In comix form, no less. Check out Tom Tomorrow at:
http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/09/15/tomo/
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There may, or may not, be a rash of suicides at France Telecom. If there is, it may, or may not, be due to management’s policies, which seem to be what we can call the American plan:
In France, the question is being taken very seriously. That’s a big contrast from here; nobody I know of has even looked at how many suicides there have been among American workers at companies with the same style of management. It’s worth investigating; a rise in suicides at a company would be a pretty inarguable sign that management is inept at best, and that the company will be in trouble down the road. Certainly, economic hardship is related to suicide rates (although not always in a strict correlation), and bad workplace environments are related to suicide triggers such as stress. Is it so impossible that bad managers (and their name is legion, for they are many) are driving their employees to suicide? And as a corollary, that better management could prevent suicides? So I read all 1018 pages of the health care bill (the July 24 version). I’ll summarize it in another post, but here’s a summary of the summary:
See, the key idea of the bill is that health insurance plans have to insure everyone and meet a bunch of requirements (like, no denying claims for no reason), with a public option to keep them honest. But as currently written, the important reforms don’t go into effect until 2013 (section 100(c)25, 101(b), and 221(a)). And then, existing group health insurance plans have a five-year grace period to get up to code (section 102(b)1(a)). And then, the health insurance company can choose to “grandfather” an existing plan, which means that it can keep offering the same crappy old terms but can’t enroll new people. What this means is that if reform were enacted tomorrow, people with no health insurance could hope to get it in 2013, while people with today’s junk insurance could expect their coverage to improve in 2018, unless their plan was grandfathered. The 2013 date has received almost no mainstream media attention—the most popular hits on a Google search on “health reform 2013” are mostly diaries and blog posts. The 2018 date has attracted even less attention (here’s an exception). It’s not that fixing a health insurance plan really takes that long—nine years (2009-2018) was enough time to create a military from scratch, fight World War II, dismantle the military, and rebuild it for the Korean War. Back in the thirties, nine years was enough time to create important programs like the Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, have them do their work, and dismantle them. On the other hand, the long delay gives the forces against reform time to undermine it, and an entire freaking presidential election campaign to replace pro-reform politicians with ones more amenable to their interests. One doesn’t have to be paranoid to think that maybe this is the point. The left is mobilizing against delaying the public option for this reason. Here’s Robert Reich:
Reich has it right, but what’s true of the public option is also true of health care reform in general. Waiting so long to implement reform nearly guarantees that it will be whittled down to nothing, or killed outright, before we ever see it. I’m planning another post summarizing the whole bill, if only because I read the whole damn thing and other people should suffer too, but I’ll wait to watch Obama’s speech tonight before starting. This blog involves analyzing (or, um, bitching about) various aspects of the economy that don’t work, so I thought I’d break things up occasionally by putting forward solutions to the things I’m complaining about. Some will be ones I’ve thought up, others will be other people’s good ideas that need more publicity. So here’s the first one. It’s possibly the simplest, most obvious, and most urgent reform out there: Publicly traded corporations should pay taxes on the profits that they declare to their shareholders. Just explaining the current situation shows how insane it is: Today, a corporation declares its profit to the government, and it announces its profit to its shareholders, and these two numbers do not have to be the same.
Making companies report a single number both to the shareholders and the taxman would go a long way toward solving both problems. Companies would think twice before overestimating their profits (it would mean more tax) and would hesitate to underestimate them (shareholders would start to ask where the profit is). There would have to be a transition period—say, five years—for companies to bring their two sets of books into line. Of course, that would mean either restating their profits upward to the government or downward to their shareholders. They don’t want to do that, and big corporations more or less choose how they’re regulated, so I don’t see this happening any time soon. But so what? There’s something to be said for keeping our eyes on real solutions, even if we can’t push them through Congress this week or this year. We just got the August employment numbers; unemployment jumped from 9.4% to 9.7%. That sounds bad, but as I explained last month, the unemployment rate is a strange beast. In unsettled times like this it bounces around a lot, so it’s better to look at the sheer number of jobs lost. It turns out that we “only” lost 216,000 jobs in August, compared to (a revised) 276,ooo in July; both are a far cry from the 600,000 plus at the worst of the freefall. So rather than a sudden scary spike in unemployment, the real news is that things are leveling off. Within a few months we might even see the losses stop. Hey, a man can dream. On the heels of last year’s meltdown comes the news that EBANK has frozen its accounts, $1.2 trillion in the hole. It’s the old story–in the words of the new CEO, “controls were not enforced, auditing was never completed and reporting was almost non-existent.” On the bright side, the real-world fallout should be minimal–EBANK only exists in the virtual world of EVE Online. Which just makes it more interesting, really–people are people, no matter how we’re interacting. (Here’s the full article, which is worth reading.) And really, how different is EBANK from any other financial institution? Merrill Lynch’s customers and trading partners generally go to a computer terminal to interact with it, most of its transactions are computerized, and many of them have lost all real-world meaning (almost nobody who buys, say, wheat options actually takes possession of wheat when the contract comes due). Hat tip to Andrew Leonard for pointing to the original article. I consider myself a pretty cynical guy, but the latest news on the healthcare front shocked even me: Apparently private health insurers in California reject a fifth of claims. In one system it’s 40% of claims. That’s worse than it sounds: A health insurer isn’t going to bother rejecting your claim for a routine doctor’s visit or your normal heart meds–they’ll pay that. They’ll only reject major claims (for your cancer treatment, for instance). It’s possible, then, that health insurers in California reject pretty much every single major claim as a matter of course. Then some people appeal, and some of those people win, but overall, the insurance companies save more money than they would if they just paid the claims. And the patient’s time and effort spent fighting the insurance company is in addition to the official costs of health care. And if doctors and hospitals are the ones fighting the rejections, they have to keep more people on staff to do so. We don’t have to look farther to understand why healthcare is in the US is expensive and bad. Two caveats: although this news comes with Reuters’s imprimatur, it seems to be pretty much a press release. Also, California is one of the more dysfunctional states as far as health care goes; some other states don’t let insurers get away with quite so much. “Economists are nearly unanimous that Ben Bernanke should be reappointed to another term as Federal Reserve chairman. . . .” That’s how a Wall Street Journal article begins. But I couldn’t help but notice that all the quotes in the article (three out of three) were from economists at financial firms. I emailed Phil Izzo, the writer, to ask how many of the economists surveyed worked at financial firms, as opposed to academia or government. He’s had plenty of time to respond and hasn’t, so it’s fair to draw my own conclusion, which is: This survey is bollocks. Statistically speaking, it’s likely that at least half of the economists surveyed–probably more–work at financial firms. (For stats geeks only: If it were just shy of half—say, 23 of the 47 surveyed—the chance of having the three quoted economists just randomly happen to work on Wall Street would be slightly under 11%, if I’ve done my math right.) It’s also telling that the surveyed economists didn’t criticize Bernanke for printing oceans of money that nobody knows what to do with, or for setting up another meltdown a few years down the road, or for actions that could be seen as a giant federal power grab—their only criticism was that he hadn’t rescued Wall Street quickly enough. A survey of economists that excluded any who work at financial firms would have been interesting (and yes, some of them would have supported Bernanke’s reappointment), but instead, all the WSJ survey tells us is that Wall Streeters love the guy who saved their jobs and is making very few efforts to reform the way they do business. They should. And he’s up for reappointment very soon; this article only makes sense as an attempt to advocate for his reappointment. Aaaaand even as I was putting the final touches on this, I read that Bernanke was just reappointed. The New York Times reports that unemployment has dropped, from 9.6% to 9.4%. That sounds hopeful, but there are also 247,000 fewer jobs than there were in the first quarter of the year. That’s because to be “unemployed” takes more than simply lacking a job. You must have actively looked for work in the four weeks before the survey. So these numbers really mean: while a whole lot of jobs were lost, even more people stopped looking. That’s the thing about the government’s economic statistics—they’re often calculated in strange ways that make them sound a lot better than they should. It’s worth taking the occasional look at shadowstats.com to see how other calculations look. But shadowstats, rightly, relies on the government’s original data—that is, while the government’s calculations can be iffy, the data those calculations are based on are collected remarkably well. So let’s take a look at the full data. Some interesting points come out:
The sad thing is that these numbers are hopeful. 247,000 jobs is a lot to lose, but it’s nothing compared to the 645,000 lost every month between November and April. As Bonddad and others predicted months ago, we do seem to be coming to the end of the freefall; in my grouchy way I’m still not convinced that this is the beginning of a recovery–it could be the beginning of a long period of underperformance, or even just a pause before a further drop–but Bonddad is saying it’s a turnaround, and he’s been right so far. Just saw the first thumbnailed pages from Dan Burr today. Things are happening! A mere 5 1/2 years after I committed myself to doing this book! |
Buy the book:
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