and it’s really cruel to inflict it on men who don’t actually need the treatment. And as far as cancers go, that’s totally typical. Reducing over-screening and over-treatment would probably save money (though it’s always hard to know what the long-term impact will be since everyone eventually gets sick and dies) and will definitely spare patients a lot of pain and suffering.

True enough. The problem is that it's not just doctors and pharmaceutical companies pushing these tests, though that's part of it. It's also patients who demand this stuff, and if you withhold it because "researchers" or "bureaucrats" say it's not cost effective, they go nuts. And they'll be goaded along in their hollering by whichever political party thinks it might gain them a momentary advantage.

I'm not sure what the answer is. Better patient education? I guess I'm not very hopeful about that. Economic incentives? Maybe, but when it comes to cancer that probably won't do the trick either. More rigorous approval procedures for this stuff? Perhaps, though there's an obvious tightrope to walk in order to get this right.

In any case, this is one of those topics that I have a hard time figuring out because my own temperament is so obviously different from most people's. I don't really like seeing doctors, I prefer the lightest treatment possible, and I dislike trying anything that hasn't been around for at least a decade or two. But most people just aren't wired this way. They see their doctor at the first sign of trouble, demand as much attention as they can get, and insist on whatever the latest and greatest treatments are. I just don't get this. But it's the reality, and the cure — pardon the pun — is hard to figure out.

Yes, the Healthcare Bill Really Does Pay for Itself

| Thu Mar. 11, 2010 2:11 PM EST

The CBO has a new score of the final Senate healthcare bill, with all its amendments included, and it hasn't changed much. Over the next decade they estimate that it would lower the federal deficit by $118 billion.

But isn't this just smoke and mirrors because the bill raises taxes for ten years but only spends money for six? Nope. It also reduces the federal deficit in the full decade after 2019:

In subsequent years [] the effects of the proposal that would tend to decrease the federal budgetary commitment to health care would grow faster than those that would increase it. As a result, CBO expects that the proposal would generate a reduction in the federal budgetary commitment to health care during the decade following 2019; that judgment is unchanged from CBO’s previous assessment.

Now, obviously you can choose to simply not believe this. Or you can insist that Congress will never let it happen. Or you can object to spending more money on healthcare even if it is fully funded. But for better or worse, the CBO is the official scorekeeper, it's one that both sides accept, and they say the bill cuts the deficit. Special pleading aside, that's most likely exactly what it will do.

Oh — and it insures 31 million people who would otherwise go without coverage. That gets us to 94% of all legal residents. Not bad.