obamacare

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America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional

What they were doing at those card tables with the kynectors was not about Barack Obama. In fact, none mentioned Obamacare, except for the one enrollee who said that kynect was “a lot better than Obamacare.” “KENTUCKIANS NOT BUYING OBAMACARE” Nonetheless, for Kentucky’s two leading Republicans, kynect was all about Obamacare and Obama. Perhaps oblivious to what their constituents on the ground were experiencing, Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul went on the attack with an op-ed column in the Louisville Courier-Journal the morning the Browns enrolled. Their piece, entitled “Kentuckians Not Buying Obamacare,” said the new law would lead to layoffs, higher taxes, and people losing their current health plans.

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These generous subsidies were never stressed. “Millions of Americans Are Paying Less for Obamacare Than Cable” is how a headline on the Vox news website would read, accurately, when the subsidies were tallied after the initial Obamacare enrollment period in 2014. In 2011, there were no news stories like that. Millions more living below the poverty line would get healthcare, via Medicaid, for free, because under Obamacare the federal government was paying the states to extend it to everyone living in poverty. Before Obamacare, states set their own rules, and many states had especially severe restrictions that limited their programs to people living at a fraction of the poverty level or just to families with children.

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THE “DEFUND” CAUCUS In August 2013, a cadre of the most conservative Republicans, led by freshman Texas senator Ted Cruz, began staging a series of “defund” rallies, aimed at encouraging conservatives to demand that Congress stop funding Obamacare. They had the leverage to do it, Cruz argued. Republicans could simply threaten to block any new budget, due October 1, or block any increase in the debt ceiling due soon thereafter, if Obamacare wasn’t defunded as part of a new budget and debt ceiling deal. “We have, I believe … the last good opportunity we will have to defund Obamacare,” Cruz declared at a July 30 meeting of the Heritage Foundation, whose political action committee was organizing the rallies. “If we do not pursue this strategy, we are saying we surrender. Obamacare will be a permanent feature of the American economy.”

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

SAVING SOCIAL SECURITY Essay: After the Khaki Election Social Security Scares Inventing a Crisis Buying into Failure Social Security Lessons Privatization Memories Where Government Excels 2. THE ROAD TO OBAMACARE Essay: Developing a Positive Agenda Ailing Health Care Health Care Confidential Health Care Terror The Waiting Game Health Care Hopes Fear Strikes Out Obamacare Fails to Fail Imaginary Health Care Horrors 3. THE ATTACK ON OBAMACARE Essay: The Cruelty Caucus Three Legs Good, No Legs Bad Obamacare’s Very Stable Genius Get Sick, Go Bankrupt, and Die How Democrats Can Deliver on Health Care 4. BUBBLE AND BUST Essay: The Sum of All Fears Running Out of Bubbles That Hissing Sound Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis The Madoff Economy The Ignoramus Strategy Nobody Understands Debt 5.

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As we’ve just seen, Obamacare opponents by and large don’t do math (and they’re sorry when they try). But all they really need are a few sob stories, tales of sympathetic individuals who have been impoverished by some aspect of the law. Remarkably, however, they haven’t been able to find those stories. Early last year, Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers–backed group, ran a series of ads featuring alleged Obamacare victims—but not one of those tales of woe stood up to scrutiny. More recently, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State took to Facebook to ask for Obamacare horror stories.

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We live in an era in which politicians and the supposed experts who serve them never feel obliged to acknowledge uncomfortable facts, in which no argument is ever dropped, no matter how overwhelming the evidence that it’s wrong. And the result is that imaginary disasters can overshadow real successes. Obamacare isn’t perfect, but it has dramatically improved the lives of millions. Someone should tell the voters. 3 The Attack on Obamacare THE CRUELTY CAUCUS WHERE WERE YOU IN JUNE 2012, WHEN THE SUPREME COURT HANDED down its crucial decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare? If you have no idea, you’re not a health policy nerd. I, on the other hand, am. I was on vacation in England, sitting in a pub with my wife—and with wifi access—hanging on the reports.

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

“GOP Ready to Make ‘Pledge to America.’ ” Los Angeles Times. September 23, 2010. 118.Werner, Erica; and Fram, Alan. “No Repeal for ‘Obamacare’ in Humiliating Defeat for Trump.” Associated Press. March 24, 2017. 119.Rovner, Julie. “Timeline: Despite GOP’s Failure to Repeal Obamacare, the ACA Has Changed.” Kaiser Health News. April 5, 2018. 120.Scott, Dylan; and Kliff, Sarah. “Why Obamacare Repeal Failed.” Vox. July 31, 2017. 121.Pear, Robert; and Kaplan, Thomas. “Senate Rejects Slimmed-Down Obamacare Repeal as McCain Votes No.” New York Times. July 27, 2017. A1. 122.Cummings, William. “Senate Republicans Resist ‘Knee-Jerk’ Drive to Name Building after McCain.”

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Somehow, they wound up in Politico.5 Vitter was not the only one starting to bend the Senate to the superminority’s will. By the fall of 2013, the fight over his amendment had become part of a larger push to defund Obamacare. The fight was led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Congress controls the power of the purse, so all the funding needed to implement Obamacare passed through the Senate. Cruz urged Republicans to block all funding bills related to Obamacare. There was one problem with his strategy: it had no chance of success. Congressional Democrats were not going to defund the most significant accomplishment of the Obama administration.

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A13. 32.McConnell, The Long Game. 191. 33.Grunwald, The New New Deal. 19. 34.Alberta, American Carnage. 43. 35.Acosta, Jim. “Romney Once Touted Parts of ‘Romneycare’ as a National Model.” CNN. March 7, 2011. 36.Lane, Thomas. “Obamacare & Romneycare Are ‘the Same Fucking Bill’ Says Former Romney Adviser.” Talking Points Memo. November 16, 2011. 37.Butler, Stuart. “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans.” Heritage Foundation. 6. 38.Ornstein, Norm. “The Real Story of Obamacare’s Birth.” Atlantic. July 6, 2015. 39.Brill, Steven. America’s Bitter Pill. New York: Random House, 2015. 93. 40.Alberta, American Carnage. 69. 41.Nagourney; and Hulse.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Luntz and others did, indeed, produce the arguments, in the form of the pungent turns of phrase that had become a Luntz specialty since he had coined “death tax” to demonize the inheritance tax. Obamacare’s “government takeover of health care” would “put some bureaucrat between you and your doctor,” Republicans said. These messages, along with completely fictional claims that the law would establish “death panels” to decide which elderly people were so hopelessly ill that they should be cut off from Medicare, were seized upon by the Tea Party groups that sprang up in the spring and summer of 2009 and made blocking Obamacare their battle cry. At no time did the Republicans offer an alternative to Obamacare, no doubt because Obamacare had always been their alternative—which foretold the embarrassment they would suffer seven years later when they seized control of Congress and the White House and still could not agree on an alternative.

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Therefore, any significant laws that manage to pass with only the votes of one party would be perpetually hobbled by replays of the original fight to pass it and the prospect of repeal when the other party took over. That, of course, is what happened to Obamacare, which became law with only one Republican vote. Because it continued to be so bitterly attacked by Republicans, even the traditionally routine process of cleaning up the most uncontroversial hiccups discovered in a statute after it is passed—such as simple typographical errors—could never be done. Nor would the Republicans consider substantive but incremental steps to improve the law, as both parties had repeatedly done in prior decades to fix major legislation. In fact, long after Obamacare became the law of the land, Republican House Speaker John Boehner often continued referring to it as a “bill,” as if it was still being debated.

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THE HEALTHCARE.GOV FIASCO The most vivid demonstration of all of these shortcomings in government procurement was the dramatic crash in 2013 of the website that the Obama administration built to launch the consumer health care insurance exchanges that were central to Obamacare. By the end of the first hour of the launch of the Obamacare e-commerce site on October 1, 2013, the system was down, and no one knew why. Because it had been built so incompetently, without the monitoring metrics that are standard for any e-commerce system, no one even knew how badly it was crippled. No competent manager had actually been put in charge of the implementation by the president.

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

Nelson was an old-school Democratic centrist, a transactional, silver-haired former insurance executive who held on in a red state through acts of ostentatious moderation and a laser-like focus on Cornhusker interests. But he was in a bind. The choice on Obamacare was yes/no. Democrats needed his vote to pass the law. Nelson wanted the law to pass. But Obamacare was unpopular back home, and Nelson was up for reelection in 2012. He was caught between his career, his party, and his conscience. Nelson’s solution was to split the ideological interests of Nebraska’s Republicans from the financial interests of Nebraskans. Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion was built with an unusual structure. Typically, Medicaid is funded by a roughly 60:40 split between the federal government and the states.

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In 1965, a Democratic president created a massive, single-payer health-care system for the nation’s elderly. But as liberal as Medicare was in both conception and execution, it received seventy Republican votes in the House as well as thirteen Republican votes in the Senate. Obamacare, by contrast, was modeled off Mitt Romney’s reforms in Massachusetts and built atop many Republican ideas;V it relied on private insurers for the bulk of its coverage expansion and ended up sacrificing its public option. But as compromised as Obamacare was in design, and as desperate as the Obama administration was for bipartisan support—and believe me, I covered that fight, they would’ve traded almost anything for Republican backing—the legislation didn’t receive a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate.

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In 1965, most Senate Republicans joined with the Democratic Party to create Medicare, a single-payer health-care system for the elderly. In 2010, not a single congressional Republican voted for Obamacare, a health-care plan based on the system Republican governor Mitt Romney designed in Massachusetts. Under any definition, the 2010 system was more sorted and polarized than the 1965 system—opinions were better aligned by party, and fewer politicians found themselves in the middle. But was the 2010 system more ideologically extreme? I’d argue, under our normal ideological definitions, it wasn’t—Obamacare was a public-private system with Republican roots that paid for itself through a mixture of tax increases and spending cuts, while Medicare was a liberal government takeover of health care for the elderly that created an open-ended entitlement with no dedicated way to pay its full costs.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Kushner, largely staying silent during the health care debate, publicly seemed to accept the fact that a Republican administration had to address Obamacare, but he privately suggested that he was personally against both repeal alone and repeal and replace. He and his wife took a conventional Democratic view on Obamacare (it was better than the alternatives; its problems could be fixed in the future) and strategically believed it was best for the new administration to get some easier victories under its belt before entering a hard-to-win or no-win fight. (What’s more, Kushner’s brother Josh ran a health insurance company that depended on Obamacare.) Not for the last time, then, the White House would be divided along the political spectrum, Bannon taking an absolutist base position, Priebus aligned with Ryan in support of the Republican leadership, and Kushner maintaining, and seeing no contradiction in, a moderate Democratic view.

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* * * Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion. He would have been able to enumerate few of the particulars of Obamacare—other than expressing glee about the silly Obama pledge that everyone could keep his or her doctor—and he certainly could not make any kind of meaningful distinction, positive or negative, between the health care system before Obamacare and the one after.

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He would have been able to enumerate few of the particulars of Obamacare—other than expressing glee about the silly Obama pledge that everyone could keep his or her doctor—and he certainly could not make any kind of meaningful distinction, positive or negative, between the health care system before Obamacare and the one after. Prior to his presidency, he had likely never had a meaningful discussion in his life about health insurance. “No one in the country, or on earth, has given less thought to health insurance than Donald,” said Roger Ailes. Pressed in a campaign interview about the importance of Obamacare repeal and reform, Trump was, to say the least, quite unsure of its place on the agenda: “This is an important subject but there are a lot of important subjects.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

., 165 Murphy, Patrick, 212 National Center for Education Statistics data analysis, 92–93 National Football League union refs lockout (2012), 49n National Home-ownership Strategy (1995), 123 navigator Millennials, 21–23 NEETs (youths “not in employment, education, or training”), 181 Netherlands minimum wage, 184 New Deal/regulations, 52–53, 148–149 Obama, Barack Boomers and, 64 education policy and, 93–94, 97–101 financial crisis/Great Recession and, 129, 131–132, 132n, 137, 162–164, 223–234 Millennials and, 64, 218–219, 224 policies and, 18, 19, 24, 64, 73, 93–94, 97–101 regulation and, 229 unpaid internships and, 73 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria election to Congress, 211 as Millennial, 211, 219 policy positions/views, 211, 222 taxes and, 195, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 130, 214 Ohio Public Employee Retirement Systems (OPERS), 175 Once and Future Worker, The (Cass), 58 Operation Twist, 134 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 61 O’Rourke, Beto, 214 Patel, Suraj, 219 Paul, Ron, 222 Paulson, Hank, 129, 131 peace dividend, 151 Pell Grant program, 97, 99, 100 pension/plans Boomers and, 121, 159, 221 Detroit city government example, 175 European countries, 183, 196, 198, 199, 200 Germany/Millennials and, 199, 200 Japan and, 203, 205, 208n mid-twentieth century, 49 Millennials (US) and, 79–80, 81, 81n, 82 Ohio example, 175 problems with state/local government plans, 150, 158–159, 175 trend in private work, 158 Perot, Ross, 217 politics and Millennials 2018 midterm elections, 213 first nationally-elected officials, 211–212 fixing problems and, 213–214 House Member age statistics, 212 interns and, 213 party support/political views and, 214–216, 217–219, 222–223 political influence and, 213 state offices, 212 stereotypes, 214 trade policy, 217–218 voting and, 213 wants, 220–223, 232–236 working economy, 220–221 Powell, Jerome, 231–232 productivity by the 1970s, 48 investment and, 16, 49 measuring, 48n “qualified mortgage” (QM) standard, 139–140 quantitative easing description, 133 Federal Reserve and, 18–19, 60 housing/global financial crisis, 133, 135, 136, 137 Reagan, Ronald economic policies, 24, 52–54 fixed investment, 53 supply-side economics and, 52, 54–55, 58 support for, 20 taxes and, 52 recession postwar period, 62 See also financial crisis/Great Recession regulation (financial) changes/consequences, 56–57 during Reagan administration, 52, 54 regulations and Trump, 229–230, 234 religion and Millennials, 216–217 Resolution Foundation think tank, 178 retirement finances 401 (k) plans, 80 Millennials as “retirement plans” for parents, 145 Millennials/savings and, 79, 80–81 See also pension/plans; Social Security Revolutionary War/state debts, 147, 147n Romney, Mitt as candidate, 215, 225 manufacturing background, 232n youth vote, 215 Rubin, Robert, 54–55 “Rubinomics” program, 54–55, 124 Ryan, Paul, 231 S&P 500, 10 Sanders, Bernie description/political party and, 219, 222 Millennial support, 195, 214, 219 taxes, 173, 195, 197 savings/Millennials college-educated Millennials and, 78–79 debt and, 81n, 82 defined-contribution plans, 80 description/overview, 77–83 emergency-lending facility use and, 78 job market and, 79 obsession and, 79 parents vs., 77 pension plans and, 79–80 retirement finances and, 79, 80–81 Social Security benefits and, 82–83 statistics on, 78–79, 80–83, 83n Wall Street payback and, 83 worries about, 81–82 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 50n Say’s Law, 50n Schock, Aaron, 211–212 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 41 self-employment trends (since 2000), 71 See also gig economy September 11 terror attacks/consequences, 57, 152 Shapiro, Ben, 215, 224–225 “sheepskin effect,” 90 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 Smith, Brad, 71–72 SNAP (Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program), 164 social capital, 22 social programs/benefits consequences/Mulligan and, 165–166 financial crisis and, 163–165 Social Security beginnings, 149 financial problems/Millennials and, 153–161 housing and, 114n insurance comparisons, 154, 157–158 Millennial expectations, 82–83 Millennial resources and, 142 taxes and, 150n, 196 See also entitlements for elderly solar panels installation, 28 Spain and financial crisis, 180 steel industry (1970s to 1990s), 50–51 stock market crash (1929), 10 financial crisis, 10 Strauss, William, 6–7 “structural deficits,” 150–151, 151n Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 164 supply-side economics, 52, 54–55, 58 TANF, 164 TARP (Troubled-Asset Relief Program), 59, 130, 130n taxes on capital/consequences, 53 Clinton and, 55, 152 cuts with Great Recession, 163 inflation as, 207 myth on, 195 national consumption tax and, 173–174 politicians in Germany/US and, 197 Reagan and, 52 Republicans and, 174 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 tax wedge, 183 Trump and, 227–228 Tea Party movement, 130, 231 technology labor and (mid-twentieth century), 49 role in economic problems, 234–235 See also computer/information technology Thatcher, Margaret, 189 “total-factor productivity,” 48n total number of hours worked in 1970s, 47 as measure of labor market, 47 trade policy and Millennials, 217–218 training investing less, 17, 69, 88 investing more, 228 Millennials wanting, 29, 72 See also internships/Millennials Troubled-Asset Relief Program (TARP), 59, 130, 130n Trump, Donald Affordable Care Act and, 68 description, 19 entitlements and, 231 immigration and, 225–226 interest rates/Federal Reserve and, 19, 231–232 Japan/foreign competition and, 202, 217–218, 225 Millennials and, 214, 215, 217, 224, 225–232 real estate background and, 232n regulations and, 229–230, 234 taxes, 227–228, 234 traits/character, 224 unemployment rate and, 226 Uber, 70, 70n unemployment Britain/Millennials and, 189 NEETs, 181 unemployment-assistance programs (US) creation, 149 financial crisis and, 164 unemployment rate (US) in 1950s and 1960s, 47 in 1970s, 47 in 1980s, 54 changes post-2008 decade, 30, 33 description, 30 global financial crisis/recovery and, 11, 12, 13 Millennials and, 42 Trump and, 226 See also labor-force participation rate union power other countries and, 186 in US, 49, 49n United Kingdom minimum wage, 184 Urban Institute, 139 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 28, 30, 37, 47 Vance, J.

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In the course of doing so, they would make labor ever more expensive, and investments requiring more labor ever less attractive, at precisely the moment capital investment was becoming cheaper and cheaper—at least for some investors in some industries. To see why that approach was such a disaster, look no further than the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Obamacare was an attempt to solve a glaring problem: in a new economy of constant employment churn (and where there were fewer and fewer mid-paying jobs to support health benefits for large tranches of the working population) it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to tie insurance to employment. It never made sense anyway.

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See GDP (gross domestic product) Gurner, Tim avocado/coffee and, 1, 2, 3 homebuying and, 116 inheritance, 4 Hamilton, Alexander, 147, 147n, 148 Hammond, Darrell, 153 Harris, Kamala, 214 Hawley, Josh, 212 HCAI (Housing Credit Availability Index), 139, 139n health care electronic medical records, 235 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare; health insurance health insurance economic security and, 65 employer-based insurance/history, 65, 66 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Hillbilly Elegy (Vance), 45 HOLC (Home Owner Loan Corporation), 119–120 Home Owner Loan Corporation (HOLC), 119–120 housing amortizing mortgage, 120, 120n balloon loans, 119 Boomer ownership, 109, 110, 111 Federal Reserve/mortgage lending and, 61–62 GI Bill and, 120 Great Depression/government response and, 119–121 history, 113–114, 114n, 118–119 Millennial home ownership/education debt and, 94–95 mortgages/taxes and, 120, 126, 127 multigenerational households, 112, 113 ownership value debate, 120n postwar boom and, 121 Housing Credit Availability Index (HCAI), 139, 139n housing/financial crisis bailouts, 130, 130n, 132n bank liquidity and, 129–130 Boomers and, 134, 135 description/consequences, 128–129 foreclosures and, 111, 132, 132n, 135 home equity increase and, 125–128, 126n home equity loss and, 10, 110–111 home ownership decline and, 121, 122 homeowners “lock-in” and, 136 housing debt/policies, 123–127, 125n insolvency crisis and, 129–130 interest rates and, 124–125, 125n, 127–128, 136 managing policies, 129–137 Millennials and, 131, 135–140, 141–143 mobility and, 135–136 mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market and, 124, 125n, 128, 129 mortgage security and, 122–124 press release/beginnings, 128 quantitative easing, 133, 135, 136, 137 quantitative easing dollar amount, 137 regulations following/Millennials and, 137–140 subprime/prime borrowers and, 126–127, 126n housing/Millennial issues economics and, 17, 110, 111, 112–113 expectations, 109–110 living with parents/statistics, 111–113, 114 locations/job locations and, 116, 117–118 multigenerational households, 112, 114n ownership/demographics, 115–116 renting/costs and, 113, 113n, 114, 114n, 141–142, 141n starter homes and, 116, 117 supplies and, 116–118 Howe, Neil, 6–7 HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development), 123 Iceland and financial crisis, 180 immigration Millennials views, 218, 225–226 Trump, Donald and, 225–226 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 211 India, 178, 201 Industrial Revolution, 113 information/computer technology rise, 56, 235 inheritances/Millennials beliefs/estimates, 103–104 Boomers life expectancy/health care finances and, 104–105 feudalism/history and, 106 Fidelity surveys, 105 Millennials retirement and, 107–108 timing and, 105–106 interest rates Bush and, 57 Federal Reserve and, 18, 19, 124 housing/financial crisis and, 124–125, 125n, 127–128, 136 Trump and, 19, 231–232 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 182–183 internships/Millennials numbers, 31 Obama and, 73 overview, 31, 72–73 pay and, 31, 72 work descriptions, 32 investment Boomers childhood and, 49 consumption relationship, 50 costs of labor vs. capital, 63–64, 65–66, 229 during Bush administration, 57 during Reagan administration, 53, 54 fixed investment, 49, 51, 53, 56, 57, 60, 127 growth (mid-twentieth century), 49 need to increase and, 15–17, 51 productivity and, 16, 49 technologies replacing labor and, 62–63 investment-and-productivity boom (1950s/1960s), 49–50 decline (1970s/1980s), 50 Ireland and financial crisis, 180 Italy Millennials and, 184, 201 temporary work, 184 Jackson, Alphonso, 123 Jackson, Andrew, 147 Japan consumption tax, 206 corporate scandals, 202, 202n debt, 205–206 demographic boom, 203n economic growth (1960s/1970s), 201–202 population trend, 207 working mothers and, 209 Japan Millennials delayed marriages/children and, 208–209 economy and, 203, 205, 206–207 inflation and, 207–208 interest rates and, 207–208, 208n job/training investments and, 204–205 lifetime employment deal and, 203–204 regular/nonregular work, 202–203, 202n taxes and, 205 Jeffersonians, 147n job hopping, 37–38 “jobless recovery,” 35, 69 jobs/job market and Millennials age of employee/job losses, 35–39 Boomers vs., 27, 46 company size and, 38–39 economists categories of jobs/job losses and, 33–34 experience requirements and, 37 financial crisis/recession losses distribution, 32–37 “fun/fulfilling” work and, 29 goals/dreams, 31 job losses by skill level, 34 job opportunity losses/time effects, 39–40 jobs replaced by robots, 34, 34n lower-skilled/low-paying employment replacements and, 36–37 mentors vs. bosses, 29–30 overqualification and, 42–43 pay/job losses and, 33–34 recovery from financial crisis and, 35, 59 statistics on white/blue collar jobs, 28 transformed jobs and, 27–29, 27n wants description, 29 See also specific components Johnson, Lyndon, 149 Kander, Jason, 212 Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesian economics, 50n, 58, 163n Kotlikoff, Laurence J., 171–172 labor capital vs. labor costs, 63–64, 65–66, 229 costs, 65–66 costs (by 1990s), 55 replacing labor and, 17, 34, 34n, 62–63 See also union power labor-force participation rate in 1970s, 47 in 1980s, 54 description, 30 Millennials/post-2008 decade, 30–31 labor productivity complementary technologies and, 49 definition, 48n labor hours and, 49 output per hour worked and, 48, 48n, 56, 57 labor share in 1950s/1960s, 47, 50 definition/description, 47 during Clinton presidency, 56 during Reagan presidency, 56 economic theories on, 62 trend past 50 years, 62 Lehman Brothers, 11, 129, 133 Libertarian candidates, 219 McAfee, Andrew, 41 McCain, John, 225 McCain, Meghan, 215 Maloney, Carolyn, 219 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 58 ManpowerGroup, 31 manufacturing economy (US) decline, 12, 14 description, 15–16 MBS (mortgage-backed securities) market, 124, 125n, 128, 129 Medicaid Affordable Care Act and, 167 financial problems, 156 role, 149 Medicare for all Americans, 211 financial problems/Millennials and, 153–161 inflation and, 169 insurance comparisons, 154 Millennial resources and, 142 role, 149 See also entitlements for elderly Medicare Part D, 157 Merkel, Angela political party/government and, 197, 200, 200n taxes and, 197 Merrill Lynch, 11, 128–129 Merrill Lynch survey/savings, 78 military spending deficit spending (government) and, 151 generational fairness and, 171 Millennials avocado/coffee debate, 1–3 childhood diseases and, 3–4 definition/description, 5–9, 237 diversity and, 216, 237–238 ethnicity, 9 as immigrants/children of immigrants and, 8–9, 112 material well-being and, 3–5 navigators and, 21–23 numbers, 8 parents/security and, 3–4 as “retirement plans” for parents, 145 second language and, 8 sex and, 217 social questions, 216–217 stereotypes and, 1–3, 29–30, 235 term origins, 6 views of, 1–3, 4–5, 26–27 wars and, 4 minimum wages debates/views on, 185 Europe, 183–184 in US, 183–184 Mondale, Walter, 20 mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market, 124, 125n, 128, 129 Mortgage Servicing Assets (MSAs), 138n Mulligan, Casey B., 165 Murphy, Patrick, 212 National Center for Education Statistics data analysis, 92–93 National Football League union refs lockout (2012), 49n National Home-ownership Strategy (1995), 123 navigator Millennials, 21–23 NEETs (youths “not in employment, education, or training”), 181 Netherlands minimum wage, 184 New Deal/regulations, 52–53, 148–149 Obama, Barack Boomers and, 64 education policy and, 93–94, 97–101 financial crisis/Great Recession and, 129, 131–132, 132n, 137, 162–164, 223–234 Millennials and, 64, 218–219, 224 policies and, 18, 19, 24, 64, 73, 93–94, 97–101 regulation and, 229 unpaid internships and, 73 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Obamacare.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Treating workers and owners in these sharply different ways has been the rule of the Obama years, but there have also been exceptions to it—big ones. The one great achievement of Obama’s presidency, the health insurance reform known as “Obamacare,” has many flaws, but it also subsidizes the purchase of coverage by people who otherwise can’t afford it. This detail was an important victory for the poor—and also a measure without which Obamacare could not accomplish the other things it does, such as stopping insurers from cancelling sick people’s insurance. Another triumph was the establishment of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, a much-needed regulatory agency that is supposed to keep an eye on predatory practices by payday loan shops, credit card companies, and the like.

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Instead we got Obamacare, with its exchanges, its individual and employer mandates, its Cadillac tax, its subsidies to individuals and to the insurance industry, and its thousands of other moving parts, sluicing funding this way and that. Complexity is its most striking characteristic. No one is really certain how it operates, whether it is a tax or a mandate (OK, the Supreme Court has determined that it’s the former), or whether it will truly make health care more affordable. In a video clip accessible on YouTube, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller can be seen describing Obamacare as “the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress”; a former state health-insurance official in Massachusetts, whose health care system was Obama’s model, moaned that “We took the most complex health care system on God’s green earth, and made it 10 times more complex.”1 Why did Team Obama choose to go this route?

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Why not here, too? Had fairness and greater equality been the primary goals of either Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, they would no doubt have been far more straightforward. But complexity allowed Obama to square the circle of modern liberalism. It allowed him to achieve the double mandate of making health care more affordable while preserving existing players at the same time. A single-payer system would obviously have done grave damage to the insurance industry, while a public option would have given it unwelcome competition. But Obamacare did the opposite—it made those insurers into a permanent feature of the economic landscape.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

(The Kochs’ front group seemed to have no such qualms about government intrusion into reproductive health issues.) The organization also sponsored student-oriented protests at which mock Obamacare insurance cards were burned like draft cards during the Vietnam War. The disinformation campaign spread fear and confusion. News reports reflected a widespread belief, particularly in desperately poor areas, that the government was setting up “death panels.” In the summer and fall of 2013, as Meadows was gathering co-sponsors for his open letter, Americans for Prosperity spent an additional $5.5 million on anti-Obamacare television ads. Asked about this later, Tim Phillips stressed that his group merely wanted to repeal rather than defund the health-care law.

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After the 2012 election political leaders in both parties had expressed hope that the partisan battles would subside so that the government could finally tend to the serious economic, social, environmental, and international issues demanding urgent attention from the world’s richest and most powerful nation. Speaker of the House Boehner made it clear to the extremists in his party that it was time to back off. “The president was reelected,” he reminded them. “Obamacare is the law of the land.” Yet less than a year later, the country was held hostage in another futile fight over Obamacare. As congressional leaders met with Obama at the White House on October 2, 2013, in what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to reach a deal that could avert the disastrous shutdown, Obama pulled the Speaker aside. “John, what happened?”

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Yet because of the efforts of a few activists bankrolled by wealthy ideological entrepreneurs, the challenge went from the fringe to one vote short of victory in the Supreme Court. For more, see Blackman, Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare (PublicAffairs, 2013). “It’s David versus Goliath”: Stolberg and McIntire, “Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning.” $235 million was spent: For Kantar Media statistics on ad spending, see Purdum, “Obamacare Sabotage Campaign.” “When else in our history”: Stolberg and McIntire, “Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning.” “The president was reelected”: Boehner, interview with Diane Sawyer, ABC News, Nov. 8, 2012.

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In fact, it might very well have been the worst bill ever to make its way through both houses of Congress. No, what the near failure of Obamacare represented instead was a colossally depressing truth about the American political system, which is that our government is so dysfunctional that it can no longer even efficiently sell out to the private interests that actually run things in this country. Taylor was wrong about the bill. But he was right, too. Something was long gone. Obamacare had been designed as a coldly cynical political deal: massive giveaways to Big Pharma in the form of monster subsidies, and an equally lucrative handout to big insurance in the form of an individual mandate granting a few already-wealthy companies 25–30 million new customers who would be forced to buy their products at artificially inflated, federally protected prices.

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The result was a new law that will radically remake the faces of both the federal government and the private economy and also ratify the worst paranoid fears of both ends of the political spectrum. The right-wing teabagger crowd spent all of 2009 protesting Obamacare as a radical socialist redistribution, and you know what? They weren’t all wrong, although the people who wrote this bill were about as far from being socialists as people can be. Meanwhile the castrated left wing, the constituency that worked so hard to get Barack Obama elected in the first place, suddenly perceived Obamacare as a crypto-fascist fusing of state and private power, an absurdly expensive capitulation of democratically elected officials to concentrated private interests.

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Obamacare had been designed as a coldly cynical political deal: massive giveaways to Big Pharma in the form of monster subsidies, and an equally lucrative handout to big insurance in the form of an individual mandate granting a few already-wealthy companies 25–30 million new customers who would be forced to buy their products at artificially inflated, federally protected prices. The essence of Obamacare was two ruthless power plays fused at the hip. It was the federal government seizing control of a sector of America’s private industry worth about 16 percent of GDP. And it was that same sector of private industry in turn seizing permanent control of about 8 percent of America’s taxable income, for converting to private profit.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Favors Healthcare Reform This Year,” Gallup, July 14, 2009, http://www.gallup.com/poll/121664/majority-favors-healthcare-reform-this-year.aspx. 18. Benjamin Zycher, “Obamacare Inhibits Medical Technology,” Washington Times, Jan. 9, 2012, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/9/obamacare-inhibits-medical-technology/. 19. Thomas B. Edsall, “The Obamacare Crisis,” New York Times, Nov. 19, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/opinion/edsall-the-obamacare-crisis.htmlpagewanted=1&_r=2&smid=tw-share&&pagewanted=all. 20. Interview with author. 21. Interview with author. Chapter 8: Forever War 1. Sam Stein, “Robert Draper Book: GOP Anti-Obama Campaign Started Night of Inauguration,” Huffington Post, April 25, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/robert-draper-anti-obama-campaign_n_1452899.html. 2.

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The Impulse Society, in effect, will defend itself. In some respects, the opposition Obamacare has provoked seems relatively mild, given the degree to which it is attempting to shake up the status quo. Liberals may complain that the ACA falls far short of the long-dreamed-of European-style single-payer model. But as far as many conservatives are concerned, Obamacare represents the first effort in decades to shift the country back toward the New Deal program of economic management that was supposed to have been killed off in the 1980s. More fundamentally, the reaction to Obamacare may force us to reassess the cherished idea that Americans will make personal sacrifices to address a broad social problem.

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Easterbrook, Gregg, “Voting for Unemployment: Why Union Workers Sometimes Choose to Lose Their Jobs Rather Than Accept Cuts in Wages.” Atlantic, May 1983. Accessed September 12, 2013. Doi: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/83may/eastrbrk.htm. Edsall, Thomas B. “The Obamacare Crisis.” New York Times, Nov. 19, 2013. Doi: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/opinion/edsall-the-obamacare-crisis.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&smid=tw-share&&pagewanted=all. Field, Alexander J. “The Impact of the Second World War on U.S. Productivity Growth.” Economic History Review 61, no. 3 (2008): 677. ———. “The Origins of U.S. Total Factor Productivity Growth in the Golden Age.”

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

You can still have health insurance, and you’ll probably be able to get it far cheaper than when you were working. Here are all the different ways you can reduce your health insurance costs after you retire. Obamacare (ACA) Obamacare, or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is your first and best line of defense against rising health care costs in retirement. This is because Obamacare ties the amount you pay for insurance to your income. The less you make, the less you pay. And it does this through federal subsidies. Every year the federal government publishes a number it determines as the federal poverty level, or FPL.

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So an HSA combines the best of the 401(k) and the Roth IRA, in that it allows tax-deductible contributions, tax-free growth, and tax-free withdrawals, but only for medical expenses. HDHP + HSA plans existed before the ACA, and still exist today under Obamacare. This gives us reasonable certainty that even if the ACA were repealed, the HDHP + HSA solution that early retirees used before Obamacare existed would still be a viable solution. We’re only including this policy in case America reverts to its pre-Obamacare health care system. Expat Insurance But now I’d like to talk about my solution. Meaning, this is what we do for health insurance. It may surprise many readers that we have to do anything at all.

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To order to qualify for ACA subsidies, pay special attention to avoid exceeding 400 percent of the FPL while combining the strategies mentioned earlier to minimize taxes. Moving to a Different State One big caveat to Obamacare is that you need to live in the right state. When the ACA became law in 2010, part of it relied on expanding funding to Medicaid, the health insurance program covering low-income families administered by each state. The idea was that the Obamacare-related subsidies would take care of people from 138 percent to 400 percent of the FPL, while Medicaid would take care of the 0 percent to 137 percent range. Under this system, everybody would have access to health insurance regardless of income.

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

The average employer-sponsored family health plan costs almost $14,000 a year, the highest rate in the nation.33 In short, the likely effect of Obamacare, based on the closest statewide model in existence today, is that public costs will be substantially larger than anticipated while private costs will also grow more rapidly. In short, Obamacare has taken the single worst-controlled area of government (and private) spending and severely exacerbated the problem, in the midst of recession and unrelenting funding pressures. It’s insanity cubed. * The themes explored in this chapter‌—‌the fantasy figures on which the federal budget is based, the too-low taxes, the colossal waste of the Pentagon, the fearsome costs of Obamacare‌—‌these things go a long way to explain why we are currently spending a trillion and a half dollars more per annum than we are raising in tax.

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If these things are done right, the result will be a re-energized military. Leaner, stronger, more purposeful, more focused. Better able to carry out the tasks we assign it, less distracted by nonsense. Obamacare The Pentagon, however, is like some kind of budgetary Walmart, some fuel-sipping Japanese mini-car, in comparison with the beast which is health care. Even in those far-off days before Obamacare, the situation was appalling. Over successive administrations, through countless reforms, despite constant legislative attention, health care in the United States failed to deliver. Take, for example, the most basic duty of a healthcare system: that it extends life.

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It needed to get a grip on costs first, deal with universal coverage second. What we got was the inverse of that. In Obamacare, we got a plan that aimed to ensure near-universal health coverage for Americans but one in which cost control was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t even part of the design. In frank comments made after he had left Capitol Hill, David Bowen, the former health staff director of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said: ‘This [Obamacare] is a coverage bill, not a cost reduction bill. There is stuff here that will begin to address the issue of cost, but this is not a cost reduction bill with a bit of coverage on it‌—‌it is really trying to get coverage first.’29 Increasing the scope of health care before tackling the critical question of cost was always bound to be expensive, yet the CBO estimated that the reform would reduce the budget deficit by $119 billion over ten years.30 Now that makes no sense.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

., chapter 5. 47. Devon Herrick, “FDA Slow to Approve Medical Devices,” National Center for Policy Analysis, December 1, 2010, http://healthblog.ncpa.org/fda-slow-to-approve-medical-devices/ (accessed May 12, 2015). 48. Michael Tennant, “ObamaCare: Stifling Innovation,” National Center for Policy Analysis, April 9, 2015, http://www.ncpa.org/media/obamacare-stifling-innovation (accessed May 26, 2015). 49. Cato Handbook for Policymakers, 7th Edition (Cato Institute, January 16, 2009), http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-handbook-policymakers/2009/9/hb111-16.pdf (accessed May 26, 2015).

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The lower your pay, the more you have to work to achieve a given standard of living. But other regulations can make it harder for you to get the hours you want. Government-mandated overtime pay may make it too expensive for an employer to let you work more than a certain number of hours a week. And now Obamacare, by forcing certain employers to offer health insurance to employees who work more than 30 hours a week, has created an incentive for limiting hours even further. Even if you manage to overcome these barriers, you face more obstacles, including a substantial tax burden. Low-income Americans don’t generally pay income taxes, but they do pay sales taxes, gas taxes, and “sin taxes” on goods like cigarettes and alcohol.

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Although there are some areas in which entrepreneurs and visionaries have the opportunity to change and improve things, overall the story is one of bureaucracy and roadblocks. The U.S. health care system is usually characterized as a free-market system (and all of its problems are inevitably blamed on this freedom), but the truth is that it is dominated by government. Even before Obamacare, about half of U.S. health care spending was government spending.43 Starting with Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, the government has sought to guarantee us health care regardless of our ability to pay. But it turns out that allowing people to consume health care that they don’t have to pay for (or don’t have to pay full price for) is incredibly expensive, and shortly after the launch of these medical welfare state programs, the government started imposing rigid controls on doctors, hospitals, and insurers to keep expenses down.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The Republican-led House passed the ACA repeal despite the intense local resistance, but it set the stage for a showdown in the Senate. After Trump celebrated the House passage of Obamacare repeal, Indivisible groups kept up the pressure. They coordinated protests at the offices of Maine senator Susan Collins, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, and Arizona senator John McCain—the three votes they would need to prevent Obamacare repeal in the Senate. The 62 Indivisible groups in Maine, 16 in Alaska, and 141 in Arizona coordinated with disability rights groups like National ADAPT and women’s health groups like Planned Parenthood to relentlessly pressure their senators to vote against the bill.

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Rep. Justin Amash votes against Paul Rand’s budget plan,” MLive.com, March 22, 2012, mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/2012/03/us_rep_justin_amash_votes_agai.html. “eliminate the ACA completely”: Maureen Groppe, “Republicans modify Obamacare repeal bill to win more GOP votes,” USA Today, March 20, 2017, usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/03/20/republicans-modify-obamacare-repeal-bill-appease-conservatives/99427432/. opposed pretty much all environmental regulations: National Environmental Scorecard: Representative Justin Amash (R), LCV.org, n.d., scorecard.lcv.org/moc/justin-amash. dismantle the Department of Education: “Rep.

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But she remembered the advice her mentor Paul Ryan had given her and scores of others trying to cut it in a profession where anything you say can and will be used against you: “You have one mouth and two ears; use them in that ratio.” She started to rack up big endorsements: first Ryan, then Mitt Romney endorsed her in the primary. The incumbent Democrat retired, making it a race for an open seat. She was running a fairly typical Republican campaign, focusing on ending Obamacare, reforming the tax code, and creating jobs—but she was a young woman up against a self-funded millionaire who had already run twice for the seat. Republican donors flocked to her cause. She got funding from the Koch brothers and significant backing from the free-spending libertarian Paul Singer, and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads PAC spent $800,000 pummeling her primary opponent as a “perennial loser” on TV.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

In addition to causing higher prices, this makes it harder to go elsewhere if you are frustrated by the quality of hospital service, as many Americans are.6 These developments, to me, are the single greatest market concentration issue in the United States today, and I think the critics are on the right track there. I would suggest, however, that to some extent this market concentration is the result of heavy regulation rather than a natural development from the nature of business. Observers differ on whether we should blame Obamacare or blame Republicans for not supporting Obamacare properly (or a bit of both), but still there is no market-based reason health insurance should have become so concentrated in this fashion. Insurance companies have consolidated to deal with costly regulations, which is easier for large companies to do, and because of economies of scale in lobbying government, an increasingly important activity in America’s politicized health care sector.

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I’m not saying that bundling all of those services into companies is necessarily a bad idea, and in any case it may be too late to undo each and every part of what the American system already has wrought. Many commentators, from both left and right, expected that Obamacare would bring a large-scale shedding of health insurance coverage away from companies and toward the Obamacare exchanges, but that hasn’t happened, and it suggests that employer-provided health insurance in America may be quite robust, for better or worse. In any case, looking to companies to provide these social welfare functions reflects yet another way we think of corporations as people or as like people in some emotionally resonant manner.

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On the macro side, if the American government really, truly wants something done, very often it turns to business. Corporations produce most of the American military’s weapons systems and most of the country’s roads and infrastructure, and it was the tech companies that helped the government fix the initially malfunctioning Obamacare website. On top of that, if it weren’t for business, how easily could you get your Unicorn Frappuccino or whatever else has become the sweet caffeinated beverage du jour? In fact, business is just getting started. In the not too distant future, we can expect business to drive our cars for us, to manage more of our lives for us through online personal assistants, and to run our homes through sophisticated appliances that connect to the internet and talk to each other.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Jones, Katharine W. V. Bradley, and Jonathan Oberlander, “Pascal’s Wager: Health Insurance Exchanges, Obamacare, and the Republican Dilemma,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law vol. 39, no. 1 (2014): 97–137. 75. James Tobin, “The Case for an Income Guarantee.” The Public Interest vol. 4 (1966): 31–41, at 40. 76. Jones, Bradley, and Oberlander, “Pascal’s Wager,” 127; Deirdre Walsh, “House Sends Obamacare Repeal Bill to White House,” available online at http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/06/politics/house-obamacare-repeal-planned-parenthood/, accessed February 1, 2016. 77. Ron Haskins, “Moynihan Was Right: Now What?”

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Then, as soon as the ACA became law, Republicans turned against it. Some states refused to create the competitive insurance exchanges, hoping instead that the Supreme Court would find Obamacare unconstitutional. States with Republican governments refused to expand Medicaid as the ACA intended, thus leaving some of their poorest residents with no health care. Many people who could have benefited from the availability of health insurance under Obamacare, or from subsidies based on income, made the economically irrational decision to reject it rather than to embrace a conflict with economic individualism. The rise of the Tea Party, with its polarizing rhetoric about federal overreach, transformed what should have been a popular policy initiative into a nonstarter.

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In 2009, people living in the poorest counties in the United States had life expectancies that were, on average, six years less than those of their counterparts in the nation’s wealthiest counties; life expectances in the former were similar to those in Mexico, while those in the latter were comparable with Japan.73 Instead of favoring a single-payer program like Britain’s National Health Service or Medicare, President Barack Obama embraced a Republican-designed plan (one which Governor Mitt Romney had actually implemented in Massachusetts). Insurance exchanges would enable insurers to compete for participants in a national market, and participants (individuals without employer-provided insurance, and small businesses) would gain the advantages offered by a larger insurance market.74 The basic plan for Obamacare had been mooted by the economist James Tobin as early as 1966: to make sure that adequate insurance coverage, either from government or from private insurers, is universally available for purchase; b) to require of everyone evidence of such coverage, or of equivalent financial protection for medical contingencies (just as automobile owners must prove financial responsibility) and c) to provide sufficient income to the indigent to enable them to pursue the required insurance coverage …75 But what started as a Republican idea barely became law, passing the House and Senate without a single Republican vote.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Many contemporary social welfare programs have this result—voters want both low taxes and expensive benefits that from their point of view are free or nearly so, resulting in voters showing anger toward government even as life gets better. During the Barack Obama presidency, the Affordable Care Act sought to expand health insurance support to the working class and lower middle class; like Medicare and Medicaid, functionally ObamaCare was an income-transfer program in which the wealthy are taxed so working-class and lower-middle-class persons can avoid an expense. Little commentary took into consideration that the economic role of ObamaCare was to increase the buying power of the working- and lower middle classes by covering a cost they previously paid. Under Obama, eligibility for food stamps and disability subsidies was broadened, transferring more income; a 1994 requirement that welfare recipients make a bona fide attempt to find work was suspended; federal subsidies for unemployment compensation were increased, while the benefit period was extended from half a year to two years, a major act of assistance to the working class that many Americans don’t even know occurred.

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See specific topics Nike, 253, 256 Nixon, Richard, 54–55, 179, 256–257 nuclear power, 226–227 nuclear weapons, 125–126, 160–161, 277–280 Obama, Barack, 62, 109, 131 anecdotes of, 219 declinism and, 200–201, 221 Dodd-Frank Act and, 92–93 on drone aircrafts, 159 fuel-economy regulatory regime and, 147–148 on infrastructure, 94 national debt and, 97, 100 ObamaCare and, 29, 220, 249 on tax, 254 ObamaCare, 29, 220, 249 obesity, 5, 26, 35 optimism, 283–285 ozone, 48, 49–50, 62 Paine, Lincoln, 80 Paine, Thomas, 256 Panasonic, 68–69 Paris Agreement, 239, 243 The Passing of the Great Race (Grant), 197, 198 Piketty, Thomas, 84–85 Pinker, Steven, 120, 137, 138–139 Plank, Terry Ann, 278 Plato, 202–203 pollution, 26, 30, 59 See also air pollution Prince William Sound, 43 The Promised Land (Lemann), 71 public health, 27 ability to pay and, 29 carbon dioxide and, 62 deindustrialization and, 29 flu pandemics and, 28 health care and, 29, 40, 101–102, 220, 247–248, 249 inequality and healthcare, 247–248 longevity and, 30–31 mosquitoes and, 39 ObamaCare and, 29, 220, 249 pollution reduction and, 30 sanitation infrastructure and, 29–30 racism, 223, 259–260, 266 law enforcement and, 113–114 refugees and, 197 slavery and, 174–175, 191 Radelet, Steven, 20 Reagan, Ronald, 206–207, 209, 273 Reilly, Bill, 45–46 religion, 222, 282 resource consumption, 280 resource depletion fossil fuels and, 52–53, 54, 55–57 immensity of geology and, 54 market forces and, 51–52 price controls and, 54–55 uninterrupted trends and, 51 in US and European Union, 51–52 Resources for the Future, 45, 46 Ricardo, David, 134 Rose, Reginald, 197–199 Rubenstein, David, 271 Russia.

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High-quality hospitals and health clinics, once mainly for the privileged, increasingly are open to everyone: in most of the European Union and in Japan, sick people are admitted to hospitals regardless of ability to pay, while in the United States, emergency rooms accept patients regardless of ability to pay. During the US debate about the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as ObamaCare, commentators on both sides referred to the legislation as providing health care. What it provides is insurance coverage; health care is already provided, at least to anyone in medical distress. That anyone can get high-quality health care, rather than the rich being in teaching hospitals while the poor are in dingy charity institutions, has been a boon to public health.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert A. Sirico

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, creative destruction, delayed gratification, demographic winter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, informal economy, Internet Archive, liberation theology, means of production, moral hazard, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, profit motive, road to serfdom, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

Consider the mandate issued by the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in early 2012, requiring religious institutions to provide abortifacient drugs, sterilization, and contraception coverage as part of their health insurance programs even if those religious groups are morally opposed to doing so. The fact that a seventh of the nation’s economy had already been placed under the control of the federal government by Obamacare—the fact that so many in our culture were comfortable with such a massive government intervention in the private sector—made it much easier for HHS to issue such a mandate. It is very instructive to review the progress of the passage of Obamacare. It was initially supported by the American Bishops’ conference, but eventually lost their support out of fear that it lacked a sufficient “conscience clause” exempting Church institutions from covering services deemed immoral by the Church.

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See also freedom economic personal Lima loans Los Angeles Lutherans M Mackinac Island, Michigan Maimonides, Moses Manichaeism Mao Zedong Marcuse, Herbert market, the Marx, Karl Marxism materialism Matthew, Gospel of Medicaid Medicare mercy Methodists Michelin Company, The Michelin, Francois Middle East, the missionaries Missionary Earthkeeping Model T, the Monopoly Moore, Michael morality mortgages Mother Teresa Muraya, Eva Mystery of Capital, The N National Institutes of Health Nazism New England New Testament, the New York City Nicaragua Nobel Prize, the North Korea North Vietnamese Communism O Obama, Barack Obamacare Occupy Wall Street Olasky, Marvin Opitz, Reverend Edmund P paganism Parris, Matthew Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. See Obamacare Paul (apostle) pension plan Peru Peter (apostle) philanthropy PICO National Network Pilgrims, the Pinckaers, Servais-Théodore Plague of Cyprian, the Plato Pol Pot Pope Benedict XVI Pope John Paul II (the Great) population poverty PovertyCure profit property prosperity Protestantism Proudhon, Pierre Pyongyang Q Qwest R Rand, Ayn Rachmaninoff reason (intellectual sense) Reeves, Thomas redistribution refugees regulations relativism resources Revelation, book of rights to health care human rights personal rights vs. privileges to property Rise of Christianity, The Risse, Guenter B.

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The government attempts to distribute scarce health care resources without allowing a free market to set prices—and ends up creating more scarcity as it drives a physician’s career into an early grave! If this is what compassion looks like, heaven save us from it. In 2009, when health care reform was in the air but before the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (what became known as Obamacare), business executive David Goldhill wrote a provocative article in the Atlantic magazine.5 Goldhill had lost his father to an infection acquired at a hospital in New York City. Goldhill’s experience and subsequent investigation alerted him to major problems in American health care, problems that persisted amidst enormous financial and technological riches.

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Congress’s repeated attempts to repeal Obamacare are a case in point. The House bill, passed in March 2017, was actually a tax cut disguised as a health care measure. It offered a $600 billion tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, which it paid for by removing some of Obamacare’s insurance protections and gradually eliminating its Medicaid expansion.8 Moreover, by locking in tax cuts in a health care bill, Republicans hoped to make it easier to achieve still other tax reforms that would please their donors. The Senate attempted to pass multiple versions of an Obamacare repeal without success; the basic strategy in these bills was either cutting the taxes supporting Obamacare or cutting its entitlements, particularly Medicaid.

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The Senate attempted to pass multiple versions of an Obamacare repeal without success; the basic strategy in these bills was either cutting the taxes supporting Obamacare or cutting its entitlements, particularly Medicaid. Cutting entitlements, in turn, reduces budgetary obligations, thus making it easier to—you guessed it—cut taxes for wealthy donors. From the standpoint of populism, the Republicans’ proposed health care bills have been an utter travesty; they withdraw important benefits and protections from working-class Americans to benefit the very wealthiest. Commentators repeatedly pointed out that the bills made no sense if the goal was actually to improve health care. But the bills made perfect sense from the standpoint of oligarchy.

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But if even a few other countries use the US withdrawal as an excuse to withdraw themselves, then Trump’s action could trigger a cascade of defections leading to the complete unraveling of the pact. Likewise, the stability of the health insurance marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as ACA or Obamacare) depends on essentially the same dynamics. If, say, Congress takes away subsidies and the individual mandate, the cost of health insurance will rise, leading healthier people to drop their insurance. The costs of covering the remaining, sicker, people will then also rise, causing some companies to raise prices or to drop out of the market, thereby reducing competition and raising prices even further.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

The elimination of the mandate, in combination with rules forbidding discrimination against preexisting conditions, creates a death spiral for private insurance: healthy individuals drop out until they need insurance, forcing premiums to increase as only those who are sick or about to need health insurance buy; but this induces more relatively healthy people to drop out, leading to further increases in premiums.7 If one wants to have an insurance system covering everybody—and there are good economic and social reasons for that—then one has to have public provision of insurance, along the lines of the European single-payer systems, or one has to have a mandate requiring individuals to purchase insurance privately, along the lines of Obamacare, or one has to give large public subsidies to insurance firms.8 In a society in which there is little social solidarity—each person for him- or herself—the notion that the healthy are subsidizing the unhealthy might seem objectionable, until we remember: eventually almost all individuals are going to be “unhealthy.” Even among the very healthy, as we march toward death, only those who die suddenly, without warning, never draw upon the health care system. The reason that Trump and the Republicans didn’t come up with an alternative to Obamacare (“Repeal and Replace”) is that there aren’t other solutions.

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The latter, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, is mostly remembered for upholding most provisions of Obamacare in 2012. However, the decision also allowed states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion that the Affordable Care Act originally mandated. Nineteen states did that, resulting in some 2.2 million people winding up without health insurance, disproportionately African Americans. In the 2018 election, voters in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah reversed those decisions. See, for example, Scott Lemieux, “How the Supreme Court Screwed Obamacare,” The New Republic, June 26, 2017. In June 2013, the Supreme Court (in a five-to-four decision) ruled that a central piece of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional—a provision which had played a key role in restoring voting rights to African Americans; the decision was reminiscent of the 1883 decision of the Supreme Court that struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

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Yet, in American politics and economics, there seemed to be even more pressing issues—the recovery from the Great Recession was going more slowly than Obama and his economic team had expected, and the Republicans in Congress had taken a recalcitrant stance that made passing any legislation beyond simply keeping the government open almost impossible. During his presidency, Obama did not, perhaps could not, deal with the issue of inequality, even as he recognized its importance. He deserves credit, however, for the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), which helped deal with one of the cruelest manifestations of inequality, the lack of access to decent health care. Not surprisingly, the problem of inequality did not heal itself on its own—and could not have. Quite the contrary. Matters got worse. Inequalities in race, ethnicity, and gender The inequalities just described do not fully describe the deep divides in the country, for it is riven too by those based on race, ethnicity, and gender, no small part of which arises from brutal discrimination.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

In 1958, when the first primitive computers were being deployed, it cost the UK tax authorities about £1.16 to collect £100 of tax. Today, with computing power cheap and ubiquitous, it costs £1.14.21 Many of the worst technological foul-ups have involved health care: The rollout of Obamacare turned into a debacle because the Web site was plagued by glitches. Only six people succeeded in signing up for Obamacare on the site’s first day in operation. For the past twenty years, health departments have spent fortunes on PCs, without fundamentally changing the way they work: Most of the new gadgets were in effect slightly faster typewriters or virtual filing cabinets.

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It cannot make sense for people who believe in the benevolence of government to prevent government from hiring the best people (or firing the worst), or to allow the government machine to be run by vested interests. Consider a startling fact that emerged during America’s fevered national discussion over the botched rollout of Obamacare: 94 percent of federal IT projects over the past ten years have failed—more than half were delayed or over budget and 41.4 percent failed completely. The Pentagon spent over $3 billion on two health-care systems that never worked properly. They failed partly because the government’s rigid employment rules prevent it from hiring IT experts and partly because its even more rigid rules about contracting out mean that it is a captive of the few suppliers who have the resources to navigate the eighteen hundred pages of legalese in the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

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In the first decade of the twenty-first century it expanded by an ­average of 73,000 pages a year. From 2009 to 2011 the Obama administration produced 106 major regulations, with “major” defined as having an expected economic impact of at least $100 million a year, and thousands of minor regulations. The Obamacare health bill was over 2,000 pages long; the Dodd-Frank law on finance is 800 pages long and has 400 subsidiary regulations. The federal government requires hospitals to use 140,000 codes for the ailments they treat, including one for injuries from being hit by a turtle.19 Much of this is just Olson’s law at work—industries lobby for ­exceptions or regulations that, once created, justify jobs.

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

After winning control of the House amid the Tea Party wave, Republicans had united to combat anything then President Barack Obama tried to do. Atop the kill list was the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s defining legislation, passed the year before when the Democrats controlled Congress. The ACA, or Obamacare, sought to bring healthcare benefits to millions of Americans through an expansion of federal health insurance programs and a subsidized private exchange. Even though Obamacare was projected to lower the nation’s overall healthcare costs and decrease the national deficit, Republicans opposed it, citing a philosophical devotion to small government and minimal taxes. They resolved to use the power of the purse to thwart the Obama administration, especially at the agency that would administer the expensive and unwieldy program: the U.S.

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They resolved to use the power of the purse to thwart the Obama administration, especially at the agency that would administer the expensive and unwieldy program: the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). With control of just one chamber, Republicans couldn’t directly dismantle Obamacare. They could, however, hold the entire government hostage. Led by House Speaker John Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, Republicans tipped the scale by leveraging the debt ceiling. In years prior, raising the debt ceiling—a limit on the amount of debt the U.S. Treasury can take on—was perfunctory.

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This ticking time bomb was conceived to force some sort of compromise, because no one in their right mind wanted sequestration. This assumed right minds prevailed in Washington. The Republicans’ top target, HHS, is a sprawling umbrella agency presiding over not just social welfare programs and Obamacare but less-contested functions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. And nestled deep down in this budget, where discretionary spending for countless government functions are delineated, are many programs that most Americans don’t know about, don’t care about, and if all goes well, don’t need to learn about.

Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care by Jonathan Bush, Stephen Baker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, informal economy, inventory management, job automation, knowledge economy, lifelogging, obamacare, personalized medicine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, web application, women in the workforce, working poor

Athenahealth thrives because we fulfill the mission we laid out at the very beginning: We handle the busywork that doctors absolutely hate—the stuff they suck at. Through this on-the-job education, I have developed ideas about how to remake health care in America—or at least how to start. The Affordable Care Act—commonly known as Obamacare—is widely referred to as health care “reform.” But it has focused the nation’s attention largely on the demand side of the issue: providing health care for another 30 million or 40 million people. Most of the reforms, however, were watered down by lobbyists protecting the incumbents. So we’re still left with fundamental questions around the supply side, namely how we can ensure affordable, quality care at something less than ruinous cost.

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I think each one of us has a different answer and would thrive in a system that offers loads of options, along with plentiful data to make informed choices. This in turn would give birth to a market that would provide even more choices, including many we haven’t even dreamed of. Yet laws, even well-intentioned ones like the three thousand pages in the Obamacare bill, tend to reduce choices and bolster the bloated incumbents, from hospitals to pharmaceutical giants, that created this mess in the first place. What about the people’s “right” to health care? I agree with a very limited version of that premise. I would say that everyone should be covered for the kinds of treatments and therapies that the vast majority of Americans cannot afford.

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Maybe a technology company buys access to millions of patient records and develops a system to deliver the information, with security and speed, at a fraction of the cost, a nickel or even a penny. This would provide immense benefits for all of us. Quickly, new business models would emerge in a vibrant medical data economy. But it won’t happen as long as payment for information remains illegal. Now many of the people who sat down in 2009 to draft the behemoth that became known as Obamacare wanted to strip these inefficiencies from the health care economy. They understood that the promise of universal care hinged upon making the system work better and cheaper, and many of them believed that introducing transparency and competition was key. They wanted to reduce geographic and political fiefdoms.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

In the same month his National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign over contacts with Russia made before Trump’s term had begun. Trump was adamant that Flynn had done nothing wrong, but was compelled to accept his resignation. The following month, in March 2017, Trump was forced to drop his plans to scrap Obamacare – Barack Obama’s attempt to make healthcare more freely available to those on lower incomes. Before his election victory, and in the immediate aftermath, Trump had proclaimed confidently that the scrapping of Obamacare would be ‘easy’ and ‘immediate’. That was when he was an outsider, free to say what he wanted when he wanted. By the spring of 2017 Trump was an insider discovering the powerlessness of power.

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In addition, proclaiming an aspiration is much easier than putting together a detailed policy that will work, when implemented. Democratic politics is demanding. As The New York Times columnist David Brooks noted in the aftermath of Trump’s failure to secure support from Congress for scrapping Obamacare: ‘The new elite is worse than the old elite – and certainly more vapid.’1 Brooks was not a supporter of Obamacare, but in suggesting that Trump and his entourage were part of the Washington ‘elite’, he has wounded Obama’s successor with a near-fatal blow. Trump the outsider is condemned as being part of an elite that he views with an anti-politics disdain.

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That was before he knew who the next president was going to be.5 Here was Obama still having to plead, after the law had been passed, following agonizing, sleepless acts of compromise: The law has ended the insurance industry’s most pernicious practices, fostered improvements in the way doctors and hospitals deliver care and brought the number of Americans without coverage to a historic low. Some state markets appear to be working just fine, and at least a few insurers are making money. The law’s achievements don’t make the problems any less real. But they do put those problems into perspective – and suggest that fixing them is worthwhile.6 The battles over Obamacare and other items of presidential legislation were straightforward, compared with Obama’s attempts to pass budgets with relatively modest levels of spending. Obama was facing the small-state Republicans, the ones who believed their ideological purity was electorally popular, until their spending cuts had a direct impact on voters’ lives, paving the way for Trump to pledge spending at levels that Obama would never have dared.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Indeed, among the states that benefited most from the extension of health coverage under Obamacare were Kentucky and West Virginia, diehard Trump country.55 As Trump took office, support for the ACA among the most important group of voters, Independents, had risen from 36 percent in 2010 to 53 percent.56 By the summer, when the desperate Republican congressional leadership made a last bid simply to repeal Obamacare without replacement, they had the support of only 13 percent of Americans.57 Not surprisingly, sufficient Republican moderates refused to go along. If they couldn’t repeal and replace Obamacare, what could they do? By the summer of 2017 it seemed that the incoherence of the Republicans, when faced with the complex reality of modern government, might prevent them from taking any effective action.58 The ACA fight had left little room on the legislative agenda.

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If the Tea Party would turn the Republican Party into a vehicle for an attack on the creditworthiness of US government, what was safe? So far the Tea Party had made Obamacare its main target. What would be next? By 2014 the Republican Right would block immigration reform and refuse to fund the Export-Import Bank, both priorities of American business. At the G20 the Americans were embarrassed to report that funding for the IMF was being held hostage by Republican opponents of abortion who wanted contraception excluded from Obamacare.63 What if the Republican zealots targeted Fed independence or trade policy next? Of course, there were business interests aligned with the Tea Party on tax and welfare issues.

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Bush administration, Brad DeLong had wondered what was the right strategic and tactical course for the Democrats, “when there is no guarantee that any Republican successors will ever be ‘normal’ again.”54 Nine years on the question was more pressing than ever. Since 2009 the congressional Republicans had been waging relentless political war, first against the stimulus, then the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Twice in 2011 and 2013 they had taken the debt ceiling hostage. Now, with control of both the presidency and Congress, what would they do? Obamacare was the scalp they wanted most and it ought to have been easy. As it had emerged from its congressional ordeal in March 2010, the Affordable Care Act was mangled and flawed. But for all their grim determination, in the critical first six months of the Trump presidency the Republicans could neither replace nor repeal it.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

Likely voters across New York who are upset with high taxes, poor business and economic climate, and the price tag associated with Medicaid expansion/Obamacare are open to real solutions and a job-creating governor with business leadership experience. Conway noted that while Cuomo’s favorability ratings were high, the percentage of New Yorkers who wanted to see him reelected was “at a dangerous low.” She highlighted his vulnerability on Obamacare and taxes, adding, in bold, underlined text: Cuomo’s re-elect score is positive in New York City (47%) and in the areas surrounding the city (45%), but a hypothetical “new person” wins the rest of the state by twenty points or more.

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He can be toppled through a frontal assault that pierces his bravado and exposes the shortcomings of his tenure, as well as his lack of leadership. He presides over the corruption and lack of progress that is Albany. While there is plenty of good news here for Cuomo, there is little guarantee that he will escape the misfortunes of 2014 that may be visited on Democrats (thanks to Obamacare), and his own man-made problems plaguing New York (including high taxes and a poor business climate, and a “lack of frack”). Rather than kill off the idea of Trump running for governor, Conway’s memo had the opposite effect. “She thought that it was possible for him to win New York,” said Caputo.

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It was a move that expressed the profound anger and frustration that had been building up in the party since at least the Tea Party wave of 2009. Republican leaders had repeatedly promised voters that if handed power they would unwind the major Obama achievements, from the Affordable Care Act to the Dodd-Frank financial reforms. And although they had gone so far as to shut down the government in 2013 in a failed bid to defund Obamacare, Republicans had controlled the House for almost five years and Obama’s programs remained intact. Republican voters had cynically been promised fast, easy solutions—so when Boehner couldn’t deliver, they were primed to chalk it up to betrayal. As the Summer of Trump carried into the fall, and Republican fascination with the norm-smashing front-runner kept growing, taking down a major party leader came to seem like a measure of the new populist strength.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

These patterns explain why even government programs that seem to work well enough when they are first implemented tend over time—over say, the eighty years from FDR’s heroic age of liberalism to Obama’s age of liberal frustration—to devolve into what Jonathan Rauch, in his Clinton-era book Government’s End, described as a “large, incoherent, often incomprehensible mass that is solicitous of its clients but impervious to any broad, coherent program of reform.” The Obamacare case study is useful here, not least because it’s a rare example where a meaningful reform, as opposed to just a deficit-funded tax cut or spending boost, did ultimately pass—unlike Clinton’s health care fiasco, or Bush’s doomed Social Security reform effort, or the Trump administration’s Obamacare repeal-and-replace effort, or every attempted immigration reform deal. The opposition to the Obama health care bill was obviously ideological, reflecting a clash between libertarian and social democratic principles.

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The opposition to the Obama health care bill was obviously ideological, reflecting a clash between libertarian and social democratic principles. But most Americans aren’t thoroughgoing libertarians; indeed, even most Tea Partiers weren’t thoroughgoing libertarians. The real reason that Obamacare opposition became so fierce, and the debate so toxic, was that the health care system as it exists is as Rauch described government as a whole: a huge sprawl of client populations and powerful interest groups, all of which have a strong financial stake in the existing system, and all of which have spent decades building up the lobbying shops and inner-ring knowledge required to either frustrate or redirect reform.

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The last American president really did expand health insurance coverage, however inefficiently and at however much political cost, and if the health care law has not lived up to the administration’s projections, it also hasn’t had the budget-busting effects that its critics feared. But the fact that a law as messy in its design and modest in its effects as Obamacare might be the best-case scenario for reform in an advanced and complex welfare state is an illustration of the larger point. At a certain size and scale of state spending and administrative complexity, and after a sufficient period of time has elapsed from the initial founding of the system (whether you date it to the progressive era, or the New Deal era, or the Great Society), sclerosis becomes the default state, interest-group conspiracies the default mode of governance, regulatory capture the default fate of attempted reforms, and any attempt to sweep the money changers from the temple will last, at best, a year or three before they find a way to rush back in.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It is a liability made larger by the Boomers’ lack of antitrust enforcement, which permitted huge consolidation in drug, insurance, and hospital companies. As for Obamacare, which barely squeaked through, it is too soon to tell. Certainly, Obamacare’s implementation has been rocky, and it appears that the law could be significantly less effective than anticipated, though it does seem to be improving matters meaningfully. Despite its compromises, Obamacare may be the one truly significant social accomplishment of the Boomers, and perhaps their only substantial gift to young people, as it allows those under twenty-six to remain on parental policies. At least for now, Obamacare should not be discounted in the moral calculus, whatever its practical results and likely gutting post-2016.

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Since the period 1982–1984, health-care costs have more than quadrupled in gross terms and have been rising faster than inflation overall.23 Medical inflation has slowed over the past few years because of involuntary sequestration and Obamacare’s mandated prices, which over the long term will be roughly as effective as ordering the earth to stand still. The Medicare Trustees accordingly believe Obamacare’s price fiats “are uncertain,” will “probably not be viable indefinitely,” with their actuaries being blunter, saying the price limits have a “strong possibility” of “not be[ing] viable in the long range,” and the government’s overall auditor says the same thing.24 Why?

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Nixon helped regulate the environment through legislation and by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. He supported safer working conditions by creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He proposed health-care reform, suggesting expansion of state-administered programs to offer insurance to all Americans, which—Obamacare notwithstanding—remains a dream unfulfilled. With the Fair Labor Standards Act, he increased the minimum wage, and he supported the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have helped ensure wage parity between men and women. Even the arts, the habitat of pinko intellectuals Nixon so detested, received enormous increases in federal funding.

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy by Michael Barber

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Checklist Manifesto, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, deep learning, deliberate practice, facts on the ground, failed state, fear of failure, full employment, G4S, illegal immigration, invisible hand, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, North Sea oil, obamacare, performance metric, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, school choice, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

It has to be one of the classic tales of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. In the autumn of 2013, President Obama faced down the Republicans who had forced him to close government. He refused to buckle to their blackmail; he would not concede on his vaunted health reform, popularly known as Obamacare. After all, he pointed out, Congress had passed Obamacare into law; to allow a congressional minority to overturn it through a blackmail threat would undermine American democracy and future administrations of whatever party. Polls showed that the American people were behind the president, leaving the Tea Party no option but to beat a shame-faced retreat.

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As the story unfolded in a blaze of talk shows, the president’s political victory disintegrated. Trust in Obamacare unravelled as his personal promises turned out to be unfulfilled. Jeffrey D. Zients, an extremely competent operator whom I had met previously and come to admire, made good progress, but the president suffered excruciating months of delay and took a blow to his credibility from which he may never recover. And in spite of Zients’s excellent efforts, the website remains, shall we say, suboptimal, and the timetable has slipped. Not just Obamacare, but the Obama presidency had been damaged, perhaps irreparably, by what in this book we would call a ‘delivery failure’.

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There may be something close to gridlock in modern Washington, but that is no excuse. As Governor Martin O’Malley put it at a seminar in London in 2014, ‘Failure to drive delivery contributes to gridlock, not the other way round.’ Profound, generational reforms such as Obamacare are too important to be left to government by spasm. They depend on government by routine. If the Obama administration had put the routines in place, not just on Obamacare but across, say, four or five priorities of personal importance to the president, they would also have developed the capacity to learn from delivery in one sphere lessons applicable in others. Arne Duncan, for example, has been the most successful education secretary in US history, a point acknowledged across the political divide in Washington.

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

The Speaker and his staff kept insisting they needed a scalp for the right; at one point, he proposed we scrap Obamacare’s individual mandate for health insurance, an obvious nonstarter. We were getting a bit nervous about our side, too. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had told the President they could support a grand bargain, but the outlines of the deal made the Democratic leaders uncomfortable. It would raise substantially less revenue than Simpson-Bowles or a draft proposal by a bipartisan Senate group known as the Gang of Six. And the entitlement reforms were going to be a tough vote for Democrats, especially with Republicans still insisting on some kind of Obamacare scalp. I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit.

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(Data as of June 30, 2008; Government Sponsored Enterprises include only Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks, and do not include other GSEs or Ginnie Mae.) I sometimes wondered where this newfound right-wing enthusiasm for fiscal discipline had been during the Bush years, when unfunded wars, tax cuts, and a new Medicare prescription drug benefit had helped turn the Clinton surpluses into deficits. By contrast, Obamacare included reforms aimed at reining in the rising medical costs that threatened our fiscal future, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would reduce future deficits overall despite its subsidies to extend care to the uninsured. Then again, the original Tea Party protested an unelected king who raised taxes, while Obama was an elected president who had lowered taxes, so consistency wasn’t really the point.

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This was especially true in the Senate, where Republicans were using the filibuster with unprecedented regularity, blocking just about anything that didn’t have the sixty votes needed to overcome it. For the second half of 2009, the Democrats had exactly sixty senators, which led to side deals like the “Cornhusker Kickback” that clinched Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson’s vote on Obamacare. But as the President’s policies became less popular, many Democratic senators began keeping their distance. Moderates from Republican states didn’t want to look like big spenders. Liberals thought we were too restrained in our spending and too close to Wall Street. With lockstep opposition from Republicans, it became increasingly difficult to get anything through Congress.

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

I visited a couple who lived just south of the Ohio River, with Cincinnati just over the state line. Bobby Alexander, in his early sixties, had recently retired from the army, and was helping to organise the Northern Kentucky Tea Party, appalled by Obama and all his works, especially the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare! – which had been passed six months earlier, a significant extension of healthcare benefits to millions of Americans who had no insurance, though a long way from the universal cover many reformers wanted. To Bobby it was socialism, pure and simple. We had a friendly conversation in which I asked him in passing why he thought Margaret Thatcher – a hero, of course – had made a point in her three winning election campaigns of pledging faith in the National Health Service.

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We had a friendly conversation in which I asked him in passing why he thought Margaret Thatcher – a hero, of course – had made a point in her three winning election campaigns of pledging faith in the National Health Service. This proved to be a conundrum that he couldn’t fathom. It troubled him, but certainly didn’t change his view of Obamacare, which, alongside infringements of gun rights, any liberalisation of abortion, gay marriage and increased federal spending on anything, was for him an assault on the freedoms in defence of which he’d worn his uniform. He and his wife Gloria made my producer Jasper Corbett and me most welcome in their home.

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He didn’t provide any evidence, but was believed. ‘We’re only one justice away,’ he told them. ‘One justice away!’ Apocalyptic stuff. Coming back to earth, one questioner who told a story, tentatively, of a family member facing critical illness who had been able to have medical treatment that he couldn’t have afforded without Obamacare, was firmly put down. It was a revivalist meeting, and that was all. A few days afterwards, at Cruz headquarters as the votes came in, they celebrated victory over Trump (‘To God be the glory!’ were the first words of the candidate when he appeared for the crowd). But the euphoria didn’t last. In New Hampshire, where economic concerns were more important to most Republican voters than moral renewal, Trump crushed his opponents with a promise to breathe fire into the economy.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

In fact, 85 percent of those who signed up for health coverage under Obamacare in 2015 were eligible for subsidies. Second, despite the high deductibles, an extensive set of preventive screening tests is offered free of any copays, including blood-pressure and cholesterol tests, immunizations, mammograms, and colonoscopies, as well as one annual health checkup. Any further medical procedures found to be necessary as a result of preventive screening would be paid for by the patient up to the limit of the deductible.126 The problems with Obamacare begin with its complexity. An inquiry in February 2015 to the Obamacare website healthcare.gov for my state of Illinois lists 142 different plans, each offering a different menu of premiums, deductibles, and copays.

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Other complaints include ever-changing lists of drugs that are covered, that require high copays, or that are not covered at all.127 The complexity and restrictions of Obamacare contrast notably with the simplicity of Medicare and its single-payer system, from which most doctors and hospitals accept payments. In its effort to obtain passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the Obama administration did not attempt to base the plan on the single-payer model or even to provide a public payer option, apparently fearing an onslaught of opposition from lobbyists for the private insurance industry. Although it is much too soon to gauge the effects of Obamacare on health wellness indicators such as life expectancy, it is encouraging that, as shown in figure 14–7, the long-term increase in the share of medical care spending in GDP appears to have stopped, at least temporarily, during 2010–13, even before Obamacare enrollments began in 2014.

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Research assessments of managed care did not uncover any systematic decline in quality compared to the traditional fee-for-service system, although the distinction between in-network and out-of-network providers made managed care quite unpopular. The problem of limited networks was exacerbated by Obamacare, which suffered from the complexity of hundreds of different plans, each offering narrow provider networks that were plagued with relatively high provider turnover. At least Obamacare helped to bridge the coverage gap with medical insurance that was subsidized along a sliding scale depending on income, that was available without denial for pre-existing conditions, and that required all providers to offer preventive screening tests free of charge to patients.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The reason for such residential sorting is that parents want the best learning environment for their children, given the technology-induced premium accorded to capabilities. In turn, residential sorting ensures that the emerging technology-induced meritocracy becomes a hereditary one. Popular resentment, already at a high pitch after the Global Financial Crisis, has boiled over with Obamacare in the United States and the immigration crisis in Europe. Society has become imbalanced once again, and radicals of all kinds are pushing for change. Before moving to reform proposals in Part III, we will turn to the two largest emerging markets, China and India. After outlining the reasons for their extraordinary growth, we will see that each one has a different kind of imbalance to deal with.

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Instead of an electorate hopeful that beneficial change was around the corner, it created one that feared change and did not trust the ruling upper-middle-class elite to look beyond their own interests. Populist politicians only needed an issue to fan the smoldering rage into flames. In the United States, it was the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. In Europe, it was immigration. We will look at all this more closely in this chapter. THE MANY FACES OF POPULISM A populist movement, as we have seen, is one that believes the ruling elite are corrupt and undemocratic, that the masses have been treated poorly, and that the system ought to be changed because the general will of the people demands it.

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Indeed, the financial crisis triggered two essential factors that researchers find explains increased votes for populism across developed countries—economic distress as measured by an increase in unemployment and distrust in the political institutions of the country.40 All that was needed was a spark. THE AMERICAN TRIGGER In the United States, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was an important catalyst in the organizing of the Tea Party movement, a forerunner of the populist nationalist movement. Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who studied blue-collar workers in Louisiana, offers an account of Tea Party supporters’ views. As she surmises through her interviews, the white Southern male believed he had been trudging steadily in line toward the American dream, respecting the rules of the game.41 The line moved more slowly than it had in his father’s days, as economic opportunity dwindled.

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

The two political parties fight hard to put through legislation and are opposed as vigorously as possible to each other’s efforts in that vein, because once legislation is in place, it is hard to change. Think about the Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare. For six years after its passage, the Republican party ran against Obamacare, promising to “repeal and replace.” Despite achieving the triple win of the presidency, the Senate, and the House in the 2016 election, the Republican party was incapable of either repealing or replacing Obamacare. All gamers who invested in making profits off of Obamacare will have decades to ply their profitable trade. Similarly, it takes years for stock-market operations or regulations to change, even after it is clear that the system is being gamed, partly because the hugely wealthy gamers often end up capturing the exchanges, as we saw with the NYSE and its Mahwah trading operation.

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See No Child Left Behind Act neoclassical Keynesian economics, 23–24, 25 Nestlé, 192 Net Promoter Score (NPS), 28, 29, 48 network effects, 191–192 New Deal, 12, 107, 159 new-economy companies, 71 New England Complex Systems Institute, 177 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 64, 88–91, 92, 93 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 183 1970s, 5–12, 24 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), 29–30, 45, 49 nonreductionist thinking, 118–119 normal distributions, 33–38 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 66, 150 Norton, David, 129 NYSE. See New York Stock Exchange Obamacare, 92 Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OFSI), 139–141 off-shoring, 155 oligopolies, 63 optimal financial structure, 173 options trading, 55 outsourcing, 155 Pareto, Vilfredo, 59 Pareto distribution, 46, 57, 59–76, 100 challenge of, 75–76 in companies, 71–73 of income, 161–162 monocultures and, 73–75 Parker, Jeffrey, 86 Parkland shooting, 197 participatory budgeting, 199–200 Penner, Elliot, 188 perfection, 103–106, 113, 126 performance management, 173 Pershing Square, 158 Persona Project, 2, 4, 14–16, 206 Phillips curve, 24 pitch-count restrictions, 102 platform businesses, 71 policy making long-term thinking and, 155–159 mental proximity and, 145–149 revision and, 142–145 political economy, 38 political leaders, 113–114 agenda for, 137–163 political parties, 92, 201–205 political relationships, 197–200 politicians, 197–205 politics, disengagement from, 3, 198 Porter, Michael, 17, 67, 128 power, abuse of, 152–153 power blackouts, 106–107 Power Law distribution.

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Medicare for All There was a time when I would have sorted the next two policy proposals firmly into the camp of the radical left. The Republican attitude toward government guarantees of education and health care went without saying; the Democrats, meanwhile, were content to pursue piecemeal solutions like Obamacare and vague talk of student loan forgiveness. Respectable national politicians did not associate themselves with pie-in-the-sky proposals like single-payer health insurance and free college for all. But times have changed. As I write this, the prospective candidates for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2020 election have just begun jockeying for position, with candidates like Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren already hard at work raising their profiles and staking out their policy positions.

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Clearly, the current American system is a mess, a hodgepodge of private profits and public expenditures, with excellent care for those who can afford it and vast swaths of people who are either completely uncovered or whose nominal coverage is of such poor quality that it does little to provide tangible benefits. I supported the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) when it was being debated, and I still think on balance we’re better off with it than before. But as others have noted, it is precisely the aspects of the law that are not market based—protection of those with preexisting conditions and expansion of Medicaid—that have succeeded. Meanwhile the ballyhooed market mechanisms, the exchanges on which one can purchase private insurance, have largely failed, and the law has not bent the cost curve (that is, reduced the absurd expense of health care in the overall American economy).

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Most importantly, it would eliminate one of the central constraints on young people as they work to figure out which life to lead. Most students in college enjoy access to at least basic care at a school clinic. And while many students remain under their parents’ coverage until they turn 26 (thanks in part to an age expansion under Obamacare), many do not enjoy this luxury, particularly poorer students. These people emerge from college needing to work not only to pay rent but to stay in physical therapy, to maintain access to essential medications, to see a doctor when they are sick. As a culture, we are likely to mock the time young people take to “find themselves.”

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The QV results are thus much more plausible as a representation of population preferences than is the artificial W shape from Likert.44 Second, while Likert conceals the range of intensity of preferences by grouping all, or nearly all, of the responses at the extremes, QV reveals these gradations. QV shows, for example, the greater intensity of preferences for repealing Obamacare, compared to those for retaining it, which helped fuel the success of Republicans in the 2016 election. FIGURE 2.4: Participant opinions on Obamacare under a standard Likert (left) and QV (right) survey. “Vote strength” in both graphs represents degree of support (on left) or opposition (on right) for Obamacare. Source: Adapted from David Quarfoot, Douglas von Kohorn, Kevin Slavin, Rory Sutherland, David Goldstein, & Ellen Konar, Quadratic Voting in the Wild: Real People, Real Votes, 172 Pub.

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If she cares about many issues, she must decide how to allocate her votes across them. She may discover, for example, that while she cares a lot about abortion rights, she doesn’t want to use up so many credits to vote in favor of them that she can’t even buy one vote in order to take a position on Obamacare or the minimum wage. Typically, respondents (especially those with less formal training in mathematics) quickly run into a constraint, running out of credits, and then returning to correct course. Economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir have shown in their 2013 book that running into this type of “scarcity” quickly focuses the minds of participants so that they complete the survey carefully.42 In practice, it also seems to deeply engage users: they typically spend a third longer working on QV surveys than a standard Likert survey, even though the same fraction in both cases completed the survey.

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To test whether QV manages to solve the problems with Likert, in 2016 Decide’s chief data scientist and now professor of mathematics education David Quarfoot, along with several co-authors, ran a nationally representative survey with thousands of participants that took versions of the same poll using Likert, QV, or both depending on which group they were assigned to.43 Figure 2.4 pictures a representative set of responses, on the question of repealing Obamacare, with the Likert survey on the left (with its signature W-shape) and the results from QV on the right. Two things are noteworthy. First, QV produces a roughly bell-shaped distribution, the sort of distribution of responses that characterizes most individual preferences. The QV results are thus much more plausible as a representation of population preferences than is the artificial W shape from Likert.44 Second, while Likert conceals the range of intensity of preferences by grouping all, or nearly all, of the responses at the extremes, QV reveals these gradations.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

And right now, those are the people—who’ve done things the right way—that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.” 44 The congressman’s case against Obamacare reiterates the harsh meritocratic logic that runs from the Puritans to the prosperity gospel: If prosperity is a sign of salvation, suffering is a sign of sin. This logic is not necessarily tied to religious assumptions. It is a feature of any ethic that conceives human freedom as the unfettered exercise of will and attributes to human beings a thoroughgoing responsibility for their fate. In 2009, as Obamacare was first being debated, John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing against a right to health care.

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“If a believer gets sick and dies,” Bowler writes, “shame compounds the grief. Those who are loved and lost are just that—those who have lost the test of faith.” 42 The harsh face of prosperity gospel thinking can be seen in the debate about health care. 43 When Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress attempted to repeal and replace Obamacare, most argued that their market-friendly alternative would increase competition and reduce costs, while protecting people with pre-existing conditions. But Mo Brooks, a conservative Republican congressman from Alabama, made a different argument. He acknowledged that the Republican plan would require those with greater health needs to pay more.

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Newkirk II, “The American Health Care Act’s Prosperity Gospel,” The Atlantic , May 5, 2017. 44. Brooks quoted in Newkirk, ibid., and in Jonathan Chait, “Republican Blurts Out That Sick People Don’t Deserve Affordable Care,” New York , May 1, 2017. 45. John Mackey, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare,” The Wall Street Journal , August 11, 2009. See also Chait, ibid. 46. Mackey, ibid. 47. Hillary Clinton, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” July 28, 2016, at presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nomination-the-democratic-national-convention . 48.

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

America’s major entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—are unsustainably expensive. The longer we go without addressing the problem, the more dangerously indebted the nation will become. The only way to preserve America’s important safety net is to fix it. Our health-care system is inefficient and expensive—with or without Obamacare. We spend significantly more on medical care than all other developing countries, but we get significantly less in terms of good health. Life expectancy in the United States is lower than the average for all other developed countries—and the gap is growing, not shrinking.3 Our infrastructure is crumbling.

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The Obama health-care reforms did not do this. Although there are many potentially sensible ideas tucked in the details of the law, the thrust of the reform was to make an unaffordable system bigger. Meanwhile, the Republicans have no meaningful plan for cost containment at all. Mitt Romney repeatedly vowed to repeal Obamacare on “Day One” of his administration. We never heard much about what would happen on “Day Two”—when he would still have faced an inefficient and unaffordable system, albeit one that no longer promised insurance to all Americans. The idea that competition among private insurers can be used to drive down public health expenditures is completely untested, has not worked in the private sector, and has not been embraced by any serious health economist.

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Worse still, the Republicans have strenuously opposed any efforts to use cost-effectiveness as a criterion for public health expenditures because this would be the first step toward “death panels” (Sarah Palin’s one enduring contribution to our national health-care discussion). To get our budget back in order, we have to reform Medicare and Medicaid. And to do that, we need to reform health care in general, which would have enormous benefits for the private sector as well. The nasty debate around Obamacare has proved how hard this will be. Health-care reform is a policy area where Centrist voices can add great value. It is also one of the few places where—with sensible policy changes—we might actually spend less and get more. Rebuild our international institutions. We need a revamped set of international institutions to handle all of the modern issues that transcend national borders.

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed by Laurie Kilmartin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, call centre, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, Uber for X

Your entire to-do list can be postponed until your next life. YOUR UNENDING RAGE WTF—My Dad Is Dead and [fill in the blank, I like Dick Cheney] Is Still Alive? When Dad was alive and healthy, he railed against Obamacare. He believed Sarah Palin, who said a death panel would come for him. In reality, Medicare covered his entire treatment, and his caretakers tried to keep him alive for as long as possible. I think Dad would have loved actual Obamacare—the health care that President Obama (and every modern president) receives. Do these people ever die? In 2016, Jimmy Carter was cured from brain cancer at age 92. And 76-year-old Dick Cheney, who was probably the president, has had five heart attacks and a heart transplant.

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Bush celebrated his 90th birthday by skydiving. That’s right, someone pushed a president out of an airplane, and he still lived. Both Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford were 93 when they died and I’m sure their doctors were fired for incompetence. If Dad had been given Obama’s actual care, he’d be alive today, complaining about Obamacare. Sometime after your loved one dies, you’ll hear the name of a famous person who is alive and older than your dead person, and you will be struck with envy and bitterness. Thank God. Any emotion that’s not sadness is a gift. Enjoy it, use it. Go for a run, clean out a closet. But keep it aimed at a faraway target—a celebrity or a Nazi.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), p. 163; Terry Flew, “Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and Contemporary Neo-liberalism Debates,” Thesis Eleven 108.1 (2012), p. 60. 2. Jack Jackson notes that this is not an even or consistent process. Obamacare, he argues, was a significant challenge to neoliberalization. Jack Jackson, “Not Yet an End: Neoliberalism and the Jurisprudence of Obamacare,” unpublished paper presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Certainly, Jackson has a point, but the neoliberal form of Obamacare as a national health plan can be lost on no one. There is also a question of whether it will survive. 3. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 130 S.

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Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Australian Institute of Directors Lunch,” September 15, 1976, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://www. margaretthatcher.org/document/103099. 45. While its critique is supremely important, contemporary prescriptive posthumanism expresses this historical conjuncture and colludes with it. 280 notes Index adjunct teaching, 194, 197–98. Adorno, Theodor, 119–20. Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), 168, 254 n. 2. Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 232 n. 45. Alienation, 38, 65, 77, 96, 209. Allende, Salvadore, 20, 151. Arendt, Hannah, 32, 43, 92, 233 n. 45. See also good life, the; “mere life.” AT&T Mobility LLC v Conception, 152. Austerity politics: as contemporary era of neoliberalism, 49, 71–72, 210, 213, 219; connection to sacrifice, 71–72, 134, 210, 212–13, 216, 232 n. 44, 276 n. 21; in Southern Europe, 38, 212; responsibilization and, 232 n. 44.

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Newfield, Christopher, 188, 192, 261 n. 6, 264 n. 20. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 133. Normative order of reason, 117–18. See also political rationality. obama, barack, 49; 2013 State of the Union address, 24–27, 40, 226 n. 13, 226 n. 23; college rating scheme, 178, 225 n. 11; on sacrifice, 276 n. 21. See also sacrifice; austerity. Obamacare, see Affordable Care Act. Occupy Wall Street, 24, 30, 203, 217, 219, 232 n. 40; UC Berkeley and, 250 n. 43. Offe, Claus, 68. “Omnes et singulatim,” 71, 130. See also governmentality; Foucault, Michel. Ordoliberalism, 49, 59, 60, 64, 66; diferences from Chicago School, 59–60; Hayek and, 59; historical inf luences on, 59–60, 213.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

.; Perry, Romney, Cain Close on GOP Side,” WWL-TV, October 13, 2011, http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/politics/2014/08/29/14408560. WWL-TV polled 602 likely Louisiana voters. 57and voted for the Keystone pipeline Ibid. 57“If it ain’t good for y’all, I ain’t voting for it” Scott Lewis, “Boustany and Landry Fight over Obamacare, Medicare, Negative Campaigns and Oilfield Jobs [Audio],” Cajun Radio, October 31, 2012, http://cajunradio.com/boustany-and-landry-fight-over-obamacare-medicare-negative-campaigns-and-oilfield-jobs-audio/?trackback=tsmclip. 59the EPA listed eight as “impaired” and the ninth as “unassessed” A January 24, 2015, search for Lafayette, LA, using the EPA’s “MyEnvironment” tool yielded these findings.

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Lester, James, James Franke, Ann Bowman, and Kenneth Kramer. “Hazardous Wastes, Politics, and Public Policy: A Comparative State Analysis.” Western Political Quarterly 36 (1983): 255–85. Lewis, Scott. “Boustany and Landry Fight Over Obamacare, Medicare, Negative Campaigns and Oilfield Jobs [Audio].” Cajun Radio (October 31, 2012). http://cajunradio.com/boustany-and-landry-fight-over-obamacare-medicare-negative-campaigns-and-oilfield-jobs-audio/?trackback=tsmclip. Little, Amanda. “Will Conservatives Finally Embrace Clean Energy? New Yorker (October 29, 2015). Lindsey, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970.

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He agreed with them that Louisiana “gave out drilling permits like candy.” He agreed with them on fracking, and on getting industry to repair the coast their actions had destroyed. He agreed on alternative energy. Louisiana was 42nd out of 50 states on that one. He didn’t agree with liberals on funding Head Start, Pell college grants, Obamacare, or Social Security. And that was fine. But in the back of his mind, Mike wanted to add the environment to the agenda of the Tea Party. How tough a sell would that be? He wanted to find out. The Disaster Before the Sinkhole Disasters could occur, get forgotten, and occur again. Like Harold and Annette Areno, Mike was now a rememberer.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

It has become a country with great divides in access to health care, life expectancy, and health status. In the relief that many felt when the Supreme Court did not overturn the Affordable Care Act, the implications of the decision for Medicaid were not fully appreciated. Obamacare’s objective—to ensure that all Americans have access to health care—has been stymied: 24 states have not implemented the expanded Medicaid program, which was the means by which Obamacare was supposed to deliver on its promise to some of the poorest. We need not just a new war on poverty but a war to protect the middle class. Solutions to these problems do not have to be newfangled. Far from it.

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Two of the reasons for our dismal health statistics are related to inequalities at the top and the bottom of our society—monopoly profits reaped by drug companies, medical device makers, health insurers, and highly concentrated provider networks drive prices, and inequality, up while the lack of access to timely care for the poor, including preventive medicine, makes the population sicker and more costly to treat. The ACA is helping on both accounts. The health insurance exchanges are designed to promote competition. And the whole act is designed to increase access. The numbers suggest it’s working. As for costs, the widespread predictions that Obamacare would cause massive health care inflation have proven false, as the rate of increase in health care prices has remained comparatively moderate over the last several years, showing once again that there is no necessary trade-off between fairness and efficiency. The first year of the ACA showed significant increases in coverage—far more significant in those states that implemented the Medicaid expansion than in those that refused to do so.

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For starters, access to medicine matters. With the U.S. among the few advanced countries that does not recognize access as a basic human right, and more reliant than others on the private sector, it is no surprise that many Americans do not get the medicines they need. Though the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has improved matters, health-insurance coverage remains weak, with almost half of the 50 U.S. states refusing to expand Medicaid, the health care financing program for America’s poor. Moreover, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of childhood poverty among the advanced countries (which was especially true before austerity policies dramatically increased poverty in several European countries), and lack of nutrition and health care in childhood has lifelong effects.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Doctors try not to prescribe to such people, but it is unclear how they are supposed to know, particularly given the time pressure that they face, and even people who are at risk and have a previous history of abuse can be in real pain. Doctors were being asked to police and prevent abuse in a way that was beyond their ability under the circumstances in which they work. Some commentators have argued that the rollout of Obamacare was in part responsible for the epidemic, that the expansion of Medicaid made opioids more widely available. But the timing on this is wrong, because the epidemic was in full swing before any Medicaid expansion. By contrast, Medicaid has played an important role in making available affordable treatment for people with opioid abuse disorder, with levels of therapy much higher in states that expanded Medicaid after 2014.31 The producers, directly and through prescription benefit managers, did everything possible to increase sales and profits, even when it was clear that the drugs were being abused.

…

The truth is that these horrors are happening not in spite of the American healthcare system but because of it. The next chapter makes the argument. It is not an argument about poor healthcare or lack of coverage, though there is much that could be said about both; the deaths from prescription opioids were caused by the healthcare system, and even after Obamacare twenty-seven million Americans have no health insurance.1 But a far worse problem is the enormous cost. The vast sums that are being spent on healthcare are an unsustainable drag on the economy, pushing down wages, reducing the number of good jobs, and undermining financing for education, infrastructure, and the provision of public goods and services that are (or might be) provided by federal and state governments.

…

Lobbyists oppose one another, but there are no effective lobbyists, or lobbyists of comparable power and size, who are arguing the case for the people who are paying for the enrichment of the healthcare industry or who can act as a countervailing power against it. During periods of legislative activity, the healthcare lobbyists have sometimes been singularly effective. Obamacare was passed without consideration of a single-payer system or a public option, and the US has nothing like the British system of evaluation. Hospitals, doctors, and pharma companies were effectively paid off in order to support the passage of the Affordable Care Act.54 This was necessary to get more uninsured people into the system, but it prevented any cost saving, a trade-off that was almost certainly necessary then given the power of the lobbies.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

Gaby Galvin, “87M Adults Were Uninsured or Underinsured in 2018, Survey Says,” U.S. News & World Report, February 7, 2019, www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2019-02-07/lack-of-health-insurance-coverage-leads-people-to-avoid-seeking-care. 22. Tami Luhby, “Is Obamacare Really Affordable? Not for the Middle Class,” CNN, November 2016, money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/news/economy/obamacare-affordable/index.html. 23. Boesler, “Almost 40% of Americans Would Struggle to Cover a $400 Emergency.” 24. Bob Herman, “Medical Costs Are Driving Millions of People into Poverty,” Axios, September 2019, www.axios.com/medical-expenses-poverty-deductibles-540e2c09-417a-4936-97aa-c241fd5396d2.html. 25.

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Lori Konish, “137 Million Americans Are Struggling with Medical Debt. Here’s What to Know if You Need Some Relief,” CNBC, November 12, 2019, ww.cnbc.com/2019/11/10/americans-are-drowning-in-medical-debt-what-to-know-if-you-need-help.html. 26. Matt Bruenig, “How Many People will Obamacare and AHCA Kill?” (blog), MattBruenig Politics, mattbruenig.com/2017/06/22/how-many-people-will-obamacare-and-ahca-kill/. 27. Catherine Rampell, “It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk,” New York Times, February 19, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html. 28. Leslie Brody, “New York City Plans to Give More 3-Year-Olds Free Early Childhood Education,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-plans-to-give-more-3-year-olds-free-early-childhood-education-11547165926?

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His findings show that if the Republicans had succeeded in annulling the Affordable Care Act in 2017, 540,000 people would have died over the next decade because they would have lacked health-care coverage—but an additional 320,000 would die from lack of coverage even if the Republican effort was unsuccessful. That’s an important point: even under Obamacare, millions of Americans are still uninsured.26 Add it all up, and it shouldn’t be surprising the US still lags well behind similar developed countries in access to care, even after passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Our health-care deficit leads to lost time for work and for play, but also to the worst lost time of all: the years with friends and loved ones that so many people lose because they die too soon.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

Judis, “America the Liberal,” The New Republic, Nov. 19, 2008. 55prepare the nation for a new age: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/01/21/president-barack-obamas-inaugural-address. 55did not prosecute: http://www.g-a-i.org/u/2012/08/DOJ-Report-8-61.pdf. 55shake business confidence: See Noam Scheiber, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, Simon & Schuster, 2011, pp. 170–8. 55growth of Medicare spending: See Thomas B. Edsall, “The Obamacare Crisis,” The New York Times, November 19, 2013 and “Is Obamacare Destroying the Democratic Party,” The New York Times, December 2, 2014. 56“Chicago Tea Party”: See John B. Judis, “Tea Minus Zero,” The New Republic, May 10, 2010. 56160,000 members: Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 22. 57“You are not entitled to what I have earned”: Skocpol and Williamson, p. 66. 57ACA as a redistributive transfer program: Emily Elisabeth Ekins, “Tea Party Fairness: How the Idea of Proportional Justice Explains the Right-Wing Populism of the Obama Era,” UCLA diss., 2015, pp. 74–75. 57services by illegal immigrants: Skocpol and Williamson, p. 71. 57took jobs from native-born Americans: See Kazin, pp. 35–36. 58sending him big checks: John B.

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Bankers, land speculators, and gamblers were typically numbered among the unproductive—as were, for the populists, recent immigrants who took jobs from native-born Americans. The Tea Partiers initially singled out Obama for coddling the “takers,” but after Republicans won the Congress in 2010 but failed to deliver on the Tea Party’s non-negotiable demands to repeal Obamacare, the Tea Party focused their ire on the Republican establishment. Tea Party candidates ran against both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor—and in the latter case, won. McConnell and Cantor’s sin lay in refusing to go all the way in repudiating even the bare rudiments of the neoliberal consensus between the parties and in failing to block even discussion of immigration reform.

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Concern in the United States is notably less than in comparable countries. And the drop that Klein is describing is exactly what they report. It’s very hard to doubt that that’s connected with the propaganda campaign that has been quite openly conducted. In fact, a couple of years ago, right after the insurance company victories on the health reform bill, so-called Obamacare, there was a report in the New York Times about leaders of the American Petroleum Institute and other business groups looking to the victory in the health care campaign as a model to undermine concern about global warming.34 In the Republican presidential debates, for example, even to mention global warming would be to commit political suicide.

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., 72, 85, 174–75 consumerism, 36, 37, 80 corporations, 10, 24, 26, 27, 31–32, 38, 41, 76–77, 81, 103, 119, 152, 174 piracy issue, 107–8 Cuba, 4, 160, 161 culture, and language, 138–40 deaf-blind, 134–35 debt, 8, 87, 152, 168 student, 152 decolonization, 5, 46 democracy, 47, 54, 62, 79–81, 84–85, 109, 112, 143–44, 150, 151, 158–59, 172 Democratic Party, 32, 41–42 demonstrations, 29–33, 35, 40–43, 73–77 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64, 67, 112–13, 168 civil rights, 24, 30–31, 45, 65–66, 72, 150, 167, 176 Occupy, 47, 65–69, 74–77, 118–21, 146, 168, 177 student, 73–74 Depression, 23, 27, 28 deregulation, 48, 173–74 Dewey, John, 147, 148, 149 Dink, Hrant, 89, 91 dissidents, 144–45 doctrinal system, 8, 10, 36, 38, 158, 159 Dönitz, Karl, 116 Draghi, Mario, 169 drugs, 160–62 Durand Line, 99 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 17 Economic Policy Institute, 168 economy, 4, 32, 76–78, 97, 121, 168, 171 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64, 67 Chinese, 7–10 financial crisis, 23, 48, 86–89, 168–69 global shift of power, 5–13, 58, 76–77 Indian, 7, 10–11, 20–23 stimulus, 33 U.S. decline, 4–10, 56, 59–60 education, 37, 82, 147–56, 165–68 battle over, 147–56 higher, 150–53, 165–68 K-to-12, 153–56 privatization of, 38–39, 156, 167–68 public, 37–39, 147–48, 153–56, 166–68 science, 154–55 Egypt, 35, 51, 53, 61, 67 Arab Spring, 44–49, 54, 60–64, 67, 168 Einstein, Albert, 143 Eisenhower, Dwight, 125 electoral politics, 102–13, 117–19 electronic books, 104 Ellsberg, Daniel, 15, 113 El Salvador, 145 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 148, 156 Enlightenment, 116, 147, 148 environment, 12, 75, 121–25, 158–59, 163–65, 176 climate change, 75, 121–25, 159 fracking, 164–65 Erdoan, Recep Tayyip, 89, 90, 93 Europe, 5, 6, 9, 47, 51, 58, 161 economic crisis, 47, 86–89, 168–69 European Central Bank (ECB), 86–87, 169 European Union, 87, 89, 92 evolution, 128, 129, 137–38 Facebook, 145, 146 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 15, 71, 73 Federal Reserve, 86–87 financial crisis, 23, 48, 86–89, 168–69 Financial Times, 66, 76, 78, 123 Finland, 153, 154 Foreign Affairs, 59, 61 fossil fuels, 21, 22, 49–55, 122–24, 164, 165 fracking, 123, 164–65 France, 46, 50, 52, 68, 112–13, 170 Fraser, Doug, 25 Freedom of Information Act, 110 Gadhafi, Mu’ammar, 50, 53 Galileo, 143, 144 Gates, Bill, 11 Gaza, 93 General Motors, 33, 80 genetics, 126–27, 129, 140 Germany, 15, 27, 51, 58, 118, 153 economic policy, 88 Nazism, 28–29, 115–16 Weimar Republic, 25, 27–29 World War II, 115–16 GI bill, 152 Ginsberg, Benjamin, The Fall of the Faculty, 168 globalization, 5, 20–22, 170 financial crisis, 86–89, 168–69 labor, 9–12, 76–77, 169–70 shift of power, 5–13, 58, 76–77 Goldman Sachs, 42 Google, 107 government, 78–85, 150, 158 big, 81, 82 security, 107–13 “Grand Area” planning, 57 Great Britain, 5, 8–9, 16, 17, 21, 35, 50, 52, 61, 79, 107, 139, 172 colonialism, 9, 20 government, 79 slavery, 36 World War II, 115, 116 Greece, 87 Guantánamo, 72–73 Guatemala, 21 gun culture, 162–63 Gwadar, 22 Haiti, 11, 13–14, 17 Hale, Kenneth, 136, 139–41 Hanif, Mohammed, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 106 Haq, Abdul, 16 Harvard University, Institute of Politics, 158 Havel, Václav, 145 health care, 24, 76, 82, 157 Obamacare, 124 Heilbrunn, Jacob, 111 Hindenburg, Paul von, 27–28 historical amnesia, 97–98 Hitler, Adolf, 28–29, 32, 88 Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 70–71 Honduras, 7, 110–11 House of Representatives, U.S., 85 Human Development Index, 13 “Human Intelligence and the Environment” (Chomsky), 42 Humanitarian Law Project, 70–71 human rights, 109, 113 violations, 89–92, 95–96, 145 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 149 Hume, David, 79, 81 Hussein, Saddam, 17, 71, 95 imperialism, 1–33 saltwater fallacy, 3–4 terminology, 3 India, 7, 9, 10–11, 17–23, 38, 50, 51, 107, 164 Bhopal explosion, 174 British rule, 20 -China relations, 20–22 economic growth, 7, 10–11, 20–23 -Israel relations, 20, 21 natural resources, 17–20 neoliberalism and, 19–22 TAPI pipeline and, 17–18 -U.S. relations, 20–22 war, 20 indignados, 47 Indonesia, 17 intellectual culture, 79, 81, 104–6, 141 intellectual property rights, 107–8 International Energy Association (IEA), 121–22 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 47 International Organization for a Participatory Society, 171 international relations (IR) theory, 8, 63 Internet, 105–13 security, 107–13 iPhone, 145–46 Iran, 18, 60, 62, 63, 90–91, 93, 95–98, 111, 112, 114 nuclear threat, 112 TAPI pipeline and, 18 Iran-Iraq War, 97 Iraq, 16–17, 21, 60, 61 Kurds, 95–96 nationalism, 55–56 U.S. war in, 16–17, 55–56, 62–63, 114–16 Islam, 60 political, 49, 61 radical, 61, 100 Israel, 20, 21, 96, 112 -India relations, 20, 21 -Lebanon relations, 63 Palestinian conflict, 46 -Turkey relations, 92–94 -U.S. relations, 21 Jacob, François, 129 James, William, 130 Japan, 5, 8, 58, 131, 139 Jefferson, Thomas, 3, 172 job creation, 76, 87 Kagan, Elena, 70 Karachi, 22 Keller, Bill, 144 Keller, Helen, 134, 135 Kennan, George, 57 Kennedy, John F., 2–3 Vietnam policy, 2–3, 97 Khadr, Omar, 72–73 King, Martin Luther, 30–31, 66, 105 Klein, Naomi, 123, 124 Kurds, 21, 89–92, 95–96 labor, 38, 81, 87, 169 anti-labor movements, 40 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64, 67 Chinese, 9–10, 11–12 collective bargaining, 40–41 demonstrations and strikes, 29, 33, 35, 40–43, 68, 120, 146 Depression-era, 23, 40, 67–68 global, 9–12, 76–77, 169–70 organized, 23–25, 39–41, 67–68, 147, 171 rustbelt, 11–12 solidarity, 39–41 unemployment, 22–23, 38, 66, 76 unions, 24–26, 33, 39–41, 68, 79, 147, 171 language, 126–42 biological acquisition of, 129–36 culture and, 138–40 sensory deprivation and, 134–35 similarity of, 140–41 study of, 137–38, 142 universal grammar, 126–59 Latin America, 4–7, 22, 61, 160–62, 164 drugs, 160–62 integration of, 6–7, 47, 161 U.S. military bases in, 6–7 Laxness, Halldór, 106 Lebanon, 63 Lee, Ching Kwan, 11 Left, 23, 25, 32–33, 59, 117, 147, 149, 150, 151 student, 73–74 Left Forum, 25, 27, 33 libertarianism, 157, 158, 163 Libya, 50–54, 91 no-fly zone, 50–52 Lippmann, Walter, 81 Madison, James, 84, 85 Magna Carta, 59, 72, 116 Mandela, Nelson, 71 Manning, Bradley, 113, 114 Marcos, Ferdinand, 17 market system, 80–81 Marx, Karl, 173, 175 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 13, 37, 105, 122, 134, 136, 149 mathematics, 137, 138 McCain, John, 103 McCarthyism, 24 McKiernan, Kevin, 95 media, 32, 66, 150, 151 mental slavery, 34–35, 101–25 Mexico, 11, 152–53, 162, 175 Middle East, 17, 44–64, 89–100, 111 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64, 67, 112–13, 168 oil, 21, 49–55 Turkish-Israeli relations, 92–94 uprisings, 44–64 military, 5, 98 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64 detention, 70–73 police, 119–20 U.S. bases in Latin America, 6–7 Mobutu Sese Seko, 17 Mondragon, 171 Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor, 23 Morgenthau, Hans, 63–64 The Purpose of American Politics, 64 Morocco, 46 Mubarak, Hosni, 45, 47, 62 Nader, Ralph, 150 NAFTA, 163, 175 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 61 National Defense Authorization Act, 70 Native Americans, 22 natural gas, 17–18, 164–65 natural resources, 17–22, 164–65 Navy, U.S., 6–7, 14, 52, 116 Nazism, 28–29, 115–16 New Deal, 23, 82 New York, 67, 100, 166 New York Times, 60, 81, 89–91, 124, 144–45, 160 Ngo Dinh Diem, 2, 3 Ngo Dinh Nhu, 2, 3 Nicaragua, 7 9/11 attacks, 14, 15–16, 139 Nixon, Richard, 125, 150 No Child Left Behind, 153 Non-Proliferation Treaty, 18 North Africa, 46–48, 57, 60 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 50, 51, 91, 92 Norway, 115 nuclear weapons, 97, 98, 100, 110, 112, 176 Nuremberg Trials, 115–16 Nystrom, Paul, 36 Obama, Barack, 7, 33, 63, 90–91, 93, 110, 111, 114, 153, 162, 164 Afghanistan War and, 14–15 civil liberties and, 70–73 Libya and, 51–52 organized labor and, 41–42 2008 election, 102–3 Obamacare, 124 Occupy movements, 47, 65–69, 74–77, 118–21, 146, 168, 177 oil, 21, 22, 49–55, 124 Orwell, George, 19, 97 Pakistan, 16, 17, 22, 61, 98–100, 110 drone attacks on, 18–19, 98–99 nuclear industry, 98–100, 110 TAPI pipeline and, 18 Palestine, 46, 72 -Israel conflict, 46 Palmer raids, 68 Pamuk, Orhan, 91 Panama, 7 Panetta, Leon, 114 Pashtuns, 99 Patterson, Anne W., 99, 110 Paul, Rand, 157, 162, 163 Paul, Ron, 75, 124–25, 157, 163 pensions, 12, 22, 24, 26 Peres, Shimon, 93 Peshawar, 16 pharmaceutical companies, 107–8 Philippines, 4, 17 Pinochet, Augusto, 61 piracy, 107–8 political Islam, 49, 61 Political Science Quarterly, 82 police repression, 119–20 politics, 32, 41, 57, 59, 121, 142–45, 171 electoral, 102–3, 117–19 labor demonstrations and, 41–43 poverty, 6, 66, 82, 84 Powell, Colin, 115 Powell, Lewis, 150–51 Powell memorandum, 150–51 power systems, 34–35, 69 aristocrats and democrats, 160–78 chains of submission and subservience, 34–43 global shift, 5–13, 58, 76–77 language and education, 126–59 mental slavery, 101–25 new American imperialism, 1–33 uprisings, 44–64 privatization, 11, 38, 39, 40, 156–57, 167 Progressive Labor (PL), 73 propaganda system, 35–40, 66, 80, 82, 102, 119, 122–24 property rights, 84, 85 public, power of the, 78–81 public education, 37–39, 147–48, 153–56, 166–68 public relations, 35, 79–81, 102–3 Qasim, Abd al-Karim, 61 Race to the Top, 153 racism, 3, 31, 92 Ravitch, Diane, 154 Reagan, Ronald, 62, 71, 82, 95, 99 recession, 23, 48, 86–89 Red Scare, 23, 68, 120 Reich, Robert, 170, 172 Reilly, John, 122 Republican Party, 41, 57, 75, 76, 124, 125 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 72 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 115 Right, 23, 32, 150–51 Riyadh, 52 Romney, Mitt, 57–58, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 14, 23, 54 Roy, Arundhati, 22, 29, 31 Russia, 17–18, 20, 50, 61, 98, 102, 145 rustbelt, 11–12 Saharawi movement, 46 saltwater fallacy, 3–4 Saudi Arabia, 21, 49, 52, 61, 99, 111, 144 science, 142–43, 144 education, 154–55 modern, 143 sectarianism, 73–74 Seib, Gerald, 54 self-destruction, 42–43 Senate, U.S., 63, 85 sensory deprivation, 134–35 Shiites, 52–53 Singh, Manmohan, 19 Sino-Indian War, 20 slavery, 3, 34, 36, 51 end of, 34, 35, 36 mental, 34–35, 101–25 Slim, Carlos, 11 Smith, Adam, 8–9 social Darwinism, 157 social media, 105, 107, 145–47 Social Security, 39, 156–57 solidarity, 38–41, 146–47, 159 South Africa, 21, 50–51 apartheid, 71 South America, 6, 7, 57, 60, 161 Southeast Asia, 4, 60 South Korea, 9, 17 Spain, 4, 6, 33, 87 sports, college, 154–55 Stack, Joseph, 25–26, 29 Stalin, Joseph, 61 Stohl, Bev, 105 Stop Online Piracy Act, 107 strategic hamlets, 2 student activism, 73–74 submission and subservience, chains of, 34–43 Summit of the Americas (2012), 160–61 sunbelt, 11, 12 Sunnis, 52–53 Supreme Court, U.S., 70, 150 Buckley v.

…

., 6–7, 14, 52, 116 Nazism, 28–29, 115–16 New Deal, 23, 82 New York, 67, 100, 166 New York Times, 60, 81, 89–91, 124, 144–45, 160 Ngo Dinh Diem, 2, 3 Ngo Dinh Nhu, 2, 3 Nicaragua, 7 9/11 attacks, 14, 15–16, 139 Nixon, Richard, 125, 150 No Child Left Behind, 153 Non-Proliferation Treaty, 18 North Africa, 46–48, 57, 60 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 50, 51, 91, 92 Norway, 115 nuclear weapons, 97, 98, 100, 110, 112, 176 Nuremberg Trials, 115–16 Nystrom, Paul, 36 Obama, Barack, 7, 33, 63, 90–91, 93, 110, 111, 114, 153, 162, 164 Afghanistan War and, 14–15 civil liberties and, 70–73 Libya and, 51–52 organized labor and, 41–42 2008 election, 102–3 Obamacare, 124 Occupy movements, 47, 65–69, 74–77, 118–21, 146, 168, 177 oil, 21, 22, 49–55, 124 Orwell, George, 19, 97 Pakistan, 16, 17, 22, 61, 98–100, 110 drone attacks on, 18–19, 98–99 nuclear industry, 98–100, 110 TAPI pipeline and, 18 Palestine, 46, 72 -Israel conflict, 46 Palmer raids, 68 Pamuk, Orhan, 91 Panama, 7 Panetta, Leon, 114 Pashtuns, 99 Patterson, Anne W., 99, 110 Paul, Rand, 157, 162, 163 Paul, Ron, 75, 124–25, 157, 163 pensions, 12, 22, 24, 26 Peres, Shimon, 93 Peshawar, 16 pharmaceutical companies, 107–8 Philippines, 4, 17 Pinochet, Augusto, 61 piracy, 107–8 political Islam, 49, 61 Political Science Quarterly, 82 police repression, 119–20 politics, 32, 41, 57, 59, 121, 142–45, 171 electoral, 102–3, 117–19 labor demonstrations and, 41–43 poverty, 6, 66, 82, 84 Powell, Colin, 115 Powell, Lewis, 150–51 Powell memorandum, 150–51 power systems, 34–35, 69 aristocrats and democrats, 160–78 chains of submission and subservience, 34–43 global shift, 5–13, 58, 76–77 language and education, 126–59 mental slavery, 101–25 new American imperialism, 1–33 uprisings, 44–64 privatization, 11, 38, 39, 40, 156–57, 167 Progressive Labor (PL), 73 propaganda system, 35–40, 66, 80, 82, 102, 119, 122–24 property rights, 84, 85 public, power of the, 78–81 public education, 37–39, 147–48, 153–56, 166–68 public relations, 35, 79–81, 102–3 Qasim, Abd al-Karim, 61 Race to the Top, 153 racism, 3, 31, 92 Ravitch, Diane, 154 Reagan, Ronald, 62, 71, 82, 95, 99 recession, 23, 48, 86–89 Red Scare, 23, 68, 120 Reich, Robert, 170, 172 Reilly, John, 122 Republican Party, 41, 57, 75, 76, 124, 125 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 72 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 115 Right, 23, 32, 150–51 Riyadh, 52 Romney, Mitt, 57–58, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 14, 23, 54 Roy, Arundhati, 22, 29, 31 Russia, 17–18, 20, 50, 61, 98, 102, 145 rustbelt, 11–12 Saharawi movement, 46 saltwater fallacy, 3–4 Saudi Arabia, 21, 49, 52, 61, 99, 111, 144 science, 142–43, 144 education, 154–55 modern, 143 sectarianism, 73–74 Seib, Gerald, 54 self-destruction, 42–43 Senate, U.S., 63, 85 sensory deprivation, 134–35 Shiites, 52–53 Singh, Manmohan, 19 Sino-Indian War, 20 slavery, 3, 34, 36, 51 end of, 34, 35, 36 mental, 34–35, 101–25 Slim, Carlos, 11 Smith, Adam, 8–9 social Darwinism, 157 social media, 105, 107, 145–47 Social Security, 39, 156–57 solidarity, 38–41, 146–47, 159 South Africa, 21, 50–51 apartheid, 71 South America, 6, 7, 57, 60, 161 Southeast Asia, 4, 60 South Korea, 9, 17 Spain, 4, 6, 33, 87 sports, college, 154–55 Stack, Joseph, 25–26, 29 Stalin, Joseph, 61 Stohl, Bev, 105 Stop Online Piracy Act, 107 strategic hamlets, 2 student activism, 73–74 submission and subservience, chains of, 34–43 Summit of the Americas (2012), 160–61 sunbelt, 11, 12 Sunnis, 52–53 Supreme Court, U.S., 70, 150 Buckley v.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

I don’t, by the way, count Obamacare on this list of grand projects. No matter what you think of it as policy, it provided health insurance to about 10 to 15 million of America’s previously uninsured 40 million–plus population, with the exact number for new coverage still evolving. That helps many of those individuals, but it is hardly a game-changer in terms of a broader social trajectory, especially since many of those people already were receiving partial health care coverage and, furthermore, the Obamacare exchanges are experiencing some serious problems. If anything, Obamacare has locked in the basic features of the previous U.S. health care system rather than revolutionizing them.

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See also internet dating matching assortative mating and book sellers and choice and class and crime and dating and eBay effects of influence of and jobs and living standards and marketing and music industry and pets and segregation and strivers Medicaid Medicare Mellander, Charlotta Melville, Herman Merkel, Angela Mexico and migration and outsourcing middle class and the Complacent Class and democracy income and wages and mobility Middle East migration African American and education history of interstate as investment and matching and Mexico and Millennial Generation and regional specialization and Texas See also immigration; mobility Millennial Generation and car culture and entrepreneurialism and grand projects and matching Million Man March Minsky, Hyman mobility and African Americans and American South and childrenn cross-generational cross-state and dynamic society and education effects of mobility decline history of American mobility income and innovation labor in media and the arts and politics reasons for migration reasons for mobility decline and segregation symbolism of Tocqueville on See also migration Moby-Dick (Melville) monopolies Moretti, Enrico Morrison, Van Mortensen, Dale multiculturalism Murray, Charles A. music industry Musk, Elon neo-Nazi movement Newton, Huey P. Nigeria NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) mentality North Africa Obama, Barack Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act Occupy Wall Street movement oil industry oil price shock (1973) On the Road (Kerouac) outsourcing pantheism Pareto, Vilfredo patents Patriot Act pets philanthropy Pinker, Steven Pissarides, Christopher play, outdoor polarization policing political science poverty and mobility and segregation Princeton University prison riots productivity and cities diffusion problem firm-specific productivity and innovation and the internet and matching and mobility productivity per worker hour total factor productivity (TFP) worker productivity profiling progress and the Complacent Class and democracy and innovation and mobility model of history and segregation progressivism protests.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

The states that opted out of the free extension of Medicaid were clustered in the South, reflecting again the racecraft involved in such decisions on compensation of care. Part of the anger against the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as “Obamacare,” is because its benefits are seen in racist terms by some critics as gifts from one black man—who happens to be the president—to the black population. This factor may be most important to less educated whites. Another reason for the anger is that Obamacare raised taxes on the very rich. In fact, the Obama administration raised taxes in two ways: by letting some tax breaks for people earning over half a million dollars to expire, and by the Affordable Care Act provisions raising taxes on the rich to support healthcare for the poor.

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“The Long-Run Effect of Public Housing Demolition on Labor Market Outcomes of Children.” Economics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, March 27. Clotfelter, Charles T. 2004. After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Segregation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CNN. DATE. “Poll: ‘Obamacare’ vs. ‘Affordable Care Act.’” CCN Political Unit. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/27/poll-obamacare-vs-affordable-care-act/. Accessed September 22, 2016. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015. Cohen, Patricia. 2015a. “Gasoline-Tax Increase Finds Little Support.” New York Times, January 2. Cohen, Patricia. 2015b.

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disintermediation, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, future of work, guest worker program, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, new economy, obamacare, pension reform, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, zero-sum game

Greg Orman, A Declaration of Independents: How We Can Break the Two-Party Stranglehold and Restore the American Dream (Austin, TX: Greenleaf Group Book Press, 2016), 61. 28. Lee Drutman, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 31. 29. Russell Berman, “Cruz: Political ‘Tsunami’ Needed to Win Fight to Defund Obamacare,” The Hill, August 25, 2013, https://thehill.com/video/sunday-shows/318647-cruz-tsunami-needed-to-defund-obamacare. 30. For overview of the shutdown, see Walter J. Oleszek, “The Government Shutdown of 2013: A Perspective,” in Party and Procedure in the United States Congress, 2nd Edition, ed. Jacob Straus and Matthew Glassman (2017). 31. Leigh Ann Caldwell, “Architect of the Brink: Meet the Man behind the Government Shutdown,” CNN, updated October 1, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/house-tea-party/index.html. 32.

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With the exception of Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, who did not vote. United States Senate. “Roll Call Vote 11th Congress – 1st Session,” https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111&session=1&vote=00396. 34. Tessa Berenson, “Reminder: The House Voted to Repeal Obamacare More Than 50 Times,” Time, March 24, 2017, http://time.com/4712725/ahca-house-repeal-votes-obamacare/. 35. For a great analysis of show votes, see Frances Lee, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). 36. Former Republican Senator Olympia Snowe put it best when she said, “Much of what occurs in Congress today is what is often called ‘political messaging.’

America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom by Meghan McCain, Michael Black

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, Columbine, fear of failure, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, white picket fence

They live in a comfortable but creaky townhouse on the south side of London, and every summer they come to the States to summer at an old beach house her family has had since the thirties. I’m curious to hear about the British National Health Service, a single-payer system, which has become a bogeyman here in the United States. The Republicans routinely point to Canada and England as examples of the path on which Obamacare is leading us, and never in a complimentary fashion. They never say, for example, “Obamacare will make our health care system like England’s! And it will be great! Cucumber sandwiches for everybody!” Whether or not we are ultimately headed for a single-payer system I have no idea, but I am curious to hear what Jessica’s experience with it is like, since she’s dealt with both the American and British systems.

…

Depending on which civic organization you choose to believe, the world’s first rodeo was either in Payson, Arizona, in 1884, Pecos, Texas, in 1883, or Deer Trail, Colorado, in 1869. But I’m not going to quibble with the residents of Prescott because I am a guest in their town and because they all have guns. While we’re cleaning up after lunch, the conversation turns to health care, or specifically “Obamacare,” which Jackie hates. Jackie hates Obama generally and his new health care law specifically. Even Jackie, hard ass Jackie, is willing to concede that there are parts of the Obama health care plan she likes. The preexisting condition stuff, for example. But she worries that our health care system, “the finest in the world,” will become like Mexico’s.

…

I’m in no mood, so of course the minute my butt hits the cushiony blue seats, Michael starts spewing some nonsense about health care and we begin the morning by bickering like an old married couple. By now he must be fully aware that health care and national defense are possibly the two issues that I am most conservative and he is most liberal about. Well, even though I’m pretty sure there’s a big brick wall in my future, we start discussing Obamacare on the bus on the way to the swamp tour. Michael’s argument starts with Republicans being heartless, and that we all need “to give a little more for the common good,” and that “health care should be free to every American.” I naturally feel like Uncle Scrooge when I say that universal health care would bankrupt this country if enacted into law.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Smith’s pessimism is proving to be warranted: under the HITECH Act, on top of the $30 billion in implementation incentives, the federal government has spent nearly $600 million promoting health information exchanges, but there isn’t terribly much to show for it. There are a few successful exchanges, such as ones in Indianapolis and upstate New York, but they remain distinct outliers. What kind of incentives might actually succeed in creating a viable information exchange system? Under Obamacare, the federal government and private insurers are actively pushing new payment models that promote the formation of large organizations that will share the responsibility for populations of patients and be accountable for the quality and efficiency of care. The hope is that these new models, called accountable care organizations (ACOs), will create markets in which hospitals and clinics will want—strike that, need—to move information around.

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You just can’t ask people to make multibillion-dollar investments in things that have no short-term return on investment.” Blumenthal is particularly proud of the major bump in IT adoption that began during his tenure at ONC. The penetration of electronic health records in American clinics and hospitals went from about 10 percent the year before he took office to about 70 percent in 2014. While Obamacare itself, with its shift toward payment for results rather than visits and procedures, might have inspired a modest uptick, few people question that the bulk of the increase can be chalked up to Blumenthal’s initiatives.29 If Job One was to digitize the American healthcare system, then Blumenthal’s plan and his tenure at ONC were overwhelmingly successful.

…

Before he left Atlanta, Gross had created a Google Calendar–based scheduling system, an improved paging system, and a new way of accessing the medical literature for his Emory classmates and faculty. In 2008, just as David Blumenthal, Bob Kocher, and Zeke Emanuel were beginning to hammer out the details of HITECH and Obamacare in Washington’s corridors of power, Gross was still a medical student, studying anatomy and biochemistry, but transfixed by the excitement of the presidential campaign, particularly the debate over healthcare. He decided to take a break from medical school to obtain an MBA at Harvard, so that he could better understand healthcare economics and policy and make some contribution to them.

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

The Dodd-Frank Act is an invitation to nationalize the large banks as too big to fail and to marginalize the small ones as too little to succeed. Free of all legislative constraint, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is regulating all consumer finance, from investment advisors to pawn shops. Obamacare (also known as the Affordable Care Act) is extending its web of taxation and control over all healthcare, requiring sixteen thousand new Internal Revenue Service agents to make it all work. Redressing the crisis of inequality will be expanded taxation of capital and savings capped by a progressive wealth tax—a program that may begin with Hillary Clinton’s proposed hike in the tax on capital gains.

…

Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy (New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2015), epilogue. 4.Maurice McTigue, “Rolling Back Government, Lessons from New Zealand,” Hillsdale College Imprimis 33, no. 4 (April 2004). 5.George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World’s Most Besieged State Is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2012). 6.Steve Forbes with Elizabeth Ames, Reviving America: How Repealing Obamacare, Replacing the Tax Code, and Reforming the Fed will Restore Hope and Prosperity (New York, NY: McGraw Hill Education, 2016), 124 and passim. 7.Metcalfe’s Law ordains that the power and value of a network rises roughly by the square of the number of compatible devices linked to it. 8.Judy Shelton, Fixing the Dollar Now: Why U.S.

…

See Hayek money hedge funds, 4, 11, 102, 104, 129, 170 Heritage Foundation, xiv Hezbollah, 46 high-powered money, 32, 36, 53 Holdren, John, 3 Homo economicus, xvii–xx Hong Kong, 30, 36, 42, 49, 106 Huawei, 158 hypertrophy of finance, 13, 57, 87–89, 95, 97–111, 125, 132, 167–68, 170–71 I Iceland, 94, 117 Iger, Robert, 122 Immelt, Jeffrey, 130 income taxes, 91, 152 index funds, 131, 171 India, 45, 106, 118, 158 Indonesia, 110 Industrial Revolution, xx, 100, 158 second industrial revolution, 8 inequality, 3–6, 11, 23, 43, 53, 59, 87–92, 95–96, 106, 125 inflation, xi, 36–37, 62, 78–80, 85, 92, 138, 142, 146–47, 149, 153, 155–57, 159, 162 China and, 29–30 correctives to, 81–82, 92, 152, 157 debtors and, 80, 116 departure from gold standard and, 11 gold and, 22, 111–12, 158 Japan and, 108 monetarism and, 30, 33, 35, 53, 61, 79 recovery from Great Recession and, xvi, 56, 58 Volcker and, xv, 110 information age, 106 information economy, 1, 9, 93, 100, 149, 172 information theory, xviii, 20, 24, 31, 59, 62, 64, 71–72, 77, 84, 93, 95, 133, 138, 140, 143–44, 163, 168–69, 171, 174 initial public offerings (IPOs), 49–50, 115, 119–22, 154 injustice, 25–26 Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), 88–89 Intel, 8, 119, 121, 169 interest rates, 19–20, 22, 35, 66, 109 Fed control of, 15, 24, 80, 114, 123, 132 financial recoveries and, xv high rates, xi, xv–xvi immorality of, 141–42 index of time, 14, 21, 24, 61, 113, 124–25, 141–42, 170 instability of, 11, 13–14, 155 low rates, xvii, 155 zero interest rates, 15, 24, 26, 54, 61, 92–94, 108, 110, 114, 123–25, 132, 142 Internal Revenue Service, 6 International System of Units (SI), 144–46 Internet, the, xviii, 13, 50, 53, 63–64, 73, 78, 80–81, 103, 113, 139, 144, 153, 170, 174 China and, 46–48 digital currencies and, 44, 67, 69–70, 72, 158–61, 163, 172 economy of, 13, 160–61 “internet of things,” 70 Internet Protocols, 8, 71 regulation of, xxii, 5 software stack, xxi, 170 spam, 70 iPhones, 18, 84, 153 Iran, 46 Ireland, 55, 57 Islam, 47, 141 Ivy League, xiv, 26 J Jackson Hole, WY, xvii Janszen, Eric, 107 Japan, 30, 36, 40, 88, 94, 99, 108 Jiang Mianheng, 43 Jiang Zemin, 42–43, 48–49, 51 JPMorgan Chase, 127 K Kahneman, Daniel, xx Keynes, John Maynard, 10, 49, 98 Keynesians, Keynesianism, xviii, xx, 34, 59, 147, 150, 154, 171–72 Kling, Arnold, 150 knowledge, xvii, 17, 93, 129, 131 learning and, 9 source of growth, 9, 14 suppression of, 15 wealth as knowledge, 17–18, 23–24, 31, 64, 100, 106, 108, 117, 124, 132–34, 140, 161, 163, 167–69, 172 Knowledge and Power (Gilder), 17 Koch brothers, xiv Krugman, Paul, xiv–xvii, 35, 54–56, 89, 98–99, 150 Kurzweil, Ray, 18, 169 Kwarteng, Kwasi, 10, 66 L Las Vegas, NV, xiv Laughlin, Robert, 133–34 learning, 127, 129 crucial to knowledge and wealth, 1, 9, 17–18, 23, 32, 64, 108, 124, 145, 163, 169 source of growth, 17, 22, 24, 26, 84–85, 100, 108, 117, 131, 134, 138, 140, 158, 169, 172 suppression of, 21, 24, 62, 67, 128–29, 131, 133, 144, 155 learning curves, xix, 18–19, 22, 37, 63, 75, 84–85, 95, 130, 155–56, 160–61, 169 Left, the, xx, 4, 86–87, 89 Lehrman, Lewis, 37 Lenovo, 158 libertarians, xiv–xvii, 30–31, 51, 53, 81 Likud Party, 153 Linear Technology, 119 Lipsky, Seth, 13 London, 8, 105, 134–35 M Mach, Ernst, 144 Main Street, xvii, xxii, 56, 87, 113–25, 127–29, 132, 149, 164, 170–71 Malpass, David, 58 Malthusianism, 3–4 Maoism, 30 Mao Zedong, 42, 47, 154 Marxism, Marxists, xviii, 3–4, 6 Mauldin, John, 40 McAdam, Lowell, 122 McKinnon, Ronald, 31, 97 McTigue, Maurice, 152 Medicaid, 15, 123 Medicare, 15 mergers and acquisitions (M&As), 121 Microsoft, 8, 119–20, 122, 160 middle class, the, 4, 118 anxieties in, xiii Chinese members of, 116 economic well-being of, xxii, 115, 120 harmed by economic policies, xxii, 15, 58–59, 66, 91–92, 95, 113–14, 119–20, 128 Mises, Ludwig von, xx, 102, 139–40 monetarism, monetarists Chinese rejection of, 38, 43–44, 51, 154 Milton Friedman and, 29, 32 tenets of theory, 32–38, 59, 92, 156, 171–72 versus information theory of money, 31, 61, 155 Monetary History of the United States (Friedman), 99 money connection to time, 9, 14, 17, 21–24, 61–68, 70–72, 74, 85–86, 93–96, 113, 134, 137–47, 150, 154–55, 157–58, 160–61, 163, 170–73 as measuring stick, 9, 21, 24, 49, 59, 63–64, 67, 73, 75, 78, 96, 108–9, 144–46, 157, 160, 173 money supply, 20, 29–37, 58, 80, 92–93, 98–99, 158 monopoly money, xxii, 1, 34, 53, 58, 81, 92, 124, 149, 155, 157, 163–64, 167, 170–72 Moore, Gordon, 169 Moore, Steve, xiv–xv, xvii Moore’s Law, 18, 64, 160, 169 Morgan Stanley, 127 Mundell, Robert, 43–44, 51 Mundell International University of Entrepreneurship, 44 mutual funds, 130 N Nadella, Satya, 122 NASDAQ exchange, 49, 121 National Bureau of Economic Research, 56 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, xxii National Review, 35 Netflix, 122 Netscape, 115 Nevada, 55 New Deal, 87 New Hampshire, 2, 41 Newton, Isaac, xx, 63, 136 New York, NY, 74, 95 New York Times, xiv, 54, 122 New Zealand, 152–53 Nixon, Richard, 9–10, 12, 41, 98–99 Nobel Prize, xx, 29, 31, 36, 43, 89, 133, 150 Nordhaus, William, 19 North America, 118 North Dakota, 55 North Korea, 46 O Obama, Barack, xi–xii, xv–xvi, xxi, 4 economy under, xi–xiii, xvi presidential administration of, 3, 40, 99 Obamacare, 6 Office of Price Administration, 150 oil, 11–12, 81, 83, 116, 158, 168 One Percent, xvii, 3 Oracle, 119 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 82 P Page, Larry, 122 Palantir, 121 Palo Alto, CA, 118, 171 Parks, Larry, 157 People’s Bank of China, 48 People’s Liberation Army, 42 Piketty, Thomas, 3–6, 9, 15, 19, 87–96, 110, 141–42, 150 polymerase chain reaction (PCR), xxi, 8 Ponnuru, Ramesh, 35 Popper, Karl, 89, 169 Popular Economics (Tamny), 11 Portugal, 55 principal trading funds (PTFs), 102, 104 producer price index (PPI), 81 Progress and Poverty (George), 90 Q Qualcomm, 115, 119, 160 quantitative easing, 14, 54, 80, 114, 123, 147, 157 R Rand, Ayn, xviii, 137 Reagan, Ronald, xi, xiv–xvii, 12, 40–41, 51, 115 real estate, xvi–xvii, 11, 13, 26, 37, 55, 66, 88, 90, 92–95, 117, 168, 173 Reason, 63 regulation, xiii–xiv, xvi, xix, xxii, 6, 26, 29, 31, 35, 39, 50, 57, 80, 88, 91, 93–94, 96, 122, 128, 130, 151, 154, 167 Reich, Robert, xxi Republican Party, Republicans, xii–xiv, xvii, 25, 35, 150 Right, the, 40, 89 Robinson, Arthur, 48 Romer, Christina, 99–100 Rueff, Jacques, 36–37 S Samsung, 158 Samuelson, Paul, 10, 150 Sanders, Bernie, xxii San Francisco, CA, 95 Sarbanes-Oxley, 49, 122 Satoshi Nakamoto, 64, 72–73, 172 Schacht, Hjalmar, 110 Schiff, Peter, 53 Schumpeter, Joseph, 83 science of information, 17 second industrial revolution, 8 second law of thermodynamics, 62, 142 secular stagnation, 3, 26, 56, 89, 91–92, 150–51.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Reflecting on some surprising alliances between today’s technology giants and the lobbying groups and of the world’s major extractive resource companies, Ames (2015) writes that even if we still give Google and Facebook the benefit of the doubt, and allow that their investments in the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute weren’t directly motivated by killing Obamacare and throwing millions of struggling Americans back into the ranks of the uninsured and prematurely dying—nevertheless, they are accessories, and very consciously so. Big Tech’s larger political goals are in alignment with the old extraction industry’s: undermining the countervailing power of government and public politics to weaken its ability to impede their growing dominance over their portions of the economy, and to tax their obscene stores of cash.

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Bibliography Abel, Andrew B., Ben S. Bernanke, and Dean Croushore. 2008. Macroeconomics. 3rd ed. Boston: Pearson. Allen, Katie. 2013. “Gold Price Volatility Hits Pawnbroker’s Profits.” The Guardian (September). http://www.theguardian.com/. Ames, Mark. 2015. “Google Is Helping to Fund the Group That’s Trying to Kill Obamacare in the Supreme Court.” Pando Daily (March 18). http://pando.com/. Andolfatto, David. 2013. “Why Gold and Bitcoin Make Lousy Money.” Economist’s View (April). http://economistsview.typepad.com. Andreessen, Marc. 2014. “Why Bitcoin Matters.” New York Times (January). http://dealbook.nytimes.com/.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

Here is how Edsall, the New York Times columnist, summarized the progressive political morality of full employment in December 2013: The economics of survival have forced millions of men, women, and children to rely on “pity-charity liberal capitalism” [Edsall is here quoting Konczal]. The state has now become the resource of last resort, consigning just the people progressives would like to turn into a powerful force for reform to a condition of subjugation—living out their lives on government subsidies like Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and now Obamacare.1 The only alternative to this vaguely, benignly fascistic version of liberalism, according to Edsall and Konczal, is a “bold” public policy commitment to full employment, presumably because more jobs mean less dependence on the state for income supplements, aka transfer payments, entitlements, and government subsidies.

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Then notice how a potential “force for reform” is made pliant, docile, and inert because it doesn’t just receive, it relies on government subsidies. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think a Tea Party enthusiast wrote this paragraph after finishing Atlas Shrugged, particularly in view of the reference to Obamacare as a government subsidy that will subjugate the poor, to be sure, but also create a permanent constituency for the Democrats, the party of “pity-charity liberal capitalism.” From this standpoint, there’s no middle ground between work, on the one hand, and dependence on the other—between having a job and being subjugated by the state (or the party).

Exercise Every Day: 32 Tactics for Building the Exercise Habit (Even If You Hate Working Out) by S.J. Scott

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, fear of failure, Inbox Zero, Kickstarter, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, Skype

While I do recommend joining a gym to have an alternative solution for when the weather is inclement, you should always be budget-conscious. When the cost of shoes or exercise equipment makes you balk, compare it to the medical costs people incur because they have neglected their bodies and avoided exercise for a lifetime. Even in the days of Obamacare (or specifically in the days of Obamacare, depending upon your financial situation), healthcare can be really, really, really expensive. How much better is it to invest in your health and well-being now than to pay for painful and expensive medical care in the years to come? HOW TO IMPLEMENT Step One: Use sites like eBay and Craigslist to search for lightly used equipment or check with family and friends to see if they happen to have stuff in their basement you could borrow or purchase on the cheap.

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day by John H. Johnson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, Black Swan, business intelligence, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, obamacare, p-value, PageRank, pattern recognition, publication bias, QR code, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, statistical model, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons, Yogi Berra

,” CNBC, accessed August 16, 2015, http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/13/are-red-or-blue-states-better-job-creators.html; “Climate Battle Will Likely Divide Red States and Blue States Down a Green Line,” National Journal, accessed August 15, 2016, http://www.nationaljournal.com/next-america/newsdesk/climate-epa-regulation-obama-states-20150803; Steve Benen, “‘Obamacare’ Thrives in Nation’s Largest Blue State,” the Maddow Blog, accessed August 16, 2015, http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/obamacare-thrives-nations-largest-blue-state. 4. All maps are from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/. Mark Newman, “Maps of the 2012 US Presidential Election Results,” from the personal page associated with the University of Michigan website, updated November 8, 2012, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/.

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The Electoral College is an example of aggregated data—a type of summary statistic that can often be misleading because it can mask variation in the data. You’ve probably seen media reports that analyze all of the supposed differences between red states and blue states, with stories highlighting differences in everything from job creation to environmental regulations to Obamacare.3 But is there really that much of a divide in terms of the way we think, act, and vote? Or will we see a different story as we go deeper into the data? Let’s take a closer look at the voting data, starting with a map of the 2012 election results (figure 3-1) from Mark Newman at the University of Michigan (note that red is light gray and blue is dark gray in this map).4 When you look at red states versus blue states, you see lots of divisions.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

His successor immediately set out to dismantle most of what comprised his legacy. Whether motivated by principle, petulance, or ill-disguised racism, Republican efforts to undo all that Obama had accomplished require us to reinterpret his presidency—even before the initial interpretation has fully formed. If Obamacare, the Paris accord on climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, and restoring U.S. diplomatic ties with Havana don’t define his legacy, what does? Allow me to suggest one possibility: Our forty-fourth president’s signature achievement was to briefly prolong the life of the Emerald City consensus. He did this by temporarily propping up elements of that consensus already showing signs of impending failure and pivoting toward a domestic freedom agenda to which his immediate predecessors had given only intermittent attention.

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He promised to reauthorize torture and “load up” the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo “with some bad dudes.”23 He vowed to quit NATO, abandon the Iran nuclear deal, move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and jettison every trade deal that did not demonstrably benefit the U.S. economy. He would terminate Obamacare on “day one,” appoint pro-life judges, and revive “Merry Christmas” as a holiday greeting. By unfurling the black banner of “America First,” he implicitly subverted the foundational myth of contemporary history—World War II as a “Good War” that gave credence to America’s providentially assigned liberating mission.

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See globalized neoliberalism neo-populism Neptune Spear, Operation New Deal New Hampshire primary New Orleans, Battle of New Republic new world order Bill Clinton and Buchanan and Bush Jr. and Bush Sr. and globalization and Wilson and New York Daily News New York Times Niebuhr, Reinhold Nixon, Richard Nobel Peace Prize Noriega, Manuel North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea Novak, Robert nuclear arms Iran and North Korea and Nuremberg tribunal Obama, Barack accomplishments of Afghanistan and bin Laden and economy and election of 2008 and freedom and Hillary Clinton and Iraq and Nobel Prize and primaries of 2016 and ranking of RMA and Trump and Obamacare Obergefell v. Hodges Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Occupy Movement opioid crisis Oslo Peace Accords Paine, Thomas Pakistan Panama Paris Accord on climate change Partisan Review Pataki, George patriarchy Paul, Rand Pax Americana globalized capitalism and policing of peace dividend peace-through-dominion Pearl Harbor attacks pensions People Perot, H.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

In Mindful Work, David Gelles hails Aetna’s supposedly benevolent CEO, Mark Bertolini, for offering mindfulness training to a third of its fifty thousand employees.30 The program produced annual per capita productivity gains of $3000, while cutting employee healthcare costs by $2000, saving $6.3 million in total. Mindful employees are good for big business. Meanwhile, the supposedly mindful Aetna lied about its reasons for withdrawing from Obamacare, which had expanded access to medical insurance. While the company said that mounting losses had required it to pull out of Obamacare exchanges in eleven states, the real reason, according to US District Judge John Bates, was “to evade judicial scrutiny over its merger with Humana,” a $34 billion deal which had been blocked by the Department of Justice for antitrust reasons one month earlier.31 Corporate mindfulness programs don’t train their participants to challenge business practices — that would require a search outside oneself, something modern mindfulness has studiously avoided.

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Vision Books, 1982. 27 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1006978911496 28 Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. Oxford University Press, 2001. 29 http://nomosjournal.org/2013/08/searching-for-integrity/ 30 David Gelles, Mindful Work. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. 31 https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/24/investing/aetna-obamacare-humana-merger/ 32 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/opinion/sunday/Meditation-productivity-work-mindfulness.html chapter Nine: Mindful Merchants 1 https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/industry-research/2018-global-wellness-economy-monitor/ 2 https://www.mindful.org/its-not-mcmindfulness/ 3 https://www.awakenedworldpilgrimage.com/ 4 https://www.whil.com/companies 5 Edward L.

Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Helicobacter pylori, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Joan Didion, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microaggression, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, phenotype, pre–internet, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, stem cell, TED Talk, women in the workforce

Kaiser Family Foundation, Women’s Health Insurance Coverage, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, October 21, 2016, http://kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/womens-health-insurance-coverage-fact-sheet/. Health care reform also corrected . . . Jessica Arons and Lucy Panza, “Top 10 Obamacare Benefits at Stake for Women,” ThinkProgress, May 24, 2012, https://thinkprogress.org/top-10-obamacare-benefits-at-stake-for-women-5ff541dfdf53#.36n0gciws. Insurers are now required . . . “Preventive Services Covered Under the Affordable Care Act,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, September 23, 2010, www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts-and-features/fact-sheets/preventive-services-covered-under-aca/.

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Insurers are now required to cover basic preventive care that’s critical to women’s health, like contraception, annual well-woman visits, testing for sexually transmitted infections, breastfeeding support and supplies, and domestic violence screenings, without any co-pays or deductibles. They’re no longer allowed to charge women higher premiums than men for the same coverage simply because they’re women, a practice known as “gender rating” common in the pre-Obamacare days. They can’t deny women coverage for “preexisting conditions,” like having had a Cesarean section, being pregnant, or experiencing domestic violence. And they can no longer refuse to offer maternity-care coverage, as the vast majority of plans on the individual market previously did. Still, 11.2 million women, many of them low-income women of color, particularly immigrant and Latina women, remain uninsured in the United States.

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One of the unfortunate consequences of having to constantly safeguard reproductive health care from threats originating outside of the medical system is that problems within it tend to get overshadowed. For example, in recent years, women’s health advocates have found themselves in the ridiculous position of having to defend Obamacare’s requirement that insurers cover contraception—which is used by 99 percent of sexually active women at some point—without a co-pay. Were we not stuck having such 1960s-era debates over our right to birth control, we might spend more time demanding better birth control. More than half a century after the pill was invented, the range of birth control options remains remarkably limited, dominated by varying types of hormonal contraceptives that can cause significant side effects.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

$3 trillion per year: Chad Terhune, “U.S. Health Spending Hits $3 Trillion as Obamacare and Rising Drug Costs Kick In,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2015, www.​latimes.​com/​business/​healthcare/​la-​fi-​health-​spending-​increase-​20151202-​story.​html. Nearly one dollar of every five: Scott Thomas, “Nation’s Total Personal Income Approaches $13 Trillion,” Business Journals, December 4, 2012, www.​bizjournals.​com/​bizjournals/​on-​numbers/​scott-​thomas/​2012/​12/​nations-​total-​personal-​income.​html. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare: US Department of Labor, “The Affordable Care Act and Wellness Programs,” fact sheet, accessed January 9, 2016, www.​dol.​gov/​ebsa/​newsroom/​fswellnessprogram.​html.

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It involves growing surveillance, including lots of data pouring in from the Internet of Things—the Fitbits, Apple Watches, and other sensors that relay updates on how our bodies are functioning. The idea, as we’ve seen so many times, springs from good intentions. In fact, it is encouraged by the government. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, invites companies to engage workers in wellness programs, and even to “incentivize” health. By law, employers can now offer rewards and assess penalties reaching as high as 50 percent of the cost of coverage. Now, according to a study by the Rand Corporation, more than half of all organizations employing fifty people or more have wellness programs up and running, and more are joining the trend every week.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

People close to the system can witness the abuses being carried out right in front of them. Yet it is all but impossible to muster political mandates for action to squeeze the abuses out of the system. Why do Americans find it so uniquely difficult to act effectively in the public interest? We saw an answer during the Obamacare debate of 2010. Obamacare was attacked as “socialism.” Yet the people most responsive to these attacks—older voters—were themselves already enrolled (or looking forward soon to enrolling) in Medicare, a system much more socialistic than anything contemplated by the Affordable Care Act. In fact, a lot of the anger against the Affordable Care Act flowed from seniors’ and soon-to-be-seniors’ anxiety lest the Affordable Care Act cut into the funding for their socialized medicine.

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Index The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools. Abadi, Haider al-, 40 abortion, 43, 123 abuse of power, 127 Adenauer, Konrad, 178 Affordable Care Act (ACA, 2010; “Obamacare”), 129–30, 134–36, 138, 140 Afghanistan, 41, 43, 45, 172 Africa, 108, 157, 166, 174 African Americans, 16, 80, 107, 117–18, 123, 150, 182 agriculture, 13, 122, 161, 163 AIVD (Dutch intelligence), 45 Alabama, 80, 123, 184 Alaska, 122, 123 Alfa Bank, 126 Alinsky, Saul, 19 allies, 127, 171, 177, 180 al-Qaeda, 96 Al Smith dinner, 100–101 Alternative for Germany, 66 Amazon rain forest, 161 America First, 47, 49–50 America First Action SuperPAC, 64 American Conservative, 59 American Enterprise Institute, 147–48 American exceptionalism, 175–76 American Spectator, 176 Americans with Disability Act (1990), 130 Anderson, John, 105 Angola, 108 animal rights movement, 61 Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 57 Antifa, 60, 69 anti-majoritarianism, 71–86 anti-Semitism, 56–57, 61, 197 anti-vaxxers, 66, 196–97 Appalachia, 138 Applebaum, Anne, 174 AR-15 rifles, 106 Arab Barometer, 172–73 Arendt, Hannah, 147 Arizona, 81–82, 99, 118, 123, 185 Assad, Bashar al-, 88–89 Assange, Julian, 196 Associated Press, 55 asylum seekers, 22, 108, 145 Atatürk, Kemal, 88 Atlantic, 20, 33 Australia, 41, 44–45, 162, 177 authoritarianism, 44–45, 48–49, 61–62, 70, 145, 176–77, 189, 193, 199 Axios, 40 baby boomers, 14, 77, 135–36, 142, 150 Baghdad, embassy attacks, 172 Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al-, 95–97 Bahrain, 26 Baier, Bret, 48 Baker, Howard, 85 banking and finance, 25–26, 174 Bannon, Steve, 88–89, 113 Barr, Bill, 36, 125 Baton Rouge, 80 Beck, Glenn, 75, 83, 149–50 Benczkowski, Brian, 126 Bennet, Michael, 107 Bevin Matt, 138 Biden, Hunter, 89 Biden, Joe, 88, 107, 113, 126 bigotry, 6, 111–12, 118 birth rates, 147–48, 167–68 Black Panthers, 61 Blasey Ford, Christine, 109 Bolsonaro, Jair, 64–65, 162 Bolton, John, 189 Boston Globe, 43 Bowers, Robert, 56–57 Brazil, 65, 161–62, 179 Breitbart, 58, 59, 63, 149 Brexit, 41, 45, 63, 143, 173 Bridgeland, John, 151 Britain (United Kingdom), 36, 40–42, 44–45, 64, 97, 143, 156, 160, 162, 177 British Crown Prosecution Service, 36 British National Health Service, 135, 137, 140 British Parliament, 98 British Royal Society, 151 Bruce Mansfield plant, 118 bubonic plague, 156 Buchanan, James, 198 Burisma company, 89 Bush, George H.W.

Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants by Bethany McLean

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, crony capitalism, housing crisis, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, negative equity, obamacare, Pershing Square Capital Management, race to the bottom, Savings and loan crisis

Quarter after quarter, they posted stunning multibillion-dollar losses, which required huge draws from Treasury. In early 2009, the Treasury amended its agreement to increase the total amount of funding available for Fannie and Freddie from $200 billion to $400 billion—half the 10-year estimated cost of Obamacare. On Christmas Eve, 2009, the Treasury amended the agreement again to remove any cap on the funding for the next three years. In addition, the Federal Reserve began to buy Fannie and Freddie securities to help the perception that they were safe. According to Paul Willen, a senior economist at the Boston Federal Reserve, between 2008 and 2014 the Fed would purchase $2.8 trillion of agency mortgage-backed securities.

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Fannie and Freddie provide services that are absolutely essential to the American way of life,” he wrote in the fund’s annual report. “They help make the popular 30-year fixed-rate mortgage available and affordable. They provide liquidity and stability to the nation’s housing finance system—during good and, especially, in bad times. No one does it better.” He compares housing reform to Obamacare. “Obama can get a do-over when he says, ‘You can keep your insurance!’ ‘Oops, you can’t keep your insurance!’” he says. “But you cannot mess up the plumbing of housing finance. If you do, within two weeks, credit will totally dry up. No one will be able to get a mortgage.” There is disagreement among investors on many details of how a plan would work.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

., ‘Patient choice and private provision decreased public provision and increased inequalities in Scotland: A case study of elective hip arthroplasty', Journal of Public Health, 39(3) (2017), pp. 593-60. Kliff, S., ‘Meet Serco, the private firm getting $1.2 billion to process your Obamacare application', Washington Post, 16 July 2013: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/16/meet-serco-the-private-firm-getting-1-2-billion-to-process-your-obamacare-application/?utm_term=.33eeeadf4a01 Kokalitcheva, K., ‘Uber now has 40 million monthly riders worldwide', Fortune, 20 October 2016: http://fortune.com/2016/10/20/uber-app- riders/ Krueger, A. O., ‘The political economy of the rent-seeking society', American Economic Review, 64(3) (1974), pp. 291-303.

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Other cases include failure to lock doors, poor hygiene and a reduction in staffing levels.'61 The fines, however, are minuscule in proportion to the profits made by both Serco and G4S - and such companies, rather than being penalized for carelessness and reckless cost-cutting, are being rewarded with more contracts. The applications procedures for Obamacare were outsourced in 2013 to Serco in a $1.2 billion contract.62 Indeed, US Federal government outsourcing contracts to such companies are rapidly rising. A recent GAO report shows that in 2000 contract spending was $200 billion, while in 2015 it was $438 billion.63 This amount represented almost 40 per cent of government's discretionary spending.

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Crouch, The Knowledge Corrupters: Hidden Consequences of the Financial Takeover of Public Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). 61. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/15/g4s-fined-100-times-since-2010-prison-contracts 62. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/16/meet-serco-the-private-firm-getting-1-2-billion-to-process-your-obamacare-application/?utm_term=.0ffc214237a8 63. United States Government Accountability Office, ‘Contracting data analysis; Assessment of government-wide trends', March 2017: https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683273.pdf. 64. As reported in J. A. Sekera, The Public Economy in Crisis: A Call for a New Public Economics (Springer International Publishing, 2016); J.

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

Annual borrowing costs for the United States since 2008 have hovered around 1.8 percent, thanks to an overly accommodating Fed, which allowed a dysfunctional Congress and the administration of former President Barack Obama to kick the responsibility down the road. Massive spending programs, however ill conceived, got funded with little opposition. Obamacare, anyone? According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), since 2008 federal debt held by the public has nearly doubled and now stands at 75 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). If this lunacy doesn’t end, debt will be 110 percent of GDP by 2036, exceeding the post–World War II peak of 106 percent.

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Fisher credited state and local governments whose tax, spending, and regulatory policies were oriented toward job creation. But the Fed continued to look at the nation’s unemployment metrics as a whole without examining what was working at the state level. In addition to businesses not knowing what the Fed was going to do, Obamacare, signed into law by the president on March 23, 2010, added another level of uncertainty, encouraging businesses to wait until the dust settled. Even before the August 2012 FOMC meeting, Bernanke began making dozens of phone calls to FOMC members to gather support for a proposal he planned to present at the September meeting.

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Why, then, had the Texas economy surpassed: FRBD: Richard Fisher, “The Limits of the Powers of Central Banks (With Metaphoric References to Edvard Munch’s Scream and Sir Henry Raeburn’s The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch (speech, St. Andrews University, June 5, 2012), www.dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2012/fs120605.cfm. In addition to businesses: Obamacare bill: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, obamacarefacts.com/obamacarebill/. Even before the August 2012: Jon Hilsenrath, “How Bernanke Pulled the Fed His Way,” Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2012. “They have gone about their usual”: Mamta Badkar, “Stephen Roach: WSJ Report Jon Hilsenrath Is the Chairman of the Fed,” BusinessInsider.com, July 25, 2012.

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

It was Nixon who made the mistake of hiking the capital gains tax, which had a stultifying effect on the economy, only to be corrected, interestingly enough, when Jimmy Carter signed into law a massive capital gains tax cut, which resulted in an explosion of venture capital in the late 1970s. Politics, then, is highly paradoxical. Any honest appraisal of history shows us that it is not at all a zero-sum exercise and that the battle lines are seldom drawn straight. Some of the ideas in what became known as Obamacare were conceived by scholars at the Heritage Foundation as “conservative” ideas, and even Hayek was in favor of some form of what might be called universal health care. All of which is proof that conservatives can have honest differences of opinion on policy matters, among themselves and with others—or be open to entirely new ideas—without being thought heretical.

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That is the way the system once worked and is how it has worked when we are at our best. But if those might be considered examples of how the legislative process works when it works best, there are many more examples of the system at its abysmal worst. For instance, just because the deliberations over Obamacare in 2009 were a thoroughly partisan affair—and they were—does not mean that Republicans should compound the mistake by planning its repeal behind closed doors. Legislation executed without hearings and written by only one side is always a bad idea, regardless of who does it. It is, simply put, no way to do important work.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

This is reflected by increasing alienation not only from the Republicans, who remain enormously unpopular, but increasingly from President Obama and the Democrats as well.108 According to generational chronicler and long-time Democratic activist Morley Winograd, this alienation stems in part from millennials’ experience with government, which often seems clunky and ineffective. “Millennials,” he notes, “have come to expect the speed and responsiveness from any organization they interact with that today’s high tech makes possible.” Experiences from the NSA scandal to long lines at the DMV to the botched website rollout for Obamacare, he suggests, cause “millennials to be suspicious of, if not downright hostile to, government bureaucracies.”109 Ultimately, most Americans, not only millennials, express concern about the evolving class structure, but they remain skeptical about the government’s ability to do much about it. Less than one in five Americans trusts the federal government.

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Pew Charitable Trusts, Economic Mobility Project, http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-328061. 45. Richard Henderson, “Industry Employment and Output Projections to 2020,” Monthly Labor Review, vol. 135, no. 1 (January 2012): 65–83. 46. Phillip Longman and Paul S. Hewitt, “After Obamacare,” Washington Monthly, January/February 2014, p. 39. Dan Mangan, “Medical Bills Are the Biggest Cause of U.S. Bankruptcies: Study,” CNBC.com, June 25, 2013, http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148; Christina LaMontagne, “NerdWallet Health finds Medical Bankruptcy Accounts for Majority of Personal Bankruptcies,” NerdWallet, March 26, 2014, http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/2014/03/26/medical-bankruptcy. 47.

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Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books,1984), pp. 14, 25. 27. Harrington, Towards a Democratic Left. 28. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, pp. 32–33, 288–89; Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, p. 41. 29. Callahan, Fortunes of Change, p. 13; Kathy Robertson, “Obamacare Means Big Business for Lawyers,” Sacramento Business Journal, February 15, 2013; Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, “Will Law School Students Have Jobs after They Graduate?” Washington Post, October 31, 2012. 30. Chris Moody, “Washington, D.C. Area Now the Richest in the Nation,” Yahoo News, October 19, 2011, http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/washington-d-c-area-now-richest-nation-191806412.html; Chris Edwards, “Overpaid Federal Workers,” Downsizing the Federal Government (Cato Institute), August 2013, http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/overpaid-federal-workers; Charles Lane, “Federal Washington Cashes in on Connections,” Washington Post, January 6, 2014. 31.

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Well, it could be anything from 2.5 metres to 3.49 metres (or maybe something like 2.500 metres to 3.499 metres, depending on rounding conventions). It seems some politicians are as smart as a kid in Year 7. In the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, his White House was trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, as it had been branded. When doing this through legislation proved harder than they seem to have expected, they turned to rounding. For while the ACA laid down the official guidelines for the healthcare market, the Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for writing the regulations based on the ACA.

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But with money, these size units cause problems. This was the basis of a meme passed around in 2015 when Obama’s Affordable Care Act was up and running, but not without teething problems (and the ACA Marketplace insurance plans don’t all cover dental work). An easy target for criticism was the cost of setting up Obamacare. A figure of $360 million was passed around as the cost of introducing the program, which is a large amount of money: over a third of a billion dollars. So people on the right of the political spectrum looked for ways to highlight just how much money it was. And this meme was born: It is easy enough to see what is wrong here. $360 million between 317 million people is not $1 million each, it’s roughly $1 each.

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I appreciate that people are far less critical when it comes to evidence which supports their political beliefs, but I’d like to believe that even the most self-affirming pieces of evidence must at least pass some rudimentary sense-check filter before being promulgated. I cling to the theory that at least the threat of public embarrassment will stop people from endorsing patently implausible claims. Part of me cannot be convinced that anyone arguing for this Obamacare meme is not a troll and in it for the lulz. But to give them the benefit of the doubt, let’s try to work out why this false assertion was so tenacious. My favourite version of this argument online has the protagonist back up the claim that $360 million divided by 317 million people is a million dollars each (with cash to spare) by breaking it down like this: There are 317 people and you have 360 chairs.

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, centre right, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, fulfillment center, invisible hand, labor-force participation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, single-payer health, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

“It was like we had a Dementor from Harry Potter”: Author interview, Jamie Waldrop, Nov. 6, 2017. a former pro baseball player who’d progressed: Author interviews, Terrence Engles, Jan. 4, 2016, and subsequent interviews. “RomneyCare”: Kenneth Rapoza, “If ObamaCare Is So Bad, How Does RomneyCare Survive?,” Forbes, Jan. 20, 2012. sacrificing $6.6 million a day in federal funds: “McAuliffe Pushes Virginia Medicaid expansion After GOP’s Failure to Repeal Obamacare,” CNN Wire, March 27, 2017. Republican House of Delegates speaker William Howell claimed an expansion would take state resources from education, transportation, and public safety, even though 90 percent of the bill would be footed by the federal government.

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Tess and Joey compared notes about dopesickness and black-market Subs (Suboxone or Subutex). They’d arranged to meet once to trade Xanax for crystal meth. Joey had had earlier success with the monthly naltrexone shot, Vivitrol, which is expensive but also impossible to abuse or to divert. Among the thirty-one states that had then expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, some improved access to naltrexone, even giving Vivitrol shots to people before they left prisons and jails, since they understood that addicted users were most vulnerable to overdose death just following a period of nonuse, when tolerance is low. But Joey lost access to the shot when she turned twenty-six and was no longer on her father’s insurance.

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Republican House of Delegates speaker William Howell claimed an expansion would take state resources from education, transportation, and public safety, even though 90 percent of the bill would be footed by the federal government. In states where Medicaid expansions were passed: Noam N. Levey, “Tens of Thousands Died Due to an Opioid Addiction Last Year. With an Obamacare Repeal, Some Fear the Number Will Rise,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2017. It gave coverage to an additional 1.3 million: Sally Satel, “Taking On the Scourge of Opioids,” National Affairs, Summer 2017: 21. political plot that seemed lifted from: Laura Vozzella, “Virginia Democratic Senator Puckett to Resign, Possibly Dooming Push to Expand Medicaid,” Washington Post, June 8, 2014. Political wrangling for favors: Jeff Schapiro, “McAuliffe, Others Pressed Puckett to Stay,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 10, 2014.

Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

Entrepreneurs are already experimenting with an Uber model of delivering some form of healthcare online. In some areas, they will bring a nurse to you to give you a flu shot. Other health services are on the way, causing some to speculate on the return to at-home medical visits paid out of pocket (rather than via insurance). 7 What does this innovation do for centralist solutions like Obamacare? It changes the entire dynamic of service provision. The medical establishment is already protesting that this consumer-based, one-off service approach runs contrary to primary and preventive care—a critique that fails to consider that there is no reason why P2P technology can’t provide such care.

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The producer-consumer relationship is direct, or, at least, much more so than in the past. Anyone can be a news broadcaster. If you don’t like what that news broadcaster is saying, you can make a response news broadcast and post it right where it can be seen by the same people. We can safely predict that under Obamacare, P2P relationships in health-care provision are going to become more common. With insurers under ridiculous amounts of pressure to provide every conceivable service at controlled prices, service is going to decline, giving rise to direct fiduciary relationships between patients and caregivers. We are going to be cooperating directly.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Popular culture and contemporary politics have more or less institutionalized an ascendant model of citizenship quite unlike that once seen as based on the autonomous family—at least in terms of the middle-class college educated. Take the example of a popular political ad of 2010 designed to sell the Affordable Care Act to the general public. The poster boy for the campaign was not analogous to the American Gothic married couple. The iconic advocate became known as “Pajama Boy.” As the Obamacare promoter, a young man in thick, black retro-rimmed glasses was supposed to win our empathy. He appeared confident and self-aware. Yet he was wearing black-and-red-plaid children’s-style pajamas, sipping from a mug, with an all-knowing expression of seasoned certainty on his face. The visual was accompanied by text urging, “Wear pajamas.

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The ad was an inadvertent confirmation of philosophical warnings from Juvenal to Tocqueville about the connection between government subsidies and the creation of perpetual puerility and dependency. His snark “get talking” suggested a strained adult confidence betrayed by the pajamas of his prolonged adolescence. The point, then, is that our elites who sought to sell Obamacare apparently think they best do just that by focusing on a new sort of young ascendant American. They envision the novel American archetype now as a single, urban youth. He is a new hip postcitizen who in truth is an age-old precitizen. He is presumably well educated and glib but dependent on government subsidies and suffering arrested development.

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There is no mention that at the time of the ad, students were collectively well over $1 trillion in debt and often without marketable college degrees.24 In 2012, we are additionally advised, the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (and certainly not a booming private sector short of labor) mostly enabled Julia to find work. Though unmarried, Julia has one child—but no health care worries thanks to the Obamacare effort to collectivize medicine. There is no mention that the absence of a two-parent household puts enormous strain on child raising, not to mention child development itself. Did the father of her child contribute to the latter’s livelihood? In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow Julia to find security, comfort, and the time and wherewithal to volunteer for a communal urban garden—apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source.

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

It is Congress that writes the tax laws. It’s Congress that adds hundreds of new exemptions, allowances, credits, and calculations to the tax code every year. It was Congress that decided to give the IRS responsibility for managing the health insurance subsidies flowing to millions of Americans under the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare)—and then cut the agency’s staff after assigning it this major new task. It was Congress that assigned to the IRS the management of the earned income tax credit (EITC), which has become one of the nation’s largest support programs for low-income Americans. It was Congress that crafted the much-hated alternative minimum tax, which spawned whole new dimensions of complexity, and hours of additional work, for millions of families.

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The whole thing is so complicated that the error rate is 27%, which means one out of four filers, and the IRS, have to spend even more time trying to get it right. This has prompted a mini-industry of tax fraud, with shysters going door-to-door in low-rent neighborhoods offering to fill out the EITC forms (for a fee, of course) whether the client actually qualifies or not. Similarly, the tax credits for people buying health insurance on the ObamaCare exchanges are generally aimed at low-income taxpayers and are also ridiculously complicated. There’s another significant cost as well to all this complexity. A tax code so byzantine that people can’t understand how much they have to pay badly undermines the spirit of voluntary payment that is essential to a successful tax regime.

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The most fully developed was a classic value-added tax put forth by the Texas senator Ted Cruz, who offered himself as the most conservative of all the sixteen Republican hopefuls. Cruz, of course, did not use the tainted words “value-added tax.” He called his plan, alternately, the “simple flat tax” or the “16% business flat tax” (BFT). He promised that his new tax would eliminate the corporate income tax, the estate and gift tax, the ObamaCare taxes, and the payroll taxes that pay for Social Security and Medicare (“while maintaining full funding for Social Security and Medicare”). He insisted that his plan would allow Washington to set everybody’s personal income tax rate at 10%—a major tax cut for most Americans—while maintaining the tax deductions Americans like best.

The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance) by Feng Gu

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, carbon tax, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Great Moderation, value at risk

MITIGATE ACCOUNTING COMPLEXITY Here is the Lev-Gu law of the dynamics of regulation: Regulatory systems strive to be even more complex than the structures or institutions they were charged to regulate. A race to the bottom, so to speak. If you doubt the universality of our law, think of the 1,990 pages of the original 2009 Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare), ballooning to about 20,000 pages four years later,31 or the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, originally at 848 pages, and mushrooming to 13,789 pages as of July 2013 (and still going strong—the length, we mean).32 And not only in America: No regulatory agency rivals the European Union in scope, intrusion, and complexity of regulation.

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He proposed providing a triple-column income statement: a column informing on fact-based revenues and expenses, a second to summarize the estimates in revenues and expenses, and a “totals” column, identical to today’s income statement (see Yuji Ijiri, Cash Is a Fact, but Income Is a Forecast, working paper (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University, 2002)). No doubt, such a clear separation of facts from estimates will be highly informative to investors. 31. The 1,990-page number is from Computational Legal Studies, November 8, 2009. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC.) speaking on “Fox and Friends” on May 13, 2013, said: “Implementation [of Obamacare] has also become a bureaucratic nightmare, with some 159 new government agencies, boards, and programs busily enforcing the 20,000 pages of rules and regulations already associated with this law.” 32. Joe Mont, “Three Years in, Dodd-Frank Deadlines Missed as Page Count Rises,” Compliance Week (July 22, 2013). 33.

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AARP members, impact 149 Acceleration (operations) 7 Accounting 31–32 advocacy 240 bottom line 116–117 complexity 61 fighting 223–224 mitigation 221–222 reasons 222 complication 61–62 contribution, trivialization 46–47 decline 81 defense 70 estimates domination 95–96 impact 98–100 increase 100–101 problems 79 proliferation, reversal 219–221 reliability, enhancement 98 events 105–107 expenses, breakdown (usage) 175–176 facts 94 absence 79 fairness 35–36 fault 50 fiction 94 graveyards 86 impact, intention 17–18 information (usefulness loss), investor interest 68–70 link, absence 104–105 losses 57–58 procedures, structure (impact) 35 recognition, delay 105–106 records, triggers 79–80 reform agenda 213 regulations, proliferation 56–57 relevance decrease 37, 41, 89f loss 88–90 reporting, direction (change) 214 revitalization 213–214 ROE 22 rules, change (demand) 90 Strategic Resources & Consequences Report issue 197 treatment. See Intangible assets. uncertainty/vagueness, example 94–95 usefulness, quest 62 Accounts receivable 96 Acquired intangibles, certainty 84 Adjusted coefficient of variation (R2 ) 33, 89, 108 Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) 221 Agent-driven policies 152 Agents, importance 152–153 All-in sustaining costs (AISC) 204 Allstate advertising campaign 155 Drive Wise car device 152 online customers 156 rate-increasing policy 151 Alphabet (Google) 120 Amazon, patents 78 247 248 Ambiguity, increase 68–69 American Airlines, balance sheet 87 Amgen, Inc. market share data, inconsistency 169 sales 169 Amortization 95 estimate 79 Analyst forecasts 45, 46f performance-related information source 44 release 46–47 Analysts ambiguity, increase 64f guidance 15–17 impact 62 pipeline questions, Pfizer response 200–201 pipeline-related questions, number/percentage 202f questions 114–115 Annual earnings releases 44 Annual report, extensiveness 5 Apple brand, value 234 car streaming market 140 patents 78 problem 90 Arm’s-length transactions 83–84 Assets amortization 216–217 conceptual assets 82 deployment, outcomes 125 fair valuation 37–38 fair values 61 obsolescence 124 real assets 82 recognition 78 treatment (intangible assets) 214–217 write-downs 109 write-offs 37, 97 AstraZeneca 166 Actavis acquisition 164 drug extension 174 stock price loss 104–105 Auden McKenzie 164 SUBJECT INDEX Bad debt expense 220 Bad-debt reserve 79 Balance sheet 4, 5 corporate balance sheets, recognition 78 distortion 37 usage 7 Bayer, brand (value) 234 Berkshire Hathaway 153 Beta tests 105 Biotech, Strategic Resources & Consequences Report 163 Blackberry patents, problem 90 Blue Book 97 Boeing, innovation strategies 85 Book-to-bill ratio 204 Book value impact 31f investor usage 32–33 problems 34–35 regression 89f relevance-loss 34–35 share 35f Book value of equity (BV) 38 Bottom line 116–117 Brands 234 creation 134 development 153 enhancement 175 British Petroleum (BP) household name 180 problems 189 Buffett, Warren 37, 53, 97, 153 Build-to-order business model 232 Businesses enterprises evolution 53 long-term objective 119–120 failure 90 fundamentals 58 organization, change 6–7 processes 78, 83 IT support 122–123 volatility, decrease 71–73 BV.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

The average American adult: Lydia Saad, “The ‘40-Hour’ Workweek Is Actually Longer—by Seven Hours,” Gallup News, August 29, 2014, http://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx. the number of part-timers working: Ben Casselman, “Yes, Some Companies Are Cutting Hours in Response to ‘Obamacare,’” FiveThirtyEight, January 13, 2015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/yes-some-companies-are-cutting-hours-in-response-to-obamacare/. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: “Employment Projections,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, D.C., https://data.bls.gov/projections/occupationProj. one such company, Kid Care Concierge: Kid Care Concierge, http://kidcareconcierge.com/.

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Beyond a broad allowance for families, the elemental solution would be high-quality, across-the-board, way-better-subsidized day care. For families headed by one parent or where parents both work, the need for a day-care system is clear—something akin in philosophy and reach to the much-embattled Obamacare—for the adequate nurturance of children across our land. That decent child care is currently a sign of social privilege is simply outrageous. Broad-based, accessible, adequately subsidized day care would also make the lives of day-care workers like those you’ve met in Squeezed more secure as well; the women earning their livings in the child-care field are usually subsisting in dedicated poverty.

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

Medicare and Medicaid are much bigger problems than social security. Unless there are changes, the cost of Medicare and Medicaid will consume our total GNP by 2050. The system will have to be fixed. The new healthcare program (Obamacare) only aggravates the problems in the system by promoting more healthcare demand and spending while curbing incentives for the providers of healthcare. I will not offer a diagnosis of Obamacare except to state that, as designed, it is mathematically certain to fail.5 It creates massive incentives for private employers to push their employees onto the government program. It will increase, not decrease, cost.

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For further analysis and a well-thought-out plan for privatizing social security by two long-term experts, see Peter Ferrara and Michael Tanner, A New Deal for Social Security (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1998). 5. For a detailed examination and critique of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), see Michael tanner, Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2011). 6. See, for example, Brian Riedl, “A Guide to Fixing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder #2114, March 2008, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/03/a-guide-to-fixing-social-security-medicare-and-medicaid. 7.

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

The first step to correcting false beliefs is opening people’s minds to the idea that they and their community might have the science wrong. No one wants to be wrong. NINE Thinking About Politics Few recent issues have excited Americans (and American political candidates) as much as the Affordable Care Act (more familiar as Obamacare) that became law in 2010. This law has been the subject of numerous debates and served as one of the pillars of the Republican attack on Barack Obama’s presidency. The Republicans in Congress voted multiple times to repeal or change the law. Yet, even though it has engendered much excitement and posturing on both sides, few people actually understand the law.

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Americans talk about the Eisenhower administration or the Kennedy administration as if the president of the United States personally carries out all the functions of the executive branch of government. The Affordable Care Act runs to about 20,000 or so pages of legalese. It is commonly referred to as Obamacare. How much of it do you think Barack Obama himself wrote? Our guess is none. Our presidents may or may not be great leaders, but they are definitely human beings. It is certainly fair to hold them responsible for the actions of their administrations, but not because they actually performed those actions.

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See artificial intelligence (AI) machines and widgets problem from Cognitive Reflection Test, 82 The Matrix (film), 261 McGaugh, James, 38 McHargue, Mike (“Science Mike”), 160–62 McKenzie, Craig, 235 mechanical adjustments, difficulty making, 70–71 mechanic example of education’s purpose, 219–20 medical information example of accessible knowledge, 125 memory AJ (memory case study), 38–40, 96 estimating the size of human, 25–26 “Funes the Memorious” (Borges), 37–39 hyperthymesia, 38–40, 47–48, 96 storing details, downside of, 47–48 Mendeleev, Dmitri, 199–200 military strategy example of complexity, 32–33 mind location of the, 101–05 watering can handle example, 101–02 Minsky, Marvin, 86 modus ponens reasoning, 54, 58 moral dumbfounding, 181–82 moving text window example of human cognition, 93–95 Ms. Y’s lethargy example of causal reasoning, 59–61 Musk, Elon, 141 natural world example of complexity, 29–31 Newton, Isaac, 69–70 nudges, behavioral, 248–49 Nyhan, Brendan, 159 Obama, Barack, 197 Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act On Motion (Galilei), 66 opposition to science and technology Bodmer Report, 156–59 food irradiation, 167–68 genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 155, 165–67 vaccination, 155–56 optic flow, 98–100 bee example, 100 doorway example, 99–100 highway lines example, 99 wheat field example, 98–99 organ donation example of libertarian paternalism, 248–49 ox’s weight example of crowdsourcing, 148 Pallokerho-35 Finnish soccer club example of crowdsourcing, 148 Parker, Elizabeth, 38 Pavlov, Ivan, 50 perception, 46–47 Perkins, David, 222 phobias, 104 physics curving bullets example, 69–70 Newton’s laws of motion, 69–70 placeholders, knowledge, 125–26 plants vs. animals, 40–42.

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

Just under one third (32 percent) of unauthorized immigrant adults lived in families below the poverty level, and 62 percent lived in families earning less than 200 percent of the poverty level. Only 14 percent lived in families earning more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level, the cutoff for Obamacare subsidies. A narrow 51 percent majority of unauthorized children lived in families earning less than the federal poverty level, 78 percent lived in families earning less than 200 percent of the poverty level, and only 8 percent lived in families earning more than 400 percent. This is despite the fact that employment among unauthorized immigrants is high: 79 percent of men and 48 percent of women were employed in 2011.23 This makes for a total of just under 7.25 million unauthorized laborers in the U.S. workforce, a figure that doesn’t include those who do informal work.

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., 138–39 U.S. retirees in, 135–38 midcentury America, 16–17, 79, 80 middle-class melting pot, 26–29 migrant worker programs, 58–60, 98–99, 111–14 minimum wage, 47–48, 97, 107 model minority illusion, 38–44 monogenerational immigration systems, 57–61, 102 multigenerational immigration systems, 57–61 Muslim immigrants, 3–4, 89–90 Napoleonic Wars, 73 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS), 53–55, 56 National Affairs, 162 nativism, 91, 105 naturalization, 23 New Deal, 14, 16–17, 80 New York City attempted bombing of 2017, 2–3, 4, 6–7 author’s immigrant story, 63–64, 67–68, 75–76 Bangladeshi community, 64, 74–78 civil unrest in, 181–82 New York Times, The, 61 New York University, 121 Nigeria per capita income, 132–33 population growth, 140 “non-zero-sum mobility,” 79 Northwestern University, 52 Obama, Barack, 9–11, 49 Obamacare, 174 offshoring, 12–13, 94–96, 102–7, 123, 135 of caregiving, 137–38 South Korean model, 103–4 virtual immigration, 148–50 Okun, Arthur, 118 open border advocates, 4–5, 8–11, 84, 113, 115, 188. See also immigration advocates open borders immigration policies, 59, 108–9 open vs. closed borders, 11 Page, Marianne, 178 parental leave, 47 people smuggling, 82, 134 per capita income, 131–33 Perdue, David, 169 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, 50–51 Peters, Margaret E., 105 Pethokoukis, James, 117 “place discount,” 149 points-based immigration system, 4, 169–73 population growth, 140–41 Posner, Eric, 113–14, 128, 162, 171 Postel, Hannah, 111–12 postwar America, 16–17, 79, 80 poverty rates, 22–25, 34, 35–36, 43 presidential election of 2016, 90–91, 157–58, 159–60 Princeton University, 168 Pritchett, Lant, 108–9, 111, 113 productivity, 28, 80, 96, 156 progressive tax code, 55–56 pro-immigration advocates.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

(In case you’re wondering: in the event of a “potentially uncontained military conflict in which the global superpowers get involved,” the yield curve on Eurobonds would “likely flatten due to weaker risk appetite.”)12 Because this is so contrary to our nature, eventually even the U.S. political system will work its way back to some kind of balance. The Koch brothers may well have hit their zenith. Political scientists crunching the polling data said that the Kochs’ two signature laws (the attempted repeal of Obamacare and the successful tax “reform” package) were the “most unpopular pieces of major domestic legislation of the past quarter-century,” the journalist Michael Tomasky points out. Of the nine most popular recent laws, he observes, “eight pursued what could broadly be defined as liberal goals, like gun control and environmental protection.”13 For the last few years, America’s most liked politician, by far, has been a socialist, Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on the antilibertarian slogan “Not Me, Us,” and who holds up Scandinavia as a model.

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Millennia after they’ve lost the ideological fights, the sea level will still be rising. They’ve scrawled their names into geological history, ugly graffiti that scientists will be deciphering millions of years into the future (assuming there are scientists). Many of the same people managed to cripple Obamacare, too, which is a tragedy—it means lots of people will suffer unnecessarily and die. But when eventually our politics escapes their grip, it won’t be impossible to build a health care system like those in all the other nations of the world. Climate change is different. Once the Arctic melts, there’s no way to freeze it back up again, not in human time.

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Koch, Mary Koch, William “Bill” Kodas, Michael Kona Korea Krueger, Alan Kumkum Bhagya (soap opera) Kurzweil, Fredric Kurzweil, Ray Kyoto Protocol labor law labor unions Lahore, Pakistan laissez-faire Lanier, Jaron Las Vegas lead poisoning Leap Manifesto Lear, Norman Leary, Timothy Lee, Kai-fu LeFevre, Robert leukemia leverage Lewis, Seko Serge Lexington, Battle of libertarianism Libertarian Party life expectancy lightning strikes limestone limits Limits to Growth, The (Meadows) Lindbergh, Charles lobster fisheries Locklear, Samuel Lomé, Togo London Los Angeles Los Angeles Times Louisiana Lovelock, James Lowndes County, Alabama Luntz, Frank Lyme disease Machine Intelligence Research Institute MacLean, Nancy Maduro malaria Mallory, George Maltese Falcon (yacht) Mann, Michael Manson, Charles manufacturing MAOA gene variant marine species Maris, Bill markets marlin Mars Marsh, George Perkins Marshall Islands mass extinctions Matchright maturity Mauryan Empire Mayans Mayer, Jane McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index McCain, John Medicaid Medicare Megafire (Kodas) Mehlman, Maxwell Mekong Delta meltwater pulse 1A Mercer, Robert Merkle, Ralph Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge methane Mexico Miami Beach Microsoft migration Mill, John Stuart Miller, Dean Milner, Yuri Milosevic, Slobodan Minsky, Marvin Mises, Ludwig von Mississippi Delta MIT Technology Review Mongolia Monsanto Montgomery Bus Boycott Mont Pelerin movement Montreal Montreal Protocol More, Max mortality Moses, Robert Mount Kenya MSTN gene Muir, John Mumbai Murdoch, Rupert Musk, Elon Nabokov, Vladimir nanobot blood cells National Academy of Medicine National Academy of Sciences National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Cancer Institute National Coal Association National Energy Policy Act (proposed) National Geographic National Governors Association National Journal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) national parks and monuments Native Americans natural gas Nature Nawabshah, Pakistan Nazi Germany Nectome neoliberalism Neolithic period Nepal Netherlands New Deal NewsCorp New York New Yorker New York Times Magazine Nietzsche, Friedrich Niviana, Aka Nixon, Richard Nokia nonviolence North America North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) North Carolina North Korea Norway Novartis nuclear power Nuclear Test Ban Treaty nuclear weapons nutrition Obama, Barack Obamacare Objectivist oceans. See also sea ice; sea level rise; acidification of carbon absorbed by dead zones in oxygen production in plastic waste in warming of Octopus (yacht) Off-Grid Electric Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy oil oil and gas industry climate change research and ideology and leverage and methane leaks and Paris accords and Oklahoma Olduvai Gorge Oman Omohundro, Stephen M.

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician by Sandeep Jauhar

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, delayed gratification, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, medical malpractice, moral hazard, obamacare, PalmPilot, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, source of truth, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra

There are many downsides to having too many doctors on a case. Specialists’ recommendations are often at cross-purposes. The kidney doctor advises “careful hydration”; the cardiologist, discontinuation of intravenous fluid. Because specialists aren’t paid to confer with one another or coordinate care—at least as of this writing; Obamacare is looking to put into place payment systems that will do just this—they often leave primary attendings without a clear direction as to what to do. More important, patients don’t always require specialists. Patients often have “overlap syndromes” (we used to call it aging), which cannot be compartmentalized into individual problems and are probably best managed by a good general physician.

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Another option is to use bundled payments. A major driver of overutilization is that doctors are paid piecework. There is less of an incentive to increase volume if payments are packaged (e.g., for an entire hospitalization) rather than discrete for every service. Yet another possibility is “accountable care organizations” advanced by Obamacare, in which teams of doctors would be responsible (and paid accordingly) for their patients’ clinical outcomes. Of course, such a scheme would force doctors to work together and to coordinate care. Unfortunately, most doctors, notoriously independent and already smothered in paperwork, have generally performed poorly in this regard.

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Another said, speaking for many in private practice who stand to lose the most from policy proposals to restrict fee-for-service and encourage greater use of nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants to do what was formerly doctors’ work, “We look forward to a future of a fully implemented Obamacare where physicians are but meaningless pawns in the hands of those who are pushing this absurd social experiment.” Such irrational anger, the almost operatic self-pity, has become commonplace. I encountered it countless times those first few years at LIJ. Colleagues would complain: We are not being allowed to work in a market economy.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Partisan politics has played a role in this disaster. When someone who has lost their job needed healthcare, a recourse was supposed to be Obamacare. Unfortunately, many Republican states like Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Nebraska decided to make a show of resisting the federal government by denying their citizens this option. This pushed some people to apply for disability status in order to get healthcare. Indeed, after the adoption of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare), disability claims increased by 1 percent in states that refused to expand Medicaid, while they decreased by 3 percent in expansion states.55 But the causes run deeper.

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Mayawati, the leader of one of those parties, decided to rebrand herself as the leader of all poor people, including poor upper castes, and won the 2007 Uttar Pradesh state elections on that basis. She went for broad inclusivity, not narrow sectarianism. More recently, in the United States we are struck by the curious history of the once much hated Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. As the signal policy initiative of the much despised black Kenyan Muslim Barack Obama, it was something that many Republican governors refused to have anything to do with, and many refused federal subsidies to expand Medicaid, a key mechanism to extend health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

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In a recent experiment in Pakistan, providing a bit more flexibility to the procurement officers of hospitals and schools by giving them some free cash to spend on basic supplies greatly improved their ability to negotiate low prices, leading to big savings for the government.26 Putting too many constraints on government officials and government contracts can discourage talent when it is the most needed. Despite the fact that the United States is the world leader in computing, none of the big tech firms chose to bid on contracts to set up the computer system supporting Obamacare. The reason was apparently that there were so many boxes to check off to be a government contractor that very few firms were willing to do it. The Federal Acquisition Regulation has eighteen hundred pages. So, in order to win a government contract, it is more important to be good at paperwork than to be able to do the job.27 In the development world, the contractors that systematically bid for and win the USAID contracts are known as “Beltway bandits.”

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Clinton and his allies,” a Times analysis explained in 1994, “were trying hard to redefine the Democratic Party away from traditionally liberal approaches to domestic policy; they were almost inevitably drawn to the ideas of managed competition. Though still largely theoretical, the concept relies on market forces, not government, to hold down costs and expand access to health insurance.” That is, Clinton tried and failed to pass a version of Obamacare sixteen years before Obama succeeded. One of the many congressional committees that held hearings on the Clinton healthcare plan was Senate Finance, chaired by Moynihan. His chief of staff was Lawrence O’Donnell, who later became an MSNBC anchor. “At the end of the last of two dozen hearings on the indescribably complex Clinton healthcare bill,” O’Donnell told me, “I’m sitting behind Chairman Moynihan, and he puts his hand over his microphone and turns over his shoulder and whispers to me, ‘Why don’t we just delete the words ‘age 65’ from the Medicare statute?’ 

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“It took twenty-four hearings studying every detail of healthcare policy for him to arrive there. He was a very careful juror who waited until he heard every word of testimony. It was literally while the last witness was finishing that he gave me his verdict. He hated unnecessary government complexity,” and the Clinton plan, O’Donnell says, was complex and hard to explain (as Obamacare would be as well). Also, Moynihan “could see the ‘reform’ policies” proposed by Clinton would “not perform as promised.” As these hearings and negotiations went on for the first eighteen months of the Clinton administration, Democrats had large majorities in both the Senate and House. The main labor union federation, the AFL-CIO, had broached the idea of a single-payer healthcare system.

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Even though the new law wouldn’t go into effect for four years—and would enable 20 million more Americans to have health coverage, nearly half of them as new customers of private insurance companies—the political operation nevertheless convinced millions of Americans to be frightened of the prospect, to hate Obamacare. That project was helped, as if providentially, by a signature success of the right’s judicial long game: at the beginning of the year, the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, effectively prohibiting serious election finance laws and giving big business (and unions, as if) free rein to spend money on campaigns.* And in that fall of 2010, Democrats lost their large majorities in both the Senate and House.

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

See Chapter Twelve for further discussion; see also Rebecca Vallas, Shawn Fremstad, and Lisa Eckman, A Fair Shot for Workers with Disabilities (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, January 2015), https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015/01/28/105520/a-fair-shot-for-workers-with-disabilities/. 30. Gene Sperling, “If You Like Choice, Competition, and Entrepreneurship, You Should Like Obamacare,” Forbes, March 28, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/03/28/if-you-like-choice-competition-and-entrepreneurship-you-should-like-obamacare/. 31. Linda J. Blumberg, Sabrina Corlette, and Kevin Lucia, “The Affordable Care Act: Improving Incentives for Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment,” Timely Analysis of Immediate Health Policy Issues (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, May 2013), 1, https://www.urban.org/research/publication/affordable-care-act-improving-incentives-entrepreneurship-and-self-employment. 32.

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Matt Broaddus and Edwin Park, “Affordable Care Act Has Produced Historic Gains in Health Coverage,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, December 15, 2016, https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/affordable-care-act-has-produced-historic-gains-in-health-coverage. 18. Robert Pear, “Marco Rubio Quietly Undermines Affordable Care Act,” New York Times, December 9, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/us/politics/marco-rubio-obamacare-affordable-care-act.html. 19. Paul Ryan famously warned that low-income workers face marginal tax rates of 80 or 90 percent from taxes and loss of benefits. Paul Ryan, “#ConfidentAmerica: Speaker Ryan’s Address at the Library of Congress,” streamed live December 3, 2015, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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United States, 72, 116 Norway, GDP, 5 Nozick, Robert, 224, 340n Nussbaum, Martha, 44 Obama, Barack (Obama Administration), 85 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, 221, 266–67 Auto Task Force, 137–38, 139–40 combating discrimination against long-term unemployed, 52–53, 213 Clean Power Plan, 141 Cummings’s funeral eulogy, 224 Executive Order 13563, 135 expansion of EITC, 160 gainful employment regulations, 113–14 international tax policy, 124 mortgage forbearance, 132, 137 proposal related to UBI to Rise, 143 Sperling as national economic adviser, xiii–xiv, xix, 37–38, 39–40, 52–53, 132, 143, 213, 250, 290 State of the Union address (2014), 46 Obama, Michelle, 214 Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act Obergefell v. Hodges, 18 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 103 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), 71, 73, 74–75, 235 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), 35, 50, 96, 121, 129, 132, 183–84, 198, 249, 285 offshoring, 128, 139–41, 295 oil, 5, 71–72, 116 Oldham, Greg, 226–27 Oliver, John, 238 Oman–United States Free Trade Agreement, 123 On the Clock (Guendelsberger), 236–37 opioid addictions, 60, 61, 96, 206, 315n Opportunity@Work, 284 Oreopoulos, Philip, 273 Orszag, Peter, 9, 247 Osterman, Paul, 283 Oxfam, 80, 81, 249 paid family and medical leave, 34–37, 96, 310n Palladino, Lenore, 119, 121 Parks, Rosa, xviii patents, 98–99, 124 “pattern bargaining,” 253–54 Paul, Rand, 93 Paycheck, Johnny, 243–44 payday lending, 84–85 Pell Grants, 54, 55, 111, 275 Pelosi, Nancy, 166, 179 Pepsi, 263 Perkins, Frances, 69–71, 158 personal bankruptcies, 9, 49–50 personal care aides, 217–20 pesticide use, 76 Petersen, Anne Helen, 238 Petronijevic, Uros, 273 Philippon, Thomas, 115 Phillips curve, 266–67 Piche-Lichtman, Michelle, 92–93 Pinto, Sergio, 60 Pisano, Gary, 140 Pittston Coal strike, 68 Platform to Employment (P2E), 213–14 Pollock v.

Why America Must Not Follow Europe by Daniel Hannan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, carbon tax, mass immigration, obamacare, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Upton Sinclair

Europe is falling further and further behind, sustaining its living standards by borrowing, dwindling as a force in the world. The U.S., which has expanded its federal government by 30 percent since 2008, seems determined to duplicate that error. REPEALING STATE HEALTH CARE: IF IT WERE DONE WHEN ’TIS DONE, THEN ’TWERE WELL IT WERE DONE QUICKLY Once ObamaCare takes hold, it won’t easily be undone. The moment politicians become responsible for treating the sick, it becomes almost impossible to suggest any significant overhaul of the system – or indeed, any reduction in the budget. I can best demonstrate this phenomenon with a personal recollection. In August 2009, I was asked on Fox News whether I’d recommend the British health care model to Americans.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

The United States is famously resistant to anything smacking of redistribution. Yet it allocates 19 percent of its GDP to social services, and despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians the spending has continued to grow. The most recent expansions are a prescription drug benefit introduced by George W. Bush and the eponymous health insurance plan known as Obamacare introduced by his successor. Indeed, social spending in the United States is even higher than it appears, because many Americans are forced to pay for health, retirement, and disability benefits through their employers rather than the government. When this privately administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD countries, just behind France.34 For all their protestations against big government and high taxes, people like social spending.

…

Social Security has been called the third rail of American politics, because if politicians touch it they die. According to legend, an irate constituent at a town-hall meeting warned his representative, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” (referring to the government health insurance program for seniors).35 No sooner did Obamacare pass than the Republican Party made it a sacred cause to repeal it, but each of their assaults on it after gaining control of the presidency in 2017 was beaten back by angry citizens at town-hall meetings and legislators afraid of their ire. In Canada the top two national pastimes (after hockey) are complaining about their health care system and boasting about their health care system.

…

Most of us are deluded about our degree of understanding of the world, a bias called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.91 Though we think we understand how a zipper works, or a cylinder lock, or a toilet, as soon as we are called upon to explain it we are dumbfounded and forced to confess we have no idea. That is also true of hot-button political issues. When people with die-hard opinions on Obamacare or NAFTA are challenged to explain what those policies actually are, they soon realize that they don’t know what they are talking about, and become more open to counterarguments. Perhaps most important, people are less biased when they have skin in the game and have to live with the consequences of their opinions.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

The net to the worker is the same, and an inefficient pretense of private salaries and public taxation is eliminated. Schumpeter’s suggestion has found new life in policy proposals for a Basic Guaranteed Income championed in various forms by Bernie Sanders on the left and Charles Murray on the right. The expansion of food stamps, disability payments, Obamacare, Medicare, and the earned income credit are all forms of government income maintenance, evidence of a movement toward true socialism. Schumpeter said democracy was not an ideology in which the will of the people was fulfilled. Instead it was a process by which elites competed for leadership roles.

…

Fascism is above all belief in the state rather than God or the individual as a source of authority and normative conduct. The fascist project is ratchet-like; it does not always move, but when it does it cannot be reversed. There are long periods like the 1920s and 1980s when the progressive-neofascist project makes little headway. Still, when fascism breaks through as with the New Deal, the Great Society, and Obamacare, the changes are here to stay. Each breakthrough enhances state power at liberty’s expense. Dependency is increased at the expense of self-reliance. Americans barely notice. Fascism’s advance is often aided by a crisis; an application of shock doctrine. Wilson’s authoritarian tendencies were empowered by the First World War.

…

In a fascist system, a Faustian bargain is struck between big business and big government. Fascists are perfectly willing to allow private companies and private property to exist. They are unwilling to allow private realms to stand in the way of state power. Hospitals and health insurers may be private enterprises, but their products, prices, and policies are controlled by Obamacare. Google, Twitter, and Apple may be private companies, but Internet access and fees are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, an agency established in 1933 by FDR, almost sixty years before the World Wide Web was launched. Banks are private entities, but are highly regulated under Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve Act, and a litany of other statutes.

Calypso by David Sedaris

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, obamacare

She started explaining what had taken her from North Carolina to Central America, but then the flight attendant came to take a drink order from the guy next to me, and I missed it. Just as I was tuning back in, a man across the aisle tried to open his overhead bin. It was stuck for some reason and he pounded on it, saying to anyone who would listen, “This is like Obamacare: broken.” Several of the passengers around me laughed, and I noted their faces, vowing that in the event of a crisis, I would not help lead them to an emergency exit. You people are on your own, I thought, knowing that if anything bad did happen, it would likely be one of them who’d save me. It would be just my luck.

…

We could see them in their kitchens and family rooms, watching TV or standing before open refrigerators. They were white, for the most part, and conservative, the sort of people we’d grown up with at the country club, the kind who’d have sat in the front of the plane and laughed when the man across the aisle compared his broken overhead bin to Obamacare. That said, we could have knocked on any of these doors, explained our situation, and received help. “These folks have a house but don’t know which one it is!” I could imagine a homeowner shouting over his shoulder into the next room. “Remember when that happened to us?” It’s silly, but after a while I started to panic, thinking, I guess, that we could die out there.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Perhaps Roberts was not willing to go along again with such an aggressive approach in another highly politically charged case that threatened to undermine his stated desire for a legacy as a minimalist who kept the court out of politics.2 AT THE IOWA STATE FAIR SOAPBOX, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MITT ROMNEY SAID, “CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE, MY FRIEND.” There was, however, one legal challenge to a smaller piece of Obamacare that succeeded, and it involved the rights of corporations. Hobby Lobby Stores, Incorporated, a national chain of craft stores with over 23,000 employees, filed suit against an Obamacare regulation that required large employers to include birth control in their employees’ health insurance plans. The owners of Hobby Lobby, David and Barbara Green and their three children, were Evangelical Christians who believed some of the mandated forms of birth control caused abortion, which the Greens opposed on religious grounds.

…

They called corporations “people,” yet pierced the corporate veil, looking right through the corporate form to base the decision on the rights of the corporations’ members. The centerpiece of Romney’s presidential campaign was a promise to repeal and replace President Obama’s signature legislation: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Popularly known as “Obamacare,” the healthcare law triggered a wave of legal challenges, including a historic, high-profile Supreme Court case on the law’s mandate that nearly all individuals have or buy health insurance. In a 2012 decision that surprised many court watchers, the court upheld the health insurance mandate in a narrow 5–4 decision in which Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s four liberal justices.

…

., 255, 277, 278, 281, 283, 296–97, 314, 316, 333–34 North, Frederick (Lord North), 27 North Carolina, 124, 125, 167 Northern Securities Co., 172 Northwestern National Life Insurance Company v. Riggs, 183–84, 185, 192 NYNEX, 305 oaths, 51, 131, 165 Obama, Barack, xvi, 325, 344, 359, 360, 370–72, 378 Obamacare, 378–82 Obergefell v. Hodges, xxiv, 231 Occupy Wall Street, xvi, 374–75, 394 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 336, 337, 349–50 “Octopus,” 111, 114, 119 Ohio, 124, 125, 167, 168, 198 Ohio River, 103–4 oil industry, 167, 168, 171–72, 234–35, 244, 275–76, 308, 389–94 Old South Meeting House, 30 Olin, John M., 302 Olivas, John, 389–94 Oliver, Andrew, 29 Olson, Theodore “Ted,” xxii–xxiii, 324–26, 335, 338–40, 343–44, 346–62, 370, 382 Olympics (1936), 253 opium, 27 ordinances, 389–94 Oregon, 124, 375 organized crime, 257 Orwell, George, 286 “other people’s money” corruption, 205–6, 212, 215–17, 315–16 Otto, William Tod, 149 out-of-state citizens, 97–103, 257–58, 265–67 Oxford University, 45 Pacific Legal Foundation, 310 Panama, 9 panic of 1837, 100 panic of 1893, 198 pardons, 20 Paris Commune, 146 Parish, Ashley, 346 Parker, Alton, 202–3, 209 Parks, Rosa, 257 Parliament, British, 15, 22–23, 25, 27–28, 29, 30–31, 43, 62, 63, 85–86, 87, 88 “partisan realignment,” 326–27 partnerships, 44–45, 49, 78, 178, 179–80, 181, 380–81 Paspahegh Indians, 10 pasteurization, 223 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010), 378–82 Patterson, Albert, 257 Patterson, John, 257–59, 258, 264, 265, 272 Patterson v.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

“If you’re a physician and you read the data, it’s not about your opinion; it’s irrefutable,” said Olt, who had lost her teenage son to overdose, of the efficacy of buprenorphine. “The problem is getting people to read the research. To step away from their inherent biases and opinions, which are wrong.” Most of Olt’s bupe patients are covered by Medicaid, as Illinois was an early adopter of Obamacare—still the No. 1 tool for helping people with SUD access care. But for six years, Olt funded Narcan distribution in her community out of her own pocket, hand-delivering kits to users. She gave tearful speeches at community meetings to get police and health department leaders to work with her. “Being a doctor gave her the credibility to say hard things about the way we treat SUD,” said Chris Schaffner, Olt’s program director.

…

“After about three visits to deliver them needles, they’ll ask, ‘Hey, can you help me get clean?’” Getting people admitted to quality residential treatment remained his biggest hurdle. Half the people with OUD in Surry County couldn’t access treatments because they didn’t have Medicaid or private insurance; it was that way in the dozen states that still hadn’t expanded Medicaid under Obamacare. And most church-affiliated centers still refuse to allow treatment with medications; some say they don’t have the medical staff to supervise it, but many cling to abstinence-only models and are philosophically opposed: Jesus loves the “addicts” but he doesn’t want them taking bupe. It is perhaps the sorest point of the ongoing overdose crisis that the very sickest people—many of them unhoused and devoid of support from friends or family—are the ones left to navigate this thorny divide.

…

The largest Medicaid-funded option for addiction medicines remained Daymark Recovery Services, but most drug users I met found its mandatory counseling requirements exceedingly onerous, and roughly half of the addicted working poor in the community don’t qualify for Medicaid because state politicians had shunned Obamacare as socialism. An estimated half-million North Carolinians would benefit from closing the Medicaid coverage gap. (It would most help those who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but still can’t afford insurance and too often end up using costlier emergency rooms rather than primary care.) Even those who did qualify for Medicaid had trouble getting to appointments.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

In 2011, health insurance companies certainly appeared to have the Porterian wind at their backs. Spending on health care had grown from roughly 6 percent of gross domestic product in the 1960s to almost 20 percent, a number that dwarfs the spending of any other country in both absolute and relative terms. Although the 2010 Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as Obamacare, had the potential to put pricing pressures on pharmaceutical and medical device companies, it looked like a panacea to insurance companies. After all, a key provision of the act was that every American needed to have health insurance, which meant that roughly fifty million uninsured people became target customers.

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., 5 Martin, Roger, 124, 140, 177 McClatchy, 97 McGrath, Rita, 65, 146 Meckling, William, 177 media companies founded after disruption in, 47–50 streaming, 33–36, 93–95 transformations in, 2–3 Media General, 155–157 Medicity, 183 Medtronic, 72–73, 74 Merck, 22 metrics, 42–43 microlenders, 73 Microsoft, 4, 49, 54 Mint, 132 mission statements, 177, 178 mobile phones, 3–5, 91–93 banking and, 151–152 shipping industry and, 202–203 Monte Carlo techniques, 98–99 moonshot, 24, 115–116, 131–132 Morton, Marshall, 155–156 motivation, 175–176 leaders on, 194 Motorola, 4–5, 92 M-PESA, 201 Mulally, Alan, 153–154 Mulcahy, Anne, 14, 86 multisystem operators (MSOs), 96, 98–99 Murdoch, Rupert, 97, 109 Myspace, 48, 97, 109 Narayen, Shantanu, 31–33 National Basketball Association, 98–99 National Science Foundation, 56 Navarrete, Minette, 143–144 Nestlé, 204 Netflix, 23, 97, 104 Amazon Web Services and, 54 business model innovation at, 40, 42, 146 business model of, 106 content creation at, 34–35 decision making at, 93–95, 102 early warning signs at, 108 metrics at, 43 postdisruption job to be done at, 39 transformation A at, 32–36 transformation B at, 69–70 transformation journey at, 181 net present value (NPV), 110 net promoter scores, 78 Netscape, 2–3, 47 News Corp, 48, 97 Newspaper Association of America, 3 newspapers. See also Deseret Media disruptive challenges to, 97–98 Google advertising and, 77 internet and transformation of, 3, 4 Media General, 155–157 Nexstar Broadcasting Group, 156–157 Nokia, 4–5, 8, 91–92, 102 nonconsumption, illusory, 62–63 Nook reader, 12–13 Novartis, 17 Obamacare, 100 Oculus, 48 Odeo, 49, 138 Ofoto, 1–2 Ok.com, 67–68 Omidyar, Pierre, 48–49 Omniture, 67 On Dialogue (Bohm), 130 Open Handset Alliance, 4 operating engines, 137–139 opportunity. See also curiosity capabilities link and, 74–75 disruption as, 8–12, 47–50 focusing on highest-potential, 141–142 leaders on, 196–197 stopping exploration of, 126–127 strategic opportunity areas and, 123–127 Optus, 145, 147–148, 149 Orange Is the New Black, 35 O’Reilly, Charles III, 53, 54 outsiders, involving in decision making, 109–110 overshooting, 103 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), 13, 31 Pandesic, 78–79 parable of the eleventh floor, 77 Pathway, 58 patientslikeme.com, 60 PayPal, 200 Paytm, 202 Pearson, 67 penicillin, 139 periphery, spotting warning signs from the, 107–108 Perry, Tyler, 98 Pfizer, 17, 22, 138–139 Pharmacyclics, 19 Photoshop Express, 32 Pixar Animation Studios, 3–4 planning fallacy, 120 Playing to Win (Martin and Lafley), 124 Plunify, 72, 74 Porter, Michael, 99–100, 177 portfolio management systems, 80–82 Potemkin portfolios, 120 potential estimating current operations’, 118–119 estimating existing investments’, 119 problem solving approaches, 140–141 Procter & Gamble (P&G), 23, 64, 109 capabilities identification at, 79–80 innovation at, 146 predictability versus innovation at, 137–138 Professional Golfers’ Association, 99 Project ET, 127–128 Psychology Today, 177 purpose, 175–179 leaders on, 194–195 QQ, 106 Quantum Solutions, 51, 52 Quattro Wireless, 67 Quicken, 132–133 Qwikster, 94 Rakuten Group, 143 recommendations engine, Netflix, 33–35 reinvention, 42–43 Reminder app, 152 repositioning, 12, 27–45.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Millions of low-income families would benefit from having more choice over how to spend such safety-net dollars that way, instantly rendering those dollars more valuable. The United States could also get rid of welfare and create a universal child benefit, something that would eliminate child poverty, support women, and help to build a healthier generation. We could make our existing programs simpler and more universal too. Getting rid of Obamacare’s complicated set of subsidies and letting everyone buy into Medicare or Medicaid is a very different policy proposal than a UBI, but one motivated by the same ideas. Ditto with making the tax code more transparent and less laden with loopholes and shelters, or turning programs like welfare into an entitlement based on income, with no complicated application paperwork, asset testing, or work requirements.

Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way by Tanja Hester

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy and hold, crowdsourcing, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, full employment, General Magic , gig economy, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, independent contractor, index fund, labor-force participation, lifestyle creep, longitudinal study, low interest rates, medical bankruptcy, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, multilevel marketing, obamacare, passive income, post-work, remote working, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, stocks for the long run, tech worker, Vanguard fund, work culture

And until recently, this system made early retirement and all forms of work-optional living much more challenging than they are now, because people younger than Medicare-qualification age (65) had few options for obtaining health insurance on their own. That all changed with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, also known as Obamacare. In addition to creating an individual marketplace that allows people to buy plans directly from insurers instead of having to go through an employer or expensive insurance broker, the ACA also made most types of preventive care entirely free, it allowed kids to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26, and it outlawed old practices of denying coverage for preexisting conditions.

…

Before electing to accept COBRA coverage, price out your options on the health care exchange plans available to you, knowing that the exchange plans will likely end up being cheaper. Exchange Plans Since the passage of the ACA, exchange plans have been available in every state in the US, either through the federal Healthcare.gov exchange or through individual state exchanges. Exchange plans, often called Obamacare plans, are just like regular private health insurance, though with a few notable features. To help consumers compare plans, ACA plans are grouped by levels, with bronze plans covering 60% of expenses, silver plans covering 70%, gold covering 80%, and platinum covering 90%. Most people who purchase exchange insurance policies opt for silver-level plans that cover 70% of medical costs, and if your prior employer plan was typical and covered 82% of costs, you may notice more out-of-pocket costs after transitioning to an ACA plan.

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

In February, dismayed by hostility among healthcare adepts to the American associations of ‘accountable care’, NHS England came up with a new name: Integrated Care Systems. Since we’ve already had ICS standing for something else, let’s stick with ‘accountable care’. What is it? In the United States, it was spelled out in the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, as a way for hospitals, community practitioners and local clinics to integrate into a single system to provide complete healthcare to a set of elderly Americans receiving the form of US healthcare that most resembles Britain’s NHS – the mainly taxpayer-funded, partly free at the point of delivery system for over-sixty-fives known as Medicare.

…

It was a first for me to hear somebody say, as Louise did: ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for the workhouse. But …’ Building up slowly, then with increasing enthusiasm, determination and evidence of considerable prior thought, Louise Warren laid out an ideal of healthcare and welfare in general that lay somewhere between mid-Victorian England and the modern, pre-Obamacare United States: an England of private medical insurance, self-reliance, self-help, of a reckoning for feckless welfare recipients who don’t understand that pay TV is a luxury, of decent poor people fallen on hard times being helped by acts of charity in the same way the Lincolnshire Chronicle’s ‘simple, kindly country folk’ helped Maud Elizabeth-Norman in 1924, an England which (despite seventy years of evidence to the contrary) simply could not afford to run a national health service from public funds.

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

subgroups on Twitter by messaging pattern example words characteristic speech percent of sample nigga, poppin, chillin shortened endings (e.g., -er => -a or -ing => -in) 14 tweetup, metrics, innovation tech buzzspeak 12 inspiring, webinar, affiliate, tips marketing self-help 11 etsy, adorable, hubby crafting lingo 5 pelosi, obamacare, beck, libs partisan talking points 4 bieber, pleasee, youu, <33 lengthened endings (repeated last letter) 2 anipals, pawesome, furever animal-based puns 1 kstew, robsessed, twilighters amalgamations/puns around the Twilight movies 1 It’s important to note that the study grouped users by their words alone, who they messaged, and what they wrote—these language clusters were not determined a priori.

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People at the top and bottom of this list use the same framework to speak at cross-purposes: No one should … political bias of the person posting … die because they cannot afford health care … –0.87 more liberal … be frozen in carbonite because they couldn’t pay Jabba the Hutt … –0.37 … die because of zombies if they cannot afford a shotgun … –0.30 … have to worry about dying tomorrow, but cancer patients do … –0.02 … be without a beer because they cannot afford one … +0.22 … die because the government is involved with health care … +0.88 … die because Obamacare rations their health care … +0.96 … go broke because government taxes and spends … +0.97 more conservative In 1950, at the dawn of the age of television, the American Political Science Association actually called for more polarization in national politics—the parties had grown too close together, the electorate didn’t have clear choices.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Mailin Aasmäe, ‘ETCS and Uber collaborate in seeking solutions for the devel- opment of the sharing economy’, Republic of Estonia Tax and Customs Board (9 October 2015), http://www.emta.ee/eng/etcb-and-uber-collaborate-seeking- solutions-development-sharing-economy, archived at https://perma.cc/47YA- Z49P; Jurate Titova, ‘Uber signs MoU with the City of Vilnius’, Uber Newsroom (2 November 2015), https://newsroom.uber.com/lithuania/uber-vilnius-memo- randum-with-the-city-of-vilnius/, archived at https://perma.cc/RV4R-HN7X 31. Ina Fried, ‘Gig economy companies like Uber are helping the Feds spread the word about Obamacare’, Recode (25 October 2016), http://www.recode. net/2016/10/25/13389860/gig-economy-uber-obamacare-burwell, archived at https://perma.cc/P6S8-JYDS 32. Work and Pensions Committee, Written Evidence: Self-employment and the Gig Economy (HC 847, 2016–17), Uber, Hermes and Deliveroo workers questioned on challenges of self-employment, http://www.parliament.uk/business/com- mittees/committees-a-z/commons-select/work-and-pensions-committee/ news-parliament-2015/self-employment-gig-economy-evidence-16–17/, archived at https://perma.cc/R7CX-GWCG; Sarah Butler, ‘Uber driver tells MPs: I work 90 hours but still need to claim benefits’, The Guardian (6 February 2017), http://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/feb/06/uber-driver-mps- select-committee-minimum-wage, archived at https://perma.cc/Z2D5-SCW3 33.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Over the last decade, pharmaceutical interests have spent almost two billion dollars lobbying U.S. government branches to meet commercial goals, such as preventing drug price negotiations and new importation laws to lower domestic prices. Additionally, the Obama administration made a deal with the pharmaceutical industry; the administration would drop its tacit support of drug importation in exchange for industry support of Obamacare and modest price rebates to government health care programs. Had SOPA become law, search engines, domain registrars and registries, credit card companies, payment processors and advertisers would be encouraged to refuse their services to safe online pharmacies. Supporters of SOPA obtusely pointed to the bill’s language on online pharmacies to argue that the bill was not only about protecting intellectual property and copyrights but protecting lives.

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Specifically, government guarantees of health care—a Medicare-for-all program, more efficient than the private insurance system—and pensions more robust than Social Security—would give Americans some assurance that they wouldn’t starve. They’d enable entrepreneurship, as health care access is a concern that forces people to scurry towards and hold onto jobs they don’t want instead of starting their own shops (though this predicament will be somewhat improved under Obamacare). The appropriate societal response to hard economic times and workers’ desires for portable retirement plans isn’t to convert traditional pensions into 401(k)s—rather, it’s to institute a robust federal pension system. A step between here and there would be to adopt the plans most Europeans have access to—much more robust even under austerity than the crumbs we toss at American seniors.

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For example, some Pentagon officials might want to discredit those sharing information about how the American public were misled into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke might seek to prevent exposing the role of the Federal Reserve in bailing out up both American and European banks. Some supporters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”) might want the government’s fact checkers to discredit those who expose how the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance lobby provided sought to enrich themselves by supporting the bill. Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize a propaganda machine designed to keep them from knowing the truth about their government.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize