U.S. Politics - the end of summer edition

[TerraPrime]

Yup.

[lokisnow]

Good Ole Boys and Glass Cielings

http://www.washingto...n-as-fed-chair/

The Obama White House has told the Washington Post that the reasons they don't like Janet Yellen is because she's not enough of a caretaker helpmeet for the men-folk and she shockingly has her own ideas rather than just supporting what the men-folk think. And she's extraordinarily prepared and calm rather than loud and bombastic, so the lack of loud and bombastic indicates that one cannot take her point of view as seriously as one takes a man's point of view. Oh, and she thinks that Unemployment is a more serious problem than Inflation (which is correct).

Many of the economic advisers whom President Obama consults with favor Larry Summers to be the next chair of the Federal Reserve. But what is it, exactly, that they have against Janet Yellen, the current No. 2 leader of the central bank?

...

When she arrived at the Fed as its No. 2 official in 2010, Yellen carved out a different kind of role from her two immediate predecessors in the job, Don Kohn and Roger Ferguson. Kohn and Ferguson worked much like deputies to the chairman, acting as close confidantes to Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan and then helping them carry out their decisions.

Yellen has a perfectly solid relationship with Bernanke, as best as I can tell, but she’s more of her own thinker within the institution. She has spent her time as vice chairwoman urging Bernanke and her other fellow policymakers to shift policy to try to do more to combat unemployment, and thinking through ways to do just that. She even had one economist who functioned for a time as something of a de facto chief of staff, Andrew Levin. And people dealing with her within the Fed have viewed her not so much as Bernanke’s emissary but as her own intellectual force within the organization.

...

A second, and related, reason that Yellen’s leadership style isn’t a great mesh with the Obamaites is also one of her strengths. She is always meticulously prepared, a careful and systematic thinker who chooses her words carefully. In a Fed policy committee meeting or a gathering of international central bankers, she typically scripts herself in advance and reads those prepared comments.

She is methodical, not manic. And the prevailing style of the White House insiders advising on the decision leans a bit more toward manic...

Third, the president very clearly frets about the risk of financial bubbles and wants a Fed chief who will be attuned to staving them off. As David J. Lynch of Bloomberg points out, four times in five days Obama recently referred to the importance of returning to “artificial bubbles” as a means of supporting growth. When New York Times reporters asked the president about his thinking on the Fed choice, he said: “I want a Fed chairman that can step back and look at that objectively and say, let’s make sure that we’re growing the economy, but let’s also keep an eye on inflation. And if it starts heating up, if the markets start frothing up, let’s make sure that we’re not creating new bubbles.”

Yellen has been at the forefront of the Fed’s thinking on how to use unconventional monetary policy to try to fight unemployment and was an architect of its strategy of using more open communications combined with bond purchases to try to spur growth.

These are all fucking terrible reasons to install sexist pig Larry Summers kingpin of the Good Ole Boys club as Fed chair over Yellen. Those first two reasons, that she's not enough of a help-meet to Bernanke and that she's too calm and not loud enough are pretty overtly sexist. And she's absolutely correct on the third point, and the Obama administration is wrong to be more concerned with inflation over unemployment.

[Shryke]

Obama seems to have a bad head for who to pay attention to in financial matters.

Here's hoping Yellen gets the job.

[Tormund Ukrainesbane]

Isn't maintaining optimal inflation the entire reason that there is a Federal Reserve? It seems to me that unemployment, if it must be addressed by the government at all, is a matter of public policy (ya know, that thing we used to have where we voted on representatives and shit) and not central banking. So a central bank chief who feels the need to act outside of their mandate is definitely someone you don't want on the job.

[The Progressive]

The mandates of the US Federal Reserve as established by the Federal Reserve Act include: maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12848.htm

[Shryke]

The mandates of the US Federal Reserve as established by the Federal Reserve Act include: maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.

http://www.federalre...money_12848.htm

More generally it's the first two, price stability/inflation and employment. It's referred to as the dual mandate where they are supposed to deal with employment and inflation, with the understanding that these are conflicting goals. (ie - low unemployment means high inflation, which is the Phillips Curve although the Phillips Curve is not quite correct either)

The dual mandate is really important because the alternative is shit like the ECB which pursues a policy solely based around inflation (price stability) and thus fucks over people with persistent high unemployment.

[WrathOfTinyKittens]

Hope Yellen gets the nom, but willing to bet cash money that she doesn't.

[lokisnow]

Inflation and employment go together, hence the dual mandate.

In general, low inflation is good for rich people, and high unemployment doesn't ever effect rich people. So the Rich People Priority response is to keep inflation low at all costs. On the other hand, high unemployment primarily/disproportionately affects poor people, and although it can be painful in the short term particularly if wages aren't tied to inflation, in general, higher inflation is good for poor people, long term (if they have debts, which can be effectively wiped out by inflation)--that also means higher inflation is often bad for Rich People because so much of their "wealth" is holding on to the debt of poor people and raping them with usurious interest rate. Rich People, particularly the Rich Banker really really don't want poor people to get out of debt because the perpetual interest rate rape of the poor is what makes the Rich Banker rich.

The Pro-Rich People, Fuck the Poor People Attitude is why we've indexed the estate tax to inflation but refuse to index the minimum wage to inflation.

I imagine most wall street banker types don't know a single person who is unemployed, so the financial sector without an employment mandate probably doesn't give a shit about unemployment. Putting the employment mandate with the inflation mandate is a reasonable check on the tendency of rich wall street financial sector bankers to rape and pillage the rest of the population.

[TerraPrime]

The Pro-Rich People, Fuck the Poor People Attitude is why we've indexed the estate tax to inflation but refuse to index the minimum wage to inflation.

Great point. Never thought of it that way before.

[ThinkerX]

In the course of my work, I see a *lot* of fund raising junk mail, from politicians all over the country. Over the past few months, I've noticed something:

Some of the mail is identified as being from the republican party.

Some of it is very clearly Tea Party material (often 'Tea Party Express').

But almost NONE of it contains both 'Republican' AND 'Tea Party' ID.

And given the loony-tunes bits about republicans being 'primaried' by Tea Party types (whose coughing up the cash for all this, anyhow?), I gotta wonder:

The republicans and Tea Party crowds are pretty much different groups now. So...how long before this is formally acknowledged, that they give up the farce that the Tea Party is merely a group within the republicans?

[Commodore]

boycott UPS?

UPS to drop 15,000 spouses from insurance, cites Obamacare

United Parcel Service Inc. plans to remove thousands of spouses from its medical plan because they are eligible for coverage elsewhere. The Atlanta-based logistics company points to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as a big reason for the decision, reports Kaiser Health News.

The decision comes as many analysts are downplaying the Affordable Care Act's effect on companies such as UPS, noting that the move reflects a long-term trend of shrinking corporate medical benefits, Kaiser Health News reports. But UPS repeatedly cites Obamacare to explain the decision, adding fuel to the debate over whether it erodes traditional employer coverage, Kaiser says.

[The Iceman of the North]

boycott UPS?

UPS to drop 15,000 spouses from insurance, cites Obamacare

Seems sensible, why should UPS cover spouses of their employees if these spouses are employed elsewhere?

[Lany Freelove Cassandra]

boycott UPS?

UPS to drop 15,000 spouses from insurance, cites Obamacare

My husband's company is the same. They only cover spouses if the spouse doesn't have access to other insurance.

[WrathOfTinyKittens]

Yeah that's pretty standard... I will add that in many cases the spouses can be added if the employee can show that spouse's health insurance options are significantly more expensive or significantly worse. This might not be widespread, though.

[Fez]

In today's edition of Republican Historical-Rewrites:

A significant chunk of Louisiana Republicans evidently believe that President Barack Obama is to blame for the poor response to the hurricane that ravaged their state more than three years before he took office.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government's post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame.

[Commodore]

Yeah that's pretty standard... I will add that in many cases the spouses can be added if the employee can show that spouse's health insurance options are significantly more expensive or significantly worse. This might not be widespread, though.

It's standard for companies to cite the ACA as a reason for dropping coverage?

[awesome possum]

It's standard for companies to cite the ACA as a reason for dropping coverage?

It's standard for companies to blame anyone but their own greediness for their own greediness.

[TrackerNeil]

It's standard for companies to cite the ACA as a reason for dropping coverage?

Personally, I don't care. The more Americans who use the exchanges, the stronger those exchanges will be, and the harder it will be for Republicans to defund them. In fact, the GOP will even act to protect the ACA, the same way it now protects Medicare and Social Security. A program that hands out so much money to so many Americans is hard to kill.

[Fez]

I doubt there will be any new bombshells, but the final Nixon tapes are being released today:

The recordings cap the chronological release of 3,000 hours of tapes Nixon recorded between February 1971 and July 1973 that have been released by the National Archives and Records Administration. The final installment covers the tumultuous three months when Watergate was closing in on the 37th president. Still, he forged ahead with Soviet peace talks, worked to cement Chinese relations and welcomed home Vietnam prisoners of war.

"This is a really big release in volume and importance, because of the time period it covers," said Luke Nichter of Texas A&M University-Central Texas in Killeen, who runs a website cataloging Nixon's secret recordings. "This is the end of taping and this is Watergate really beginning."

The recordings released Wednesday from the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., cover April 9, 1973, to July 12, 1973, the day before the existence of the covert recording system was revealed to a Senate committee probing Watergate.

Also unveiled will be 140,000 pages of documents, including more than 30,000 recently declassified items such as an intelligence analysis of Vietnam. Another 700 hours of Nixon tapes remain classified or restricted and haven't been released because of national security and privacy concerns.

I actually think those Vietnam documents might be the most interesting items.

Also, I wonder what happened in the early '70s that still can't be released due to national security concerns; all I can think of is Nixon detailing the location of every nuclear missile silo to someone in an extended Animanics-style song.

[Spring Bass]

Unexpected inflation is what hurts a certain sub-set of rich people, not rich people in general. It specifically hits anyone who has fixed-return savings and investments, since the money they get back doesn't adjust to inflation and so is worth less than it was when they took on the asset. But if a certain degree of inflation is expected, then creditors just adjust their interest rates. The whole "no inflation at any cost!" thing is mostly coming out of people paranoid about a return of 1970s stagflation, and the "gold-bug" types who think any currency not backed by a precious metal is dubious at best.

As for unemployment, the argument I've heard is that it's not so much inflation that you should be targeting, but a certain level of nominal GDP growth (which includes both inflation and the "real" GDP growth rate after you index for inflation). If nominal GDP growth is at 3%, you can inject money into the economy until it's at, say, 6%. The difference will be a mix of inflation and real GDP growth. Here's a good defense of it.