But that's all it can do, at least for now. Today's cloture vote is so Democrats can begin debate and modification of the bill. During that debate, they will need to call cloture votes in order to amend the bill. After that process is finished, there will be another cloture vote to begin voting on the bill. At this point in the history of the United States Senate, Harry Reid pretty much needs to call a cloture vote before he can sneeze. It's all cloture votes, all the time. And the fact that Reid won today's vote doesn't mean he'll win tomorrow's.

The specific budget gimmick mentioned in the column is that Reid has delayed the subsidies "from mid-2013 to January 2014 -- long after taxes and fees levied by the bill would have begun." But not that long. The excise tax, for instance, begins in 2013. More to the point, it's not clear what Broder's complaint is. Reid delayed the implementation of the subsidies in order to ensure the bill's deficit neutrality in the first 10 years, which is what Broder wants. Why attack him for it? Then we get this:

There is plenty in the CBO report to suggest that the promised budget savings may not materialize. If you read deep enough, you will find that under the Senate bill, "federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010-2019 period" -- not decline. The gross increase would be almost $1 trillion -- $848 billion, to be exact, mainly to subsidize the uninsured. The net increase would be $160 billion.

Huh? The net increase of $160 billion in the first 10 years is part of CBO's analysis, not a caveat to it. It doesn't mean the bill doesn't cut the deficit, it just means that overall spending is larger before you add revenues into the equation. Moreover, the CBO continues: "during the decade following the 10-year budget window, the increases and decreases in the federal budgetary commitment to health care stemming from this legislation would roughly balance out."

In other words, the revenue and the savings grow more quickly than the costs. Extend that line out further and, yes, federal spending on health care falls as a result of this bill. In other words, the bill satisfies Broder's conditions. But he doesn't come out and say that.

Instead, he pivots to the now-traditional argument that Congress won't be able to stick to the savings and revenue measures in this bill. That, however, is another way of saying that Congress can't cut health-care costs and the American government will go bankrupt. For one thing, that's not a very good reason not to at least try and avert that outcome. But if Broder's position is that we face certain fiscal collapse, then the only real question is whether we would prefer that 30 million Americans had insurance in the meantime, or went uninsured over that period.

More broadly, I'm confused by the budget hawks who that take the line: "This bill needs to cut the deficit, and I don't believe Democrats will cut the deficit, but since the actual provisions of the bill unambiguously cut the deficit, then I guess Congress won't stick to it."

People who want to cut the deficit should support this bill, and support its implementation. The alternative is no bill that cuts the deficit, and thus no hope of cutting the deficit.

The expectation is that Reid will get his 60 votes tonight, and the health-care bill will continue to move forward. But that's what matters today: the vote, not the speeches.

2) A small win for Ron Wyden and choice.

3) Brad DeLong is puzzled by America's political economy.

4) Paul Krugman on the "phantom menace," though not the one you're thinking of.

Recipe of the day: My family won't go for this, but I always liked Mark Mittman's idea to braise turkey.

The Senate wanted to wish you a good weekend, but they couldn't schedule a cloture vote on the resolution until tomorrow.

This is probably the most important benefit of cost control, and the one that's least understood. If we control costs, wages will go up. If we fail to control costs, they will continue to stagnate, and even fall, in real terms. But because people think of health-care premiums as a "benefit" that's separate from their wages, rather than as a deduction that's taken out of their wages, this remains poorly understood. You can make a pretty good case, in fact, that the best single thing we could do for cost control would be to itemize the deductions for health-care premiums on each worker's paycheck, much as we do with taxes.

But the real answer to this policy isn't to tweak it. It's to replace it with the House's straightforward employer mandate. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities is too polite to say that that's what they're saying here, but that's what they're saying here, and they're right:

The new provision is very different from the House bill’s employer requirements, under which firms that elect not to provide health coverage would pay a flat percentage of their payroll (2 percent of the payroll of non-covered employees for firms with payrolls between $500,000 and $585,000, 4 percent of payroll for firms with payrolls of $585,000 to $670,000, 6 percent of payroll for firms with payrolls of $670,000 to $750,000, and 8 percent of payroll for firms with payrolls larger than $750,000). The House provisions would not create incentives for firms either to try to minimize the hiring of workers from lower-income families or to convert full-time positions into jobs of less than 30 hours per week.

The employer requirements in the House-passed bill would raise $135 billion over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Senate provision would raise $28 billion, about one-fifth that amount.

There will need to be vigorous discussion of these issues in conference, where there should be opportunity to make changes in the Senate bill’s employer-requirement provision.

In general, the Fed's behavior tends to track the Taylor Rule, which is an economic formula based off a mixture of unemployment and inflation. Don't worry, there's not going to be a quiz. Suffice to say that the situation remains bad enough, and strange enough, that the Taylor Rule implies the Fed's interest rates should actually be negative, which would mean they'd be paying people to borrow money. They can't do that, of course, so the incredibly low rates they're offering are actually far, far too high.

That's the context for the debate over whether the Fed should fear inflation, and begin to "tighten" its policy (which would largely mean raising interest rates). What the Fed needs to do, and what everyone knows the Fed needs to do, is further lower rates. But it can't, at least not without resorting to unorthodox measures that, as Brad DeLong says, it regards "with horror, shock, and shame."

At some point, however, the Fed going to need to raise rates. It's going to need to decide when reflation has given way to inflation. And that's what the argument over inflation is actually about. Not whether we're there now, but whether we can trust the Fed to know when we've gotten there, or whether it's going to be listening to the wrong people along the way.

The folks arguing that the Fed needs room to tighten believe that the main pressure on the Fed comes from Congress and the White House, and that the main pressure on Congress and the White House comes from polls showing people are unhappy about the economy, which will mean that the Fed should keep trying to stimulate growth even at the risk of some inflation. But Fed policy works on a lag, and the Fed needs to prepare itself to act long before the political system is ready. Some of these folks also believe that the Fed acting will stimulate investment, as it will mean the Fed believes the recovery is working, and it signals that interest rates won't be lower next year than they are this year, so you'd better invest while the investin' is good.

The folks arguing that the Fed needs to stop worrying about tightening are concerned that elites are weirdly obsessed with, and afraid of, inflation, and the Federal Reserve has historically considered itself an inflation-fighter before anything else. There's something of a structural bias there, and it could lead the Fed to pull the trigger too quickly. If anything, the Federal Reserve needs to get into the quantitative easing business for awhile, as it needs to recognize that unemployment is as big a problem as inflation has ever been, and needs to be battled as creatively and proactively.

I'm with the quantitative easers, but it's also worth saying that the Federal Reserve isn't showing any signs of worrying about inflation. From Ben Bernanke's speech last week (italics mine):

The outlook for inflation is also subject to a number of crosscurrents. Many factors affect inflation, including slack in resource utilization, inflation expectations, exchange rates, and the prices of oil and other commodities. Although resource slack cannot be measured precisely, it certainly is high, and it is showing through to underlying wage and price trends. Longer-run inflation expectations are stable, having responded relatively little either to downward or upward pressures on inflation; expectations can be early warnings of actual inflation, however, and must be monitored carefully. Commodities prices have risen lately, likely reflecting the pickup in global economic activity, especially in resource-intensive emerging market economies, and the recent depreciation of the dollar. On net, notwithstanding significant crosscurrents, inflation seems likely to remain subdued for some time.

The actual debate over whether the Federal Reserve should worry about inflation is still a couple of years away, and Bernanke knows that. The debate worth having right now is whether they should start doing some truly unorthodox things to fight unemployment.

Sen. Mary Landrieu's state of Louisiana is still ailing years after Hurricane Katrina devastated its largest city. So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could be killing two birds with one stone by including in his health care bill $100 million in federal Medicaid aid for any states (aka, Louisiana) that have suffered a natural disaster in the last seven years. That's much needed help for the poor in Louisiana, and also a sweetener for Landrieu, whose support for health care reform has never been terribly certain.

Cynical question: How does this get Landrieu votes? The folks helped by $100 million for Medicaid are largely poor people who either don't vote or already vote Democratic, and Gov. Bobby Jindal, who isn't going to help Landrieu win reelection no matter how much she does to help him balance his budget. It's obviously a good thing for Landrieu's state, and even strikes me as good policy, but I've never been clear on how the assumed electoral benefits of this sort of thing actually work.

Just to be clear, the Medicare drug benefit was a pure giveaway with a gross cost greater than either the House or Senate health reform bills how being considered. Together, the new bills would cost about $900 billion over the next 10 years, while Medicare Part D will cost $1 trillion.

Moreover, there is a critical distinction -- the drug benefit had no dedicated financing, no offsets and no revenue-raisers; 100% of the cost simply added to the federal budget deficit, whereas the health reform measures now being debated will be paid for with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, adding nothing to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (See here for the Senate bill estimate and here for the House bill.)

Maybe [Trent] Franks (R-Ariz.) isn't the worst hypocrite I've ever come across in Washington, but he's got to be in the top 10 because he apparently thinks the unfunded drug benefit, which added $15.5 trillion (in present value terms) to our nation's indebtedness, according to Medicare's trustees, was worth sacrificing his integrity to enact into law. But legislation expanding health coverage to the uninsured -- which is deficit-neutral -- somehow or other adds an unacceptable debt burden to future generations.

Also, this might be one of my favorite headlines ever.

Luckily, Harry Reid has wiggle room. His bill clocks in at $849 billion over 10 years. That gives him $51 billion to play with before he hits $900 billion. And given that Obama's preferred cost was "around $900 billion," there's even more upward flexibility than that. But it would have been far easier if he had maxed out the subsidies when he was building the bill on his own, rather than leaving it for the floor of the Senate, where any changes will need 60 votes. When CBO came back at $849 billion, Reid could have quickly tossed in $40 billion of low-income subsidies before unveiling the bill. From here on out, the legislation is likely to get less generous, not more generous, as Nelson and Lieberman and Landrieu and Lincoln extract their pound of flesh.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke.

I should acknowledge that I have no idea who should and should not get routine mammograms. But I know enough about statistics to say that the issue is not settled just because you know of someone in her 40s whose breast cancer was detected by a mammogram and cured. As economists and medical researchers are fond of saying, the plural of anecdote is data.

I'd always thought that the saying was "the plural of anecdote is not data." But a quick Google search turned up people using it both ways to say precisely the same thing. Anyone know the answer?

My doors, as I found when I recently locked myself out of the house, have extremely advanced door-locking technology. The locksmith whistled in awe. He talked happily about how rarely he sees this many pins in a lock. Then, after he spent some time fiddling ineffectually with lock-picking tools, he whipped out a cordless drill and plowed through the sucker. But when it was all over, he advised that I go to a good locksmith's shop and get the barrel repaired. "That's a fine piece," he said with evident admiration in his voice.

But is it? It was good enough to foil his picking tools, which might have been enough 40 or 50 years ago. But it's not enough to foil a couple of minutes with a cordless drill. A drill is louder than lockpicking tools, to be sure, but if you're willing to go to this much trouble to get into my house, then I'm probably not home and you can probably just bust through my door. Or my window. Or my wall. Or you have a quiet drill and a towel to muffle the noise.

Now, I actually do have to replace the barrel in my lock. It locks, but I can't open it from the outside (there are two entrances to my house). So what's the upside to getting a better lock? Does it really protect me against anything more than the wind and someone trying the knob? Or has the advent of cordless drill technology created an arms race, and I need a door wired to deliver a small electromagnetic pulse if anybody tries to tamper with it?