Alot of people in Washington are planning to put a lot of power and decision making authority into the Joint Super Committee to make cuts that will receive a up or down vote in Congress. Suzy Khimm over at Ezra Klein’s blog, asks the logical question (after the all too excellent and obligatory, will this commission work post by Sarah Binder over at the Monkeycage): who will be on this committee:

Given the stakes, both parties will want to appoint members who have close ties to the leadership and are willing to carry out their directives. “Budgeting is the most political of all procedures on the Hill,” says Stan Collender, a former congressional budget analyst. And the stakes this time around are even higher. Committee chairs and ranking members who work closely with taxes, health care and entitlements will all be strong contenders. But congressional leaders will also probably steer clear of members up for a tough reelection battle in 2012, such as Sen. Orrin Hatch, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee.

The whole piece is worth reading, especially as Khimm goes down the list of who will or will not be on the committee. Just a quick thought as I dive back into my research paper I’ve neglected for a week after hanging out on vacation in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. What worries me is how different will this committee be from the general ideology of the chamber. The only major difference in my eye between this committee and the chamber is that the procedural obstacles are not really there. However though the committee does reflect the balance of both of the houses of government (6 from the House 6 from the Senate), it doesn’t really accurately reflect how votes came down in the House:

If you can see, Nancy Pelosi was able to marshal her caucus quite easily, allowing for a 95-95 split of her Democratic colleagues in the House. However, I doubt there will be any Democrats from the House on the committee (only time will tell), which ignores the politicking in the House, and guarantees that Boehner may be able to get even more austerity in this package than he would have otherwise. The real question that remains to be answered is, how this deal will be any different from the one of this past weekend? With the Paul Ryans, John Boehners, and Jon Kyl’s, and Mitch McConnell’s of the world debating the Harry Reids, Barney Franks, etc…of the world will this agreement be more powerful, or will the commission fail, leading to the wicked deficit trigger? Time will tell.

I have started a new gig posting a column 2-3 times a month at The Politicizer, an online opinion website for the “Millennial Generation”, whatever that is. The url is: http://www.thepoliticizer.com.

Here it is, my first column:

ROBINSON: The Battle Over Rules and Discretion Posted on August 2, 2011 at 3:56 pm

Filed under Economy, Government, Jonathan Robinson no comments

Jonathan Robinson, Columnist

By moving from politics based on discretion to rules based politics, the Republican Party leadership is signaling that more painful budget cuts are on the way, and that’s not a good sign for the economic recovery. Rules based politics constrict activist government and prevent progressive policy change by cocooning politicians from blame for unpopular political consequences when it is most convenient for the minority party.

Many times in politics, even the most complex economic and political issues that come up for debate can be distilled into essential dichotomies as can be seen with the debt ceiling and balanced budget amendment fights in Washington. Policymaking is a balancing act between playing by the rules at hand and negotiating a law with which both sides are satisfied. Over the past half-century economists have engaged in heated debates over the merit of rules versus discretion based policy making in the economic policy making arena.

The basic debate goes something like this: One side argues that rules are to be preferred, while the other prefers discretionary action on important pressing issues. Those who favor rules argue that they not only constrain politicians from abusing discretion but introduce an element of certainty into policy making that keeps markets happy and eases voters’ fears about manipulative politicians. Conservative economist Milton Friedman is famous for advocating a ‘rule’ for monetary policy conducted by the Federal Reserve. Under Friedman’s vision there would be no need for a Federal Reserve Board to choose monetary policy, just a bureaucracy to execute policies in response to changing economic conditions without the discretionary freedom to react to unique economic circumstances.

Although a few believe in this extreme form of governance, most seem to be in favor of some sort of discretionary governance in some shape or form on certain issues (still, partisanship plays a big factor). Take, for instance, the role of government in response to the financial crisis:

Those who favor discretion note its importance during crisis, where an activist government can respond skillfully and effectively to aid citizens and solve complex problems, even though it involves a bigger economic role for government. Critics of the rules based approach see rules as one way for Congress to avoid blame for unpopular actions by steering clear of tough issues. Some policymakers believe that government can be just as effective, if not more so, than rules based policies, and that discretion can tweak policy without negative side effects. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, speaking at an event honoring Friedman, jabbed:

On the issue of inflation control, Friedman may be judged to have been a bit too pessimistic; his concerns that central banks would have neither the technical ability nor the correct incentives to control inflation led him to recommend his money-growth rule, for which a central bank could certainly be held accountable. Evidently, however, determined central banks can stabilize inflation directly, at least they have been able to do so thus far.

As of late, the debate over the debt ceiling and the discussion of inserting a balanced budget amendment into the constitution (something that has been proposed by conservative Republicans many times, as far back as 1994) have seeped into the latest discourse about solving the crushing debt that the US has incurred to the tune of about 14 trillion dollars and counting.

The debt ceiling is an important rule, created by Congress to constrain the size of government spending. However, historically the debt limit has been raised at the behest of the Treasury Department many times so that the government could incur greater spending. Congress, in the past, has even enacted rules so they could avoid having to deal with the debt ceiling—also another rule! Known as the Gephardt Rule (which, the House waived this year when they got their chance to rewrite the House rules at the beginning of the 112^th Congress, providing more evidence that the Republican leadership wanted conflict about the ceiling), it is the perfect example of using rules to avoid making policy choices.

But voters should always be suspicious of rules that politicians create to constrain themselves. Politicians like to claim credit for popular programs and any rule that allows politicians to avoid blame for unpopular decisions should be a clear sign of rough waters ahead. According to the Christian Science Monitor:

In 1995, then-majority House Republicans waived the Gephardt rule. They refused to raise the debt limit in a bid to force President Clinton to accept spending cuts – prompting two government shutdowns.

While I understand the importance of rules, I smell something sinister about the choices that the Republican leadership is making. On the one hand they waived the Gephardt rule, allowing them the discretion to play chicken on the debt ceiling with the Democratic leadership, and to create uncertainty that a deal will be reached before the August 2^nd deadline. But what one hand giveth, the other hand taketh away.  By putting forth a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution that would force Congress to make cuts to offset any proposed budgetary spending it would send to the President, it would force Congress to make unpopular decisions and constrain its choices in times of crisis. By picking and choosing between which rules they like and which rules they don’t, the American public should be aware that by going down these procedural paths and forcing decisions to be made (whether you want to call them tough or unpopular) the Republicans plan to insulate themselves from possible backlash.

If the current budget debate is to be framed as a choice between rules and discretion, the public has to be aware that creating rules that force our nation down a certain path is a sly tactic, which can only mean that even more austerity is on the way. By inserting rules that command specific actions, as a Balanced Budget amendment would, Republicans can implement cuts to government spending, even in popular programs, while claiming to have only done so because it was a rule. As someone who believes that, now more than ever, we need more government intervention to pick up the slack in the economy, the current procedural maneuverings and offerings that the Republican debt ceiling negotiators are proposing can only mean one thing: more austerity is on the way and they want to minimize the damage.

With the oncoming passage of a debt ceiling increase in the next couple of days, it seems that a balanced Budget Amendment is still being discussed amongst the Republican caucus (though if Boehner wants moderate members of the House Democratic caucus to vote for this he may have to give it up), which is a definite form of worrisome discretion. The small bit of scary rule writing comes in the form of a trigger that I have talked about here that, according to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, will automatically lead to spending cuts, not tax increases. However, there is a grey area on the largest bit of rules politicking in this bill. In short, a “Super Committee” will be created (12 people, 6 from each party including 3 from each House for each party) to make recommendations on deficit reduction. However, these committees have a history of not working too well, essentially failing where the discretion of policymakers tends to fail; with an inability to reach an agreement. If the committee fails to reach an agreement, a whole other set of actions take place, which may end up being more favorable to Republicans. All in all, the murky, more esoteric rules that are written into this agreement may end up mattering more than most think. Stay tuned, only time will tell whether rules trump discretion, or if the politicians can negotiate their way out of these new constraints.

One of great parts of the journalism today is how easy it is contact and publicly fact check the claims made in articles and reports appearing in the news media. There is one publication that refuses to publish the authors of specific pieces written in their magazine and that is The Economist. If you don’t like a piece, the best you can do is hold the publication, rather than the writer accountable for their poor writing, logic, and arguments. In searching for a reason why this would be the case, I found Economist writer and author Andreas Kluth had already written a blog post on the topic, quoting his editor, John Micklethwait:

“We haven’t done anything. We’ve kept the same, and everyone else has changed.” In other words, The Economist is 160+ years old, and back then anonymity was the norm. Then the industry went on a slightly disturbing path toward writer celebrity, and we simply chose not to participate.

When asked about why they still persist today, other than tradition, Micklethwait answered:

“Why do we keep it? Firstly, because it’s, I suppose, a brand. But it’s more than a marketing gimmick.” It also, he says, fits our method of collaborative writing.

The reason I wish that the Economist had more openness and transparency by giving up the people who write their columns, etc…is to respond to stories like the one that is in the latest issue of the magazine (and can be found here). The story, published on the heels of the launch, by the USDA, of a new mapping application to measure, graphically by census tract, where Food Deserts are located in the United States. The claims made in the article, namely questioning the fact that food deserts even exist (I will define what a food desert is soon enough), that food deserts do not lead to worse health outcomes like obesity and chronic health problems, and that government policy, specifically the current government program known as the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, is ineffective in solving the problem, if it exists at all.

The reason that this column bugged me so much is that I have done considerable research on the topic, culminating in my first publication entitled Access and Inequality: The Cleveland Food Desert Case, in the 10 Ideas for Economic Development published by the Manhattan based think tank the Roosevelt Institute:

The small abstract, I paste here:

By strategically expanding public transportation routes, municipal authorities can improve the health and economy of Cleveland, Ohio, one of the United States’ most depressed urban areas.

So obviously I was taken aback at the Economist’s piece, and wanted to email the author my critique. However, this piece was an anonymous one, so here I am, left to rant on this blog on the internet. I want to rebuke some of the points that (for all we know Mr. Kluth wrote) appeared in the Economist on food deserts.

The logic of the article in my mind makes very little sense. So food deserts don’t exist, but they also don’t cause poor health outcomes. Well if they don’t exist then, then how is there a problem? The author can’t seem to get his/her head around the issue to develop a consistent opinion. That isn’t to say that what the author has to say is all complete rubish. This piece is right:

Official figures for the number of people living in food deserts already show a decline, from 23.5m in 2009 to 13.5m at the launch of the website in May. Although this might on the face of it suggest that the initiative is off to a superb start, sadly it does not in fact represent a single additional banana bought or soda shunned.This is because in America, the definition of a food desert is any census area where at least 20% of inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33% live more than a mile from a supermarket. By simply extending the cut-off in rural areas to ten miles, the USDA managed to rescue 10m people from desert life.

I don’t necessarily agree with what the author is insinuating, no government official or agency is claiming credit for the downsizing of food deserts in the US. In fact, it’d be pretty impressive if all the Healthy Food Financing Initiative’s seed money had been swallowed up that quickly, especially in a recessionary downturn when people in poorer communities have less money and economic security than in recent memory.

That’s about as factual as the piece gets. What follows is a mangling of an academic study and a spattering of flimsy anecdotal evidence. The author brings forth this tidbit:

Research by the Centre for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington found that only 15% of people shopped for food within their own census area. Critics also note that focusing on supermarkets means that the USDA ignores tens of thousands of larger and smaller retailers, farmers’ markets and roadside greengrocers, many of which are excellent sources of fresh food. Together, they account for more than half of the country’s trillion-dollar retail food market.

1. With regards to the first statistic, the author does not further substantiate the claim that perhaps the census tract measure is imperfect because census tracts are so damn large! It is quite possible that since tracts are so big that they understate the power of concentrated poverty and variations in the socioeconomic status of those within tracts. The problem of using census tract as a unit of analysis is its size, its not optimal for the study of food deserts, but who else has the resources than the USDA (utilizing the Census to survey Americans)?
2. Small markets are not a solution and never have been. They don’t have the economies of scale to make a great deal of competition in comparisons to less healthy food and only have a limited ability to supply big areas (especially in what the author refers to as places experiencing urban decay). Local gardens and small markets are not a panacea in the least and their ability to be a long term viable solution for poor urban communities is close to nil.
3. The anecdotal evidence comes in the form of the author explaining how in his or her experience in an area outside of Seattle, WA in a food desert that he/she deemed to not be on. First of all, it is quite possible that the food desert is due to the fact that there is a poor population in the area that does not have the proper transportation to reach the superstore (only really savvy consumers with money shop at health food stores, food stands vary depending on whether produce is organic). Simply, the author is taking food desert as a measure but not decomposing the numbers to see what they mean.

At the end of the piece, the author draws attention to the fact that neither the USDA nor the Institutes of Medicine have been able to link food deserts to poor health outcomes. Firstly, a longitudinal study is necessary to do this and to my knowledge none is available as the study of food deserts is a relatively recent phenomenon to be studied in public health and sociology. However, the Institutes of Medicine did put out a report on the issue, emphasizing that:

Mapping shows that these are also frequently areas with high rates of obesity and chronic, diet-related diseases. However, presenters emphasized that food retail is only one component of the total food environment that affects how people eat and, more fundamentally, their health. Another caveat is that the supply of healthy food will not suddenly induce people to buy and eat such food over less-healthy options, especially when relative prices of the healthier foods are high.

I’d guess that food deserts explain a good third of obesity, as the availability of healthy food at all is a major factor in whether a person even has the opportunity to lead a healthy lifestyle. Janet Currie, in a NBER working paper, (that was later published in the AER) stated in work related to the placement of fast food restaurants on obesity rates that:

We find that among 9th grade children, a fast food restaurant within a tenth of a mile of a school is associated with at least a 5.2 percent increase in obesity rates. There is no discernable effect at .25 miles and at .5 miles. Among pregnant women, models with mother fixed effects indicate that a fast food restaurant within a half mile of her residence results in a 1.6 percent increase in the probability of gaining over 20 kilos, with a larger effect at .1 miles. The effect is significantly larger for African-American and less educated women.

However, as affordability is a huge issue, this is where I focused my research on. From the policy brief:

By introducing a “food bus line” to link stores and consumers, the City of Cleveland would allow supermarkets to directly compete for customers. While the HFFI brings supermarkets to under served areas, the bus line’s goal would be to bring grocery dollars back to under served communities. Increased competition from the bus line would incentivize supermarkets to provide consumers with information on prices and make healthy food more accessible.

The final problem that the author of the Economist notes is the cynicism he/she displays:

Open a full-service supermarket in a food desert and shoppers tend to buy the same artery-clogging junk food as before—they just pay less for it. The unpalatable truth seems to be that some Americans simply do not care to eat a balanced diet, while others, increasingly, cannot afford to.

This is a matter of taste. The inability of public policy to provide for a nutritious lifestyle and a safe place for businesses to take root in the poor sections of urban areas means that over  time tastes changed to what was provided and prices responded downwards. This can be changed, tastes aren’t immovable, and it is the job of public policy to try and reverse this trend.

One of the cool things that I get to do as a researcher is read, and read, and read some more. Part of the job of a researcher’s job (at least in my eyes) is to ask interesting questions that haven’t been answered or were insufficiently answered before. When you read other people’s work, you not only get the gist on what the consensus is on your topic and what current part of your topic researchers are studying, but you don’t want to ask a question that has already been answered satisfactorily. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s happened to me many times after having a eureka moment. One of the great things about coming at a research topic from a fresh perspective is an ability to look past ways in which path dependence shapes academic research communities.

As demonstrated in Kuhn’s famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, there tend to be paradigm shifts in the way problems in research are addressed, not gradual shifts in analytical frameworks. This is not to say that the work I am doing at the moment is anything close to a paradigm shift, but I am quite proud of a clever measure that I created for my current project. Though my creation is much more a creature of a theoretical proposition than that of statistical or mathematical rigor (ie, it’s no Policy Mood or DWNominate score) I think it intuitively represents what I hoped it would when it was first conceived.

The measure we came up with is called (for now) the Wack rate. Here is a graph of the wack rate, then let me explain.

The basic story we wanted the wack rate to tell is how far policy drifts on the minimum wage, or how much the real value of the minimum wage loses its power over time:

The wack rate measures the real minimum wage in reference to the previous real maximum value of the minimum wage. So for example the maximum value the real minimum wage (2010$) attained was $9.526147. Today’s minimum wage is 7.25. Therefore the wackrate is 7.25-9.526147 or -2.276147.

I can only hope that the wack rate permeates something more than just the current project, because I think it provides a useful way to distinctively measure policy drift, if only because the minimum wage is such an empirically simple statistic.

Also wouldn’t it be cool to be the second person from GWU to get a statistic named after them regarding the minimum wage? The first would be Hyman Benjamin Kaitz of the famous Kaitz Index, which provides a more useful way to compare the minimum wage over time by taking the minimum wage, dividing it by the average hourly earnings of workers in manufacturing and then multiplying by the percentage of workers who are covered by minimum wage laws (according to the Gelman library his Master’s Thesis: On the Income Distribution, was directed by Everett Herschel Johnson in May of 1951, I am proud to say that 60 years later it seemed that old Kaitz did end up being important!). Maybe the wack rate will become the Robinson Rate in the future? Doubtful, but still a cool exercise in making your own metrics for data analysis.

The latest stir up in the Senate these days revolves around taxes. For the uninitiated, anti tax advocate Grover Norquist has circulated what has been called on both sides as an ‘anti tax pledge’ (it’s actually called the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, but I will refer to it as the Norquist pledge) that he has asked Republicans to sign. The reason I say Republicans is because as of today, all the signers of the Norquist pledge have been Republican senators and members of Congress, no Democrats or Independents caucusing with the Democratic party have signed the pledge, which reads:

Taxpayer Protection Pledge
I, _____, pledge to the taxpayers of the (____
district of the) state of ______ and to the American
people that I will: ONE, oppose any and all efforts
to increase the marginal income tax rate for
individuals and business; and TWO, oppose any
net reduction or elimination of deductions and
credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further
reducing tax rates.

Why all this about the pledge? Well, despite its simplicity, it does help to illustrate how either (1) tremendously ideologically homogenous the Republican party is or (2) how cohesive the Republican caucuses in both the Senate and the House are. In fact, Norquist has leveraged the pledge into not just a litmus test for legislators but as a signalling mechanism for presidential candidate hopefuls. However, what has caused such a fuss this past week is over Tom Coburn’s supposed breaking of his anti-tax pledge by supporting an elimination for a tax break for ethanol. As can be clearly seen, this violates point TWO, but puts Coburn in a strange place, where he is not only enacting a relatively economically sound policy (not the subject of this post), but one that actually does lower the medium term deficit. The only problem is that according to Norquist’s TWO, getting rid of tax expenditures, where tax revenue is foregone on a certain good, service, or income, is a non-starter.

So here we are today. Surely this is an interesting event,but is it the biggest thing happening in Washington, are the Republicans in the Senate unshackling themselves from the economic orthodoxy and black and white statements of Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform?

Jon Chait Tom Coburn Traps Grover Norquist:

Norquist and Coburn have been circling each other for months, trading barbs in the media. Now Coburn is using a test case to expose Norquist’s Pledge. That test case is the ethanol subsidy, which is pork that survives due to the strength of the agriculture lobby, but which the conservative movement at least putatively opposes. The ethanol subsidy, like many subsidies, comes in the form of a tax break. Eliminating it is, therefore, a tax increase. Therefore, eliminating the ethanol subsidy, without using the revenue for a tax cut, would violate the Pledge.

In other words, Coburn has set a trap for Norquist. He has proposed eliminating the ethanol subsidy. If Norquist supports it, he has to alter his pledge to allow for closing loopholes that raise revenue. If he opposes it, he has to admit that he opposes closing loopholes that even Norquist admits are unsupportable.

Ezra Klein from today’s Wonkbook newsletter:

Norquist might have to take a hard line and pretend he’s appalled to see it crossed, but in focusing everyone on that line, he’s effectively distracting them from how far the goalposts have been moved. Instead of revenues being an assumed part of a deficit deal, with the only question being how much of the deal they make up, the question has become whether Republicans will accept any revenues at all in the deficit deal. Including any new revenues at all has been framed as a major concession for the Republicans, which means it’s easier for Republicans to include far less revenue in total. And no matter how you look at it, that’s a win for Grover Norquist.

And finally, Ezra again on the question of whether the media gives Grover Norquist too much credit:

So perhaps Norquist is mostly a mixture of effective self-promotion and a useful way for journalists to humanize the GOP’s anti-tax stance. But the point from this morning’s Wonkbook remains: The fact that Republicans, after blowing a hole in the deficit with the Bush tax cuts, have managed to define any revenues at all as some sort of massive concession is an astounding political victory, and it means that the ultimate mix of the deficit deal will probably tilt very heavily towards spending cuts.

If you want to see how heavily, notice that President Obama’s deficit-reduction proposal extends more than $3 trillion of Bush’s tax cuts and then raises taxes by less than $1 trillion. And that’s the Democratic opening bid. The Republicans, presumably, will counter with an offer to extend all $4+ trillion of the Bush tax cuts but close down some tax subsidies for green energy. And then the two parties will meet somewhere in the middle.

Ezra may be right, but what I would argue is that the media is giving too much credence to this story. Sure it is an interesting story, especially the fact that Coburn is so strong in his opposition to Norquist, someone who is arguably on his side. However, this seems to me like a non story. Legislators tend to not like to be publically constrained be interest groups, especially ‘non important’ ones like American’s for Tax Reform.

On a political sciencey note, I think Jonathan Chait gets this wrong:

Virtually all the media coverage has gotten this vote wrong. Tom Coburn was not going about this in order to eliminate the ethanol subsidy. He made no attempt to work with the House, line up a majority, woo Senate Democrats, arrange for a vote on favorable terms, or do any of the things that Senators do when they’re trying to pass a law. His goal was to do one thing: set a trap for Grover Norquist.

What Chait is saying is that Coburn wasn’t necessarily voting with his sincere preferences on policy. That kind of voting is called sincere voting, where a legislator or voter chooses a policy closest to his/her preferred option. What Chait is claiming is that Coburn was undertaking sophisticated voting, where he didn’t care about the policy, just stabbing Norquist. Despite the fact that all this seems rather petty and far-fetched, a paper by Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeffrey Mylo of University of Missouri states (ungated!):

However, when scholars search systematically over a large set of roll-calls, they typically conclude that sophisticated voting is rare. We are aware of only three such systematic studies—those by Ladha (1994), Poole and Rosenthal (1997), and Wilkerson (1999). All conclude similar to Poole and Rosenthal: ‘‘our search of the literature on strategic [i.e. sophisticated] voting found very vew bothersome needles in our haystack of the 37,000 roll calls in the first 100 congresses’’ (1997, 147).

So, sophisticated voting is rare, why should we expect it to occur here? Isn’t this in fact an extreme case of a lack of party discipline? My answer to this question is really that I don’t know, but I can guess. The fact that 34 Republican Senators defected is rare, but not a truly strategic action in and of itself. It seems to me that being anti government subsidies is pretty consistent with the ideological bend of Republicans in Congress today, and moving in such big groups to strategically bait Norquist might go well with the strength of party cohesion in the Republican caucus, but wouldn’t it be easier to do than organize 33 of your colleagues? Just my cents on this.

My gut says that we really shouldn’t be giving too much credence to this spat. In gridlock whenever there is an irregular vote or a step out of the orthodoxy the media should be wringing its hands to try and figure out what was going on and what the portents are for the future. To me gridlock seems imminent on the horizon and continuing party cohesion and obstruction the norm. Journalists would be far more suited in my eyes with getting the story of the evolution of the tax pledge, instead of trying to needlessly pick apart at its demise.

This graph from Adam Bonica’s blog is just one of many that aims to show the ideological tendencies of the medical profession. This is important, because as Jacob Hacker has shown in his great book The Divided Welfare State on the history of health care reform (and pension reform) in the US, stresses the importance of the support of the medical industry and the lobbying and professional organizations that represent them (remember how important it was when the AMA ‘endorsed’ the House bill in March 2010?).

The opposition of doctors, “plus the fears which this opposition aroused in Congress, doomed all hopes for early enactment of health insurance legislation.” (207)

So, it seems that for a great deal of time (since the days of Teddy Roosevelt), the opinion of the medical profession in the US has mattered a great deal. Hacker continues:

In no country has the medical profession wholeheartedly embraced national health insurance. Yet the depth of professional opposition and the alternatives that physicians have supported have varied significantly both over time and across nations. Moreover, these differences appear to reflect not only strategic political considerations but also real variance in doctors’ preferences rooted in contrasting market structures. In explaining why physicians attitudes differ across time and space, two factors seem to be crucial in all cases: the profession’s assessment of its prospects in the political arena and the availability of acceptable private alternatives to government insurance.” (188)

Before I continue, just to give a quick primer on the graph posted above. The y-axis shows the ideal point estimation of ideology on a left to right scale, with -1 being very liberal and 1 being very conservative. This is a sort of novel new methodology that is best explained by someone with a strong background in math:

Ideal point models attempt to estimate the position of each legislator on the left-right or other dimensions using the votes that they cast on legislation. Basically, the models assume that a legislator will vote in favor of a motion if it moves policy outcomes closer to their most preferred policy. The resulting estimates from these models provide a descriptive summary of the distribution of preferences within a legislature. They are also important parameters in many formal models of legislative behavior.

Though much of Bonica’s work is really cool empirics I was disappointed to not see him discuss one of the most interesting (in my opinion) contributions of the last decade to our understanding of political institutions in America: how they shape the behavior and actions of participants. Joe Soss of the University of Minnesota has one of my favorite papers on the topic where he examines the attitudes of participants in SSDI, TANF, and Head Start. What he found was striking, these participants interactions with powerful government entities in their lives shaped the way they saw and understood politics. Reacting to the autonomy of many caseload managers in TANF offices, many participants adopted an attitude that participation in government was futile, they would always be under the thumb of the caseload manager. This seems to me to be a useful way to explain the divergence in ideal points of health care professionals.

First off, it would have been nice to have a rough breakdown of how big each sector Bonica divides each group into (its at the BLS somewhere). I’d assume that nurses are the largest group, followed by physicians, then surgeons, and psychiatrists (just a quibble). However, I think the way health care professionals interact with government health care institutions say a great deal about their political views, especially if we assume that health care is a major issue for these professionals. Psychiatrists have been squeezed and squeeze by health insurance companies not covering their services, and would benefit most from a change in the way insurance is run in the US. In many cases, physicians run into trouble with their patients ability to afford basic care, whereas the practice of psychiatry in the US has been irrevocably altered around what insurers cover (the shift from psychotherapy to drug therapy).

Nurses I have a hard time understanding. Seeing as they are one of the fastest growing parts of the medical profession and span many different fields (from working in hospitals with surgeons to manning primary care practices) it is hard to generalize. Perhaps this is why we see nurses situated more towards the middle along with physicians, since the sample size is so large, perhaps the data regresses to some sort of mean? Surgeons it seems. are taking the status quo conservative position. This makes sense to me as well. Their experience with the government is possibly with Medicare, in dealing with surgeries for the elderly that are well reimbursed. They like the status quo, where the payday is good, something that is threatened by possible changes to the insurance market with government entry.

Something along these lines would make the blog post (and presumably other article that is on the way by Bonica), alot more interesting.

I wish!

This summer I am lucky enough to be able to stay in DC and work on some of my research, one of three “conference paper” worthy papers I plan to write by the end of the year. I even created a “semi-professional” Google-site that will serve as my academic research hub (see research agenda here). My project this summer is a sort of political economy of minimum wage legislation. What my adviser and I hope to find is what best predicts changes in the minimum wage,and not just changes, but how powerful and strong they are. There has been some work on this already, and I’m not expecting to find anything ground breaking, though most studies on this topic stopped after the late 80’s,and the stagnating minimum wage (as show in the above graph) as well as the fall of organized labor should prove interesting to analyze.

However, the first point I want to touch upon in my first post on the minimum wage and my research is public opinion on the minimum wage. What we should expect from our politicians is that they are responsive to public opinion. How else are they going to be re-elected. Politicians must appease their constituents and not tread to far from their views, or they run the risk of losing their office and their ability to effect policy (if we assume politicians are a self interested bunch, which isn’t too hard to get many of us to believe). So, in response to this question posed by the Pew Center on Economic Mobility, respondents said:

(Now I am going to read you some steps the government could take to make sure people don’t fall behind economically. For each one I read, please tell me if you believe this would be one of the most effective steps the government could take, very effective, somewhat effective, not very effective or not effective at all.)…Raise the minimum wage

Pew Economic Mobility and the American Dream Survey, Mar, 2011 

This poll is generally indicative of how people think on the minimum wage. Here’s another example to prove my point.

I’m going to read you several actions the next Congress could take. For each one, please tell me whether you would strongly support this action, mildly support it, feel neutral about it, mildly oppose it, or strongly oppose this action….Raising the minimum wage

NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll, Dec, 2006

Next, let’s break it down by category/demographics:


As you can see from these results, this study (and the breakdown included) show pretty high levels of support for the minimum wage, though you’re more likely to support the minimum wage if you’re a young, liberal, black, and poor (this matches up with evidence of who is most likely to receive the minimum wage). This strong support for the minimum wage doesn’t match up so nicely with elite public opinion on the minimum wage. In part, minimum wage isn’t all that salient. When people are primed about issues like the minimum wage, they support it, but rationally they have no incentive to advocate for a program that most Americans make little use of. I measure media salience by looking for how often the phrase “minimum wage” was used in the Roper Online Polling Database (provided by the University of Connecticut):

While the minimum wage was a more salient issue in the 80s-00’s, the 150 question (roughly) maximum number of questions asked is rather low in comparison to hot button issues like marriage, taxes, health care, etc. The major puzzle with the minimum wage is that even though there is broad support for it, across a wide array of demographic groups, those who are affected by the wage are not politically active enough to make the issue salient. That at least, at this moment is my feeling on the issue. This finding makes me question the claims made by Larry Bartels in his book Unequal Democracy, where he argues that the voices of the poor go unrepresented in Senate roll call votes. It seems to me, that on the minimum wage, the poor are so disengaged from politics,that it never even becomes a salient issue to be ignored.

One of the major parts of President Obama’s deficit reduction plan is an “automatic trigger”, that provides for action when discretion falls short. Stated simply, if the Obama plan doesn’t cut deficits, then automatic cuts in spending will occur to supplant the failure to reach the target set up by the plan. It’s a bold move, ultimately inserted into the legislation as a fail safe, because it acknowledges that if the deficit reduction act doesn’t work, something, swiftly and quickly, must be done to ensure effective action takes place and to be sure: Congress isn’t the place for that. Commentators have praised this part of Obama’s deficit reduction pledge, the humility of possibly not getting to the goal, as the most noble and notable part of his plan. Ezra Klein noted:

And, curiously for a conservative who distrusts both government and congress, it (Ryan’s Plan) has no answer to the question of “what if this fails?”

The policy that clarifies this difference is the “trigger.” Obama’s budget, aware that it might not pass and, if it does pass, it might not work, proposes to make automatic cuts to discretionary spending and tax expenditures if the promised savings don’t materialize. If Ryan’s budget falls shorts, there’s no comparable failsafe. That is to say, Obama’s budget has two plausible ways to get to its number, while Ryan’s budget has none. You don’t need a PhD in philosophy to understand why that’s a problem.

Others including Alan Krueger, someone whom I revere for his economic expertise, praised the trigger for being a rule that is unable to be deviated from that signals that a policy is serious and commits to the policy no matter what. Politicians love making promises but largely tend to avoid blame (gated) in tough scenarios (budgetary crises, deficit reduction, etc…). Krueger opined in the NYT that:

In essence, Mr. Obama proposed a rule that will enable us to get ahead of the long-run budget problem, and provide predictability and certainty to the federal budget.

Economists prefer rules over discretion when parties can choose to reverse themselves as tough decisions arise. Think of an overweight person intending to lose weight. He could use his judgment every time he is confronted with dessert. But that one extra slice of cake would not really matter much, so there is a tendency to indulge today and push restraint off until later. If, however, he buys all his meals in advance and commits to eat only those meals, he builds restraint into his diet. Rules can commit individuals or groups to a predetermined path.

Krueger then goes on to praise the PayGo rules (some call the Obama trigger: SaveGo) for its rules based approach to propose how a deficit trigger would work in practice:

The so-called pay-go rule in the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 — which required increases in spending or decreases in revenue to be offset by other spending cuts or revenue increases — helped lead to the surpluses that arose in the late 1990s. We’ve also run the experiment in reverse: After the pay-go rules expired in 2002, increased spending on programs like Medicare prescription drugs and two rounds of tax cuts caused the deficit to soar.

While pay-go rules are helpful in the current environment, they are not sufficient given the burden the approaching retirement of the baby boom generation and rising health care costs will place on the debt. We need a supercharged pay-go rule, and that is what the president proposed. Because politicians prefer discretion, it took courage to propose an automatic trigger.

Krueger is right, we should try to prefer rules to discretion as much as possible. Though discretion can lead to great outcomes, rules are sometimes too constraining and don’t allow for dynamic policy response to new challenges, domestic and foreign.

On the other side of the coin, Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center thinks these rules are not worth too much, and I agree with him:

Caps–and the triggers needed to enforce them– are supposed to be a last resort for legislators. Yet, they perversely encourage stalemate by providing an easy fallback in the face of gridlock. By mindlessly but automatically slashing spending or raising taxes across-the-board, they permit Congress to avoid setting national priorities though, last I looked, this is why lawmakers are here.    

Mostly though, caps only work during those rare moments when Congress wants to be fiscally responsible. When Congress prefers profligacy—which is most of the time—they become little more than an inconvenience. And it is never good for democracy when lawmakers routinely ignore the law.

Supporters argue that these process reforms at least slow Congress’ mania to spend too much and tax too little. Maybe. But it won’t take long before the next set of caps-and-triggers joins paygo and Gramm Rudman Hollings on the ash heap of failed schemes aimed at saving Congress from itself.

Here’s why I think Gleckman is right. Triggers are only as good  as the politicians who make them. There are incentives to create economic policy triggers. One is that it takes the decision out of the hands of political actors and moves it towards something that academics (studying other forms of rules based governance) have called “Automatic Government”. Automatic government takes hard decisions out of the hands of lawmakers and places them in another authority that perhaps can’t receive harsh electoral backlash. An example of this deference of authority is in deciding whether to go to war. According to the Constitution, only Congress can declare war and raise an army. However, since it is hard to discern the benefits and/or costs of war at its onset, legislators tend to cede power on this issue to the executive. Similarly, this has taken place before with regards to automatic government issues and deficit reduction.

The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Acts of 1985 and 1987 are perfect examples of why trigger, unless they are well designed and a powerful commitment mechanism exists, tend to not work. First of all, the Gramm-Rudman act had key parts of it struck down by special 3-panel federal court, something that the Obama administration is probably highly aware of, because, you know they’re competent. Anyways, part of the problem with Gramm-Rudman is that there was a sunlight provision to it. While the Obama administration’s trigger would have a timeline before the trigger would go into effect, it is not a fool-proof plan. The problem with rule setting is that rules can always be tinkered with. One of my favorite quotations about Congress is from the sage John Dingell:

If you let me write the procedure and I let you write the substance, I’ll [beat] you every time.

What happened with Gramm-Rudman was that the Congress and President Reagan passed the trigger, but then tinkered with it only 3 years later in the COBRA of 1990! Mind you, it wasn’t the same Presidency, but it was presided over by the same political party. Jonathan Rauch (he had to make a good point every once in a while!) points out (in a 2005 hate-fest on Gramm-Rudman-esque policies proposed by Bush administration):

Mechanically, the measure, which came to be known by the shorthand “Gramm-Rudman,” failed. Congress generally managed to evade or raise its limits. But it was not without effect. First, “Gramm-Rudman made it easier to go after defense [spending] as well as other elements,” says William Niskanen, a former Reagan administration economic adviser who now is the chairman of Cato. Second, says Timothy Penny, a Democratic member of Congress during that period (now a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs), “it kept us focused on spending and the size of the deficit. The virtue of Gramm-Rudman was not that it worked as designed, but that it elevated attention to the deficit.”

Eventually, this meant that the focus was moved to a spending cap, not a trigger to hold deficit reduction. Sound familiar? It is what is being proposed right now in the Senate and the House, most prominently by Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee. And that, as many have said, is a recipe for disaster and stunted government response, the very essence of a bad rule! So Gramm-Rudman didn’t work because it provided bad incentives and created institutional norms that didn’t help anything at all. The only question is whether or not they have the guts to do what they claim. With regards to that only time can tell.