When the United States is considering entering into war, sometimes the most important voices can come from other countries.

(Andrew Craft / FOR THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE)

Recent research raises the intriguing possibility that Americans’ views about U.S. foreign policy can be influenced not just by the president and members of Congress – the elites from whom the public typically takes its cues – but also by the leaders of other nations and the United Nations.

That might sound bizarre. Would Americans, often portrayed as parochial and insular (freedom fries, people), really take direction about U.S. foreign policy from the accented pronouncements of foreigners? Mon dieu!

But my new book with Matt Guardino, Influence from Abroad: Foreign Voices, the Media, and U.S. Public Opinion, says yes. Under some circumstances, international actors can influence whether Americans support U.S. military interventions.

Guardino and I studied the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. In the days before the United States lit up the Baghdad night with its “shock and awe” campaign, public opinion was starkly polarized. Just a week before the invasion, upwards of 90 percent of Republicans favored military action, but just 44 percent of Democrats did, according to one Pew survey.

That kind of wide partisan gap typically opens only when the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties take diverging positions on an issue, which makes the polarization before the Iraq War a curious puzzle.

While Republican elites, rallying behind the Bush administration’s push for action, were full-throated in their support for an invasion, Democratic elite opposition was muted. Even a majority of Democratic senators – including the 2004 presidential ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards and the near-nominee in 2008, Hillary Clinton – voted for the congressional resolution that authorized Bush to use force against Saddam Hussein.

Of course, some liberal Democrats, such as the late-Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), were vociferous in their opposition. “This is no small conflagration that we contemplate,” Byrd said on the Senate floor in February 2003. “It is not going to be a video game.

But the public hardly heard any of it.

In our analysis of every nightly network television story about Iraq in the eight months before the war – 1,434 stories in all – Guardino and I found that Democrats accounted for just 4 percent of all statements in the news. Other domestic sources who opposed the war, such as protesters and anti-war groups, made up an even tinier fraction. By contrast, Bush administration officials arguing for military action constituted 28 percent of all statements in the news. When we looked at national newspaper coverage, we found the same thing.

Yet many Democrats in the public, and about one-third of independents, remained opposed to the war, even without clear opposition signals from domestic elites. Why did that happen?

Although the U.S. media paid little attention to dissent from domestic voices, Guardino and I found that they devoted significant air time to opposition to the war from overseas. (In the book, we discuss at length why journalists largely ignored opposition from congressional Democrats and anti-war groups.)

In our analysis of network news coverage, foreigners were the sources of 34 percent of all statements that appeared on the air, and 65 percent of all of the anti-war statements. The most common sources were U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, numerous anti-war members of the British parliament, and various officials from France, Germany and other European governments. When Americans heard opposition to the war, those objections came from abroad.

In turn, the coverage of overseas opposition suppressed public support for the Iraq invasion. According to our analysis of a series of pre-war opinion polls, support for the invasion was about nine percentage points lower than it would have been without foreign opposition in the news.

Certain people were especially responsive. College-educated Democrats were 37 percentage points less likely to support the war because of opposition from overseas. Independents with college degrees were 59 percentage points less likely to advocate invasion than they would have been in the absence of foreign dissent. Republicans, not surprisingly, were unmoved.

The effects were strongest among these groups for two reasons. First, highly educated people pay more attention to the news and so were more likely to be exposed to the reported opposition. Second, Democrats and independents are far more likely than Republicans to be skeptical of pre-emptive military action and to have favorable attitudes toward European governments and the United Nations. As a result, they were much more responsive to these foreign voices.

Of course, foreign-induced opposition didn’t stop the invasion. Public opinion is but one consideration for political leaders. But it did mean that President Bush took the country to war with a polity far more divided than it would have been otherwise. This left him with a weaker base of support to draw on as the conflict ground on, hastening the slide in his approval ratings and accelerating dissatisfaction with the war.

Guardino and I aren’t the only researchers to find that citizens may look overseas for guidance about U.S. foreign policy. One paper suggests that Americans, and especially those who don’t trust the sitting president, look to the United Nations for a “second opinion” about whether to support military action. The boost in presidential approval at the outset of a military conflict – the “rally round the flag” effect – is significantly larger when the United Nations endorses the action than when it does not. Views about whether the United States should attack Iranian nuclear facilities might also depend on U.N. support.

The debate over the Syrian conflict is, of course, very different from the Iraq War (or the debate over Iran’s nuclear program, for that matter). But recent news coverage has already highlighted the relevance of various international actors, from the United Nations to Israel to Turkey and more.

It remains to be seen whether these voices will shape Americans’ attitudes as they contemplate another conflict in a far-off land. But it certainly seems prudent for the Obama administration to try to cultivate support for its Syria policy not only on Capitol Hill, but around the globe.

Bayonne Hopsital Center in Northern New Jersey tends to charge higher prices than any other hospital in the country, according to the new data trove that Medicare made public earlier this month. For example, while the average hospital charges $23,518 to treat congestive heart failure, Bayonne charges $121,080.

 Medicare does not pay the really high prices that Bayonne–or any other hospitals, for that matter–charge. For congestive heart failure, for example, Medicare paid the hospital an average of $7,170. That’s less than 6 percent of what the hospital billed.

Why do hospitals like Bayonne set absurdly high prices, ones that insurers and Medicare will never actually pay? One explanation I’ve gotten from hospitals is that it’s all about the “chargemaster,” a master-list of prices that determines the prices for everything the hospital does, from transplanting a lung to providing a piece of gauze.

“The chargemaster can be confusing because it’s highly variable and generally not what a consumer would pay,” Carol Steinberg, vice president at the American Hospital Association, told me when I reported on the new Medicare data. “Even an uninsured person isn’t always paying the chargemaster rate.”

In other words, the chargemaster price is likely irrelevant to most patients. But at Bayonne, Creswell, Meier and McGinty found another reason that may compel hospitals to set the high prices they know they won’t get paid.

“Until a recent ruling by the Internal Revenue Service, for instance, a hospital could use the higher prices when calculating the amount of charity care it was providing, Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins,” said in the New York Times story. ‘There is a method to the madness, though it is still madness,’ Mr. Anderson said.”

Charity care is incredibly important to facilities like Bayonne Hospital Center, which needs to demonstrate that it provides a high level of “community benefit” in order to maintain its status as a nonprofit hospital. The higher prices that a hospital charges, the bigger amount of charity care its providing.

At least, until this year. In April, the Internal Revenue Service issued new regulations under the Affordable Care Act that change the way hospitals demonstrate “community benefit.” Among other changes, the new regulations requires hospitals to charge uninsured patients a rate that not more than the “amounts generally billed” to patients with insurance coverage.

Bayonne had other motivations for setting high prices, and it’s worth reading the New York Times article in full to get a better understanding of those. It’s a helpful reminder that even when hospitals know they won’t get paid their full prices there is still, as Anderson put it, a method to the pricing madness.

In the nice commencement speech Bernanke delivered this morning at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, in Massachusetts, he tackles one of the most interesting and important economic questions of the moment: Is the era of rapid economic advancement over, or do America and the world have more days ahead of quickly improving living standards. The first argument has been articulated by Tyler Cowen in his book “The Great Stagnation,” which argues that the low-hanging fruit of economic growth has now been consumed, and by Robert J. Gordon, both of whose work Bernanke cites in a footnote to the published speech.

But what about the robots?

The chairman acknowledges the apparent case for the great stagnation by comparing life during his own childhood 50 years ago with ordinary life 50 years before that:

Fifty years ago, in 1963, I was a nine-year-old growing up in a middle-class home in a small town in South Carolina. As a way of getting a handle on the recent pace of economic change, it’s interesting to ask how my family’s everyday life back then differed from that of a typical family today. Well, if I think about it, I could quickly come up with the Internet, cellphones, and microwave ovens as important conveniences that most of your families have today that my family lacked 50 years ago. Health care has improved some since I was young; indeed, life expectancy at birth in the United States has risen from 70 years in 1963 to 78 years today, although some of this improvement is probably due to better nutrition and generally higher levels of income rather than advances in medicine alone. Nevertheless, though my memory may be selective, it doesn’t seem to me that the differences in daily life between then and now are all that large. Heating, air conditioning, cooking, and sanitation in my childhood were not all that different from today. We had a dishwasher, a washing machine, and a dryer. My family owned a comfortable car with air conditioning and a radio, and the experience of commercial flight was much like today but without the long security lines. For entertainment, we did not have the Internet or video games, as I mentioned, but we had plenty of books, radio, musical recordings, and a color TV (although, I must acknowledge, the colors were garish and there were many fewer channels to choose from).

The comparison of the world of 1963 with that of today suggests quite substantial but perhaps not transformative economic change since then. But now let’s run this thought experiment back another 50 years, to 1913 (the year the Federal Reserve was created by the Congress, by the way), and compare how my grandparents and your great-grandparents lived with how my family lived in 1963. Life in 1913 was simply much harder for most Americans than it would be later in the century. Many people worked long hours at dangerous, dirty, and exhausting jobs–up to 60 hours per week in manufacturing, for example, and even more in agriculture. Housework involved a great deal of drudgery; refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, electric stoves, and washing machines were not in general use, which should not be terribly surprising since most urban households, and virtually all rural households, were not yet wired for electricity. In the entertainment sphere, Americans did not yet have access to commercial radio broadcasts and movies would be silent for another decade and a half. Some people had telephones, but no long-distance service was available. In transportation, in 1913 Henry Ford was just beginning the mass production of the Model T automobile, railroads were powered by steam, and regular commercial air travel was quite a few years away. Importantly, life expectancy at birth in 1913 was only 53 years, reflecting not only the state of medical science at the time–infection-fighting antibiotics and vaccines for many deadly diseases would not be developed for several more decades–but also deficiencies in sanitation and nutrition. This was quite a different world than the one in which I grew up in 1963 or in which we live today.

Bernanke goes on to explain why, despite that apparent downshift in the pace of advances in standard of living, he remains a techno-optimist.

First, future innovations are, by definition, unknowable, and times of weakness tend to bring out an unfortunate pessimism. Bernanke quotes John Maynard Keynes’s prediction in 1930, when pessimism was at a high-water mark, that income per person would be four to eight times as large a century later; the United States is on track to meet that projection. (Though it’s probably not meant this way, one can read the invocation of Keynes’s long-term thinking on the economy as a subtle rebuke of Niall Ferguson, the Harvard professor who a few weeks ago argued that Keynes was indifferent to the long term because he was gay and had no children).

Second, the full impact of new technologies takes time to be realized, and by that standard, the IT revolution is quite young. Bernanke notes in particular that in health care, the use of information technology to deliver better, cheaper, faster care is only in its infancy:

A strong case can be made that the modernization of health-care IT systems would lead to better-coordinated, more effective, and less costly patient care than we have today, including greater responsiveness of medical practice to the latest research findings. Robots, lasers, and other advanced technologies are improving surgical outcomes, and artificial intelligence systems are being used to improve diagnoses and chart courses of treatment. Perhaps even more revolutionary is the trend toward so-called personalized medicine, which would tailor medical treatments for each patient based on information drawn from that individual’s genetic code. Taken together, such advances could lead to another jump in life expectancy and improved health at older ages.

Third, the opening up of the developing world means that far more people, with far greater capacity to communicate with each other, are at work trying to solve humanity’s problems than in the past. Researchers in China and India now have access to the same information as their counterparts in the West, and ideas they generate spread rapidly. That means there is more raw brainpower being devoted to innovation, as well as greater capacity for good ideas to reach around the globe.

Add it all up, and Bernanke is in the techno-optimist crowd — though he clearly needs to give a follow-up speech to spell out in greater detail what he thinks will happen when the robots take all our jobs.

A source of contention. (Charlie Riedel/Associated Press)

That stat comes from this extensive new survey led by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli, who run the Skeptical Science website. And it builds on earlier studies finding the exact same thing.

The authors sifted through 11,944 climate-related abstracts over the past two decades and found that 66.4 percent of papers took no explicit stance on whether humans are warming the planet (i.e., that wasn’t the main focus of these papers). Another 32.6 percent stated that humans are indeed warming the planet, while just 0.7 percent rejected that view. Cook and Nuccitelli combined those last two numbers to say that 97 percent of papers that took an actual stand on whether humans are warming the planet answered “yes.”

Fair enough. But it’s worth asking: What’s the point of this exercise? After all, it’s not news that climate scientists agree that fossil-fuel emissions and land-use changes are causing global temperatures to rise. The last big report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said as much. And these surveys can’t answer the hard questions that do provoke real disagreement, like how much warming we can expect, or what to do about it.

One possible answer is that it’s simply worth reminding everyone that there’s broad scientific agreement on very basic climate change questions — and that global-warming denial is a fringe view. In an e-mail, Nuccitelli put it this way:

The reason our paper is particularly important is because research has shown there’s a strong correlation between public awareness of the consensus and support for climate mitigation.  However, the public is very misinformed on the issue, with the average American believing that scientists are split 50/50 on the cause of global warming.  So it’s critical that we close this consensus gap.

On the bolded part, Nuccitelli has a point. A recent Pew poll asked Americans whether “scientists agree the earth is getting warmer because of human activity.” Only 45 percent said yes, while 43 percent said no:

That said, other experts are doubtful that emphasizing the consensus on climate change will actually sway public opinion here. Dan Kahan of Yale Law School points out that we’ve seen plenty of these “consensus” surveys over the years — to little effect. In fact, he notes, there’s some evidence that hammering away at the science doesn’t always get everyone to agree. If anything, it can make people even more polarized.

Are these your people? (AP)

Why is that? Because, as Kahan has argued at length, people tend to arrive at these debates with their own pre-existing cultural values. If you’re not already inclined to accept the values that typically accompany belief in climate change — and if you’re not predisposed to agree with all the people who like to talk about climate change — then you’re probably not going to change your mind just because the media says there’s an expert consensus. (Here are some other experiments along these lines.)

Keith Kloor has some related thoughts on the matter, arguing that there are lots of other reasons why many Americans aren’t especially concerned with climate change — it doesn’t all boil down to ignorance about what scientists believe. In particular, as this Yale report found, the threat of climate change is far-off and quite abstract to many people:

Over many years of research, we have consistently found that, on average, Americans view climate change as a threat distant in space and time–a risk that will affect far away places, other species, or future generations more than people here and now.

“That. Is. The. Stumbling. Block,” says Kloor.

So where does that leave things? In recent years, science communicators have tried to dream up all sorts of novel ways to talk about climate change. Kloor, for his part, suggests a “frank debate about future uncertainties, risks, and scenarios, and the reconciliation of competing values.” Grist’s David Roberts has suggested elsewhere discussing the topic in terms of values rather than endless lectures on scientific facts.

Either way, there does seem to be a fair bit of skepticism among science communicators that yet another study reiterating the expert consensus on climate change will change many minds.

Further reading: 

–Questions about public opinion aside, there are a couple of very interesting aspects to Cook and Nuccitelli’s new work. They allow people to inspect and rate all the abstracts they examined here, essentially letting anyone redo their research. It’s worth a browse.

–Here’s Dan Kahan’s 2010 paper, asking, “Why do members of the public disagree — sharply and persistently — about facts on which expert scientists largely agree?” Note that this phenomenon isn’t just confined to climate change.

–My colleague Jason Samenow adds some smart comments on the survey.

Former FDIC chairwoman Sheila Bair. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press)

As someone who knows the FDIC — which is actually the agency that takes down failing banks — she’s in an unusually good position to know whether the law’s resolution authority will work. These are the new powers the FDIC has in Dodd-Frank to impose losses and fail a financial firm (it’s what Barney Frank called “death panels” for financial megabanks). Bair has also been a vocal advocate for higher leverage requirements, which has animated the debate over the recent Brown-Vitter bill. And she was recently critical of the efforts by the House Financial Services Committee to repeal parts of Dodd-Frank that push swaps out of bank holding companies, even though she original opposed a stricter version of that language back in 2010.

We talked about all three of these topics; our discussion is slightly edited for clarity.

Mike Konczal: To start, how do you think Dodd-Frank is unfolding? Specifically, the rules for Title II and “resolution authority.”

Sheila Bair: We finalized most of the rules we could write on our own before I left, though they are working on further clarifications. I think the FDIC has come up with a viable strategy for resolving a large complex financial institution. This is their strategy of using a single-point-of-entry. The FDIC will take control of a holding company and put creditors and shareholders into a receivership where they, not taxpayers, will absorb any losses. This will allow the subsidiaries to remain operational, avoiding systemic disruptions, as the overall entity is unwound over time.

I think this is viable, and they’ve done a lot of great work, particularly coordinating with the Bank of England on the relative resolution regimes. I think bondholders are starting to wake up to the idea that their money is at risk and that they could take losses, which will result in greater market discipline. If you convince the market TBTF is over, debt spreads will go up for large institutions. And you are seeing that happen a bit already. There’s a lot of work left to be done, but so far I’d give implementation a pretty good grade.

 It strikes me that coverage of resolution authority is often very political, with many people making up their minds on whether it will work from before the bill even passed. As such, it’s really difficult to understand if a stronger, versus a weaker, set of rules are being written.

We worked hard to make sure taxpayer bailouts are completely prohibited. I think the language is very tight on that. One of the things that frustrates me with critics of Title II is that they perpetuate the myth of Too Big To Fail by insisting that the government is still going to do bailouts, notwithstanding clear language in Dodd-Frank to the contrary. And that just continues the moral hazard by reinforcing market perceptions that the big institutions won’t be allowed to fail.

There are some critics who think just the very act of FDIC being involved, especially with the ability to provide emergency financing, is a de facto bailout and puts taxpayers at risk.

A couple of things. First, the FDIC process is essentially a bankruptcy process. We follow claims priority religiously — you would never see the FDIC haircutting secured creditors and bailing out unsecured creditors as they did with the GM bankruptcy. In fact, Dodd-Frank is more harsh than bankruptcy in that key board members and top managers have to be fired with mandatory clawbacks of their pay.

Second, I pushed very hard to get a pre-funded reserve for working capital to support the FDIC’s resolutions work. This would have been a $150 billion dollar reserve paid for by financial institutions over $50 billion in size. We got it through the House, but it was opposed in the Senate. Ironically some of the folks who like to bash Title II as a bailout mechanism opposed this industry-funded reserve.

This pre-funded reserve was replaced in the Senate with a line of credit from the Treasury Department that the FDIC can tap into for working capital for a resolution. If it is used, it is repaid off the top as the failed institution is restructured and sold back into the market. The government’s claims take priority over everyone else. If the privately held debt and equity aren’t sufficient to absorb losses, then any shortfall is paid for by an assessment on the industry. There’s no way taxpayers will be taking losses with this kind of mechanism. Based on the FDIC’s past experience, I think it is extremely unlikely that losses on a Dodd-Frank resolution would exceed equity and unsecured debt. And even if that did happen, there’s an immediate assessment on the entire industry. It wouldn’t be paid by taxpayers.

That’s another reason why the industry itself should want to make sure that effective rules and meaningful resolution plans are in place for an orderly failure. Because if the banks don’t give the regulators what they need to be prepared, it will not only be more expensive for creditors, but also potentially for the industry as a whole.  Of course, the risks of an industry assessment are reduced if the megabanks have thick levels of equity and unsecured debt.  I believe the Federal Reserve Board will move ahead with rules to increase minimum equity requirements for megabanks and also set minimums for unsecured debt.

 I personally like the industry assessment. If resolution authority is invoked to preserve stability and prevent panics in finance, then any costs should fall on the financial industry as a whole.

How is the international coordination going? Many point out to the international component as being the hardest part of this procedure.

 For the five biggest U.S. megabanks, about 80 percent of their foreign operations are subject to the jurisdiction of the UK. So you have the lion’s share of it right there with the Bank of England. Another area, where industry has not taken a role, is to amend the documentation that is used by derivatives dealers worldwide to make sure that derivative contracts have built-in legal recognition of the FDIC’s resolution authority. That could be fixed very easily if ISDA, an industry group, would amend its standard documentation.

 You’ve written about how banks should have higher leverage ratios. One thing that strikes me in the argument about higher leverage ratios is so many regulators agree with you. Fed Governor Tarullo even wrote a book on Basel II critical of this. Given that so many people support this, why haven’t higher ratios been written by regulators?

I’ve spent a lot of time advocating for a leverage ratio. Back in 2006 when I first joined the FDIC as chairwoman, we were fighting off an effort by other regulators and industry to get rid of a leverage ratio and just go with the risk-based modeling done internally by banks.

We had to fight hard to get a leverage ratio in the Basel III accord. It frustrates me when people bash Basel III, because Basel II is really where the problems were. Basel III was designed to fix many of these problems. After a lot of fighting, we secured an international accord on having a non-risk-weighted leverage ratio in the final product.

This is the good news. The bad news is we could only get to 3 percent. The Germans and the French in particular really didn’t like it, and 3 percent is as high as we could go. So that was a compromise. A lot of regulators have said it should be higher though, and there’s a consensus among independent thinkers and academics that there’s still too much leverage in the financial sector.

The Basel accords are meant to be a floor, not a ceiling. Regulators in the US could take the 3 percent leverage ratio proposed in the rules and put in 8 percent instead. I’m hoping that US bank regulators will do this.

Right. And that can be done during rule-writing by regulators, which means they wouldn’t even have to go back to Congress.

Absolutely. There’s no question about their authority to do that.

 I understand why the banks don’t want a higher leverage requirement. If our regulators imposed it themselves, how much international pressure would they come under from Europe?

If our regulators promulgated a higher leverage requirement, you’d put more pressure on Europe to implement the Basel III leverage ratio and even raise it. I think the UK will go with a higher number. Right now, continental Europe is floundering on Basel implementation. The leverage ratio is on the back burner. If we upped the 3 percent in the US,  it would put great pressure on them. Right now their banks are too leveraged and it is hurting their economy. Strong capital is a competitive strength, not a competitive weakness.

One thing I’ve noticed that is that many people argue that since resolution authority is coming along well, and taxpayer-funded bailouts look less likely, there’s no reason to increase capital requirements. But you argue both — FDIC is doing well and we really need higher leverage ratios. How does that work?

Just because we now have a process to let megabanks and financial firms fail without taxpayer support doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying to prevent failures. The best way to prevent a failure is to get them to hold more common equity. And if they do fail, they have a bigger cushion of protection for bondholders and other unsecured creditors. So these two make each other stronger: more capital means less likelihood of a failure, and it also means more loss absorption capacity if the FDIC is forced to act. They go hand in hand, and complement each other.

 A controversial piece of Dodd-Frank was a provision called Section 716, which would have pushed derivatives known as swaps outside bank holding companies. A much more limited version of it was included in the final bill. Recently the House Financial Services Committee has voted to repeal the limited version that passed.

You originally opposed the full measure, though now you came out against the bill by the House to repeal the limited version of it. How has your thinking on this issue evolved since Dodd-Frank passed?

During Dodd-Frank the original proposal was to push pretty much all swaps outside of bank holding companies. I didn’t think that was necessary or appropriate. To push them completely outside regulated entities didn’t make much sense to me.

Since Dodd-Frank, unfortunately, the trend has been to move this activity from the investment banking affiliates, which do not use insured deposits, into the banks where the activity can be funded with cheap, FDIC backed deposits. Section 716 would at least keep certain credit default swaps outside of insured banks. I don’t understand why conservatives would be pushing this so hard. Derivatives have many legitimate functions, but they can be high-risk and poorly understood because of their complexity by bank managers and even regulators, as we saw with the London Whale debacle – so keeping them outside of insured banks and making the market fund them is the way to go. This will increase market discipline and protect the FDIC.

Longer term, government policies toward financial derivatives need to be fundamentally rethought.  I’m concerned that members of Congress act on these issues without full understanding of the ramifications.  If we are going to revisit derivatives regulation, I’d go in the direction of more market discipline and disclosure, rather than letting big derivatives dealers use insured deposits to support their high-risk operations.  This market is amazingly complex and potentially destabilizing. Yet Congress keeps showering special benefits on this industry.  Derivatives get breaks under the tax code, under the bankruptcy code, and under capital and margining rules. They have all this preferential treatment even though they can be quite destabilizing. I’m not sure if we have the derivatives regulations right, but repeal of Section 716 moves in the wrong direction.

But regulators leave the door open to this kind of industry-driven legislative mischief when they fail to finalize the rules and leave these issues dangling. I was surprised and disappointed by these votes in the House. In an area as complex as this, I wish Congress would at least wait for the regulators. But the regulators need to use their authorities.

Mike Konczal is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where he focuses on financial regulation, inequality and unemployment. He writes a weekly column for Wonkblog. Follow him on twitter here.

1. Obama’s tax increases are largely about limiting deductions

Let’s be real: Mitt Romney made capping tax deductions cool. (Charles Dharapak – AP)

For years, Obama has been proposing capping itemized tax deductions at the level of benefit that people in the 28 percent tax bracket get. That means that single people making more than $183,250 and couples making more than $223,050 will get 28 cents back for every dollar of deductions they get, rather than 33, or 35, or 39.6 cents back.

That got a little overshadowed during the presidential contest, when Mitt Romney proposed his own vaguely defined deduction cap proposal. And it made less of a difference when there weren’t high earners paying the 39.6 percent rate, as there are now. But with that rate back in place, and because of chained CPI pushing more people into higher brackets (more on that later), the deduction cap is Obama’s single most important revenue increase. The CBO estimates that the plan will raise $493 billion over 10 years.

For comparison, Obama’s budget raised $974 billion in new revenue over the course of 10 years. The deduction cap represents more than half of that.

2. Chained CPI is as much about raising taxes as cutting benefits

The proposal to change the measure of inflation used for federal programs to chained CPI, which rises more slowly than conventional inflation measures, is usually framed as a Social Security cut. And it is. The CBO estimates that it will save $133 billion in Social Security (Update: and some non-SS, Marc Golderin reminds me) costs over 10 years.

But it’s also a tax increase. Currently, the cutoffs for different tax brackets rise with CPI-U, a non-chained measure of inflation. Chained CPI would cause the cutoffs to rise more slowly, pushing more and more people into higher tax brackets. That raises $99 billion over 10 years. So about 43 percent of the deficit reduction from chained CPI comes from increased taxes, not spending reductions.

3. Ending wars saves a lot of money

This is expensive. (Hoshang Hashimi/AP)

On net, Obama’s budget reduces spending by $172 billion over 10 years, but that includes a number of big cuts and a number of big new spending initiatives. Canceling the sequester and budget caps, for example, costs $970 billion all together, and transportation funding increases, the Medicare “doc fix”, and extending refundable tax credit expansions from the stimulus (to wit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the American Opportunity Tax Credit) all cost more than $100 billion apiece.

But that’s more than offset by cuts elsewhere. The single biggest, at $601 billion in savings, is the proposal to “reduce spending on overseas contingency operations” — that is, winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The CBO baseline assumes we continue current spending in those countries. Tying up those loose ends does wonders for the overall spending picture.

4. The tobacco tax’s revenue doesn’t fall

(Carl Court/Bloomberg News)

One worry, expressed well by Brad Plumer here, about the administration’s scheme to pay for preschool with an increase in the tobacco tax is that you want revenue from such taxes to fall, as they induce people to smoke less and get healthier. That was certainly the picture you got from the administration’s initial budget release, which forecast lower revenue in 2022 and 2023 than upon the tax’s initial implementation.

But the CBO finds the opposite. It finds that the tax raises $7 billion in 2014, $8 billion every year from 2015 to 2019, and $9 billion every year from 2020 to 2023. So its revenue increases over time, rather than decreases. It’s unclear which of these projections is more reasonable, though intuitively Brad’s logic seems sounder than the CBO’s here.

5. Obama already has money for corporate tax reform

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently unveiled his own corporate tax reform proposal. (All Things D)

The budget proposal includes broad outlines of Obama’s plan for a revenue-neutral corporate tax reform package. That includes making the Research & Experimentation Tax Credit permanent, making a new preferential expensing policy for small businesses permanent, ending “last in first out” inventory accounting and limiting the ability of companies to hold money offshore to defer tax payments. Taken altogether, these proposals raise $66 billion.

Now, to afford a significant rate cut, he’s going to need to cut deductions more than that. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimates that it costs about $100 billion to reduce the corporate tax rate one percentage point. By that reasoning, the Obama savings would make it possible to cut the rate from 35 percent to … 34.33 percent. That’s not the most dramatic change in the world, but it is a start.

– “Watching [the new Star Trek movie] is like talking to a salesman who stops every 40 seconds to ask if you’re still with him, and then slaps you in the face just to make sure.”

– “Cicadas with a prime-numbered life cycle had the most successful evolutionary strategy.”

– “Technology and privacy have had many skirmishes in the past, but the coming generation of wearable computing has the potential to escalate the conflict to all-out war.”

– “Which raises a delicate question: Having already eclipsed Paris in Michelin stars, could Tokyo chefs one day eclipse the French at their own cuisine?”

– “In fact, the department said it has ruled all 187 officer-involved shootings of dogs since January 1, 2010 as justified.”*

* Just a reminder that we don’t actually endorse all the sentiments in these sentences. Especially the one about dog shootings. These are just things that caught our eye.

The Senate Democrats’ budget and the House Republicans’ budget also bring deficits down to more-than-manageable levels through the mid-2020s. But the best part of the CBO’s analysis isn’t in their report. It’s a chart CBO Director Doug Elmendorf put on his blog that offers an unusually clear look into how the three budgets differ — and how they don’t:

The first thing you’ll notice: All these budgets look pretty similar. In fact, the Senate Democratic budget looks almost identical to the White House’s budget. If you showed a Martian this graph, they would not think Washington is a particularly divided place.

But pay close attention to where the White House and the House Republicans actually diverge. It puts the lie to a lot of what the two parties want you to think they’re arguing about.

For reasons related to both coalition politics and polls, Democrats and Republicans tend to fight over taxes, Social Security and Medicare. But that’s not where their budgets really disagree. Over the next 10 years, spending on Medicare and Social Security is almost identical across the plans. Taxes offer more of a contrast: President Obama’s budget envisions them sixth-tenths of a percentage point of GDP higher than the Republicans do. Defense spending also differs, and cuts against the narrative that Democrats always want to spend more and grow government while Republicans want to spend less and shrink it: Republicans want to spend more on defense than Democrats.

But the real difference comes in government spending on everything that’s not Social Security, Medicare or defense. The difference there is 1.5 percent of GDP — which is almost three times the size of the difference on taxes. It’s 15 times — yes, 15 times — the difference on Medicare and Social Security.

That spending includes everything from Medicaid and Obamacare to food safety, education, infrastructure, housing subsidies, the court system and the FBI. The GOP’s deep cuts there are required if they’re going to fulfill their disparate goals of balancing the budget while holding taxes low and letting defense spending rise.

The question, of course, is why those are their goals. There’s no pressing need to balance the budget in the next decade. Ryan’s 2013 budget, which his fellow Republicans supported enthusiastically, didn’t balance until 2038. And if you believe, as Republicans claim to, that the growth of government is really a story of out-of-control entitlement programs, it doesn’t make sense to spend the next 10 years cutting the non-Medicare and Social Security programs part of the budget. As for taxes, if you believe, as Republicans again claim to, that tax expenditures are equivalent to spending, then it’s unclear why they can’t be cut to reduce the deficit — a decision that would unlock a bipartisan budget deal.

The White House’s budget raises some similar questions, though since its choices are less extreme, the questions are less stark. But a core truth of their budget is they’re bringing non-Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid spending to historically low levels. It’s not a budget that’s consistent with the “Sputnik moment” rhetoric that the administration often favors. Their budget is a lot rougher on the categories of spending that aid social mobility and “winning the future” than it is on, say, Social Security.

All that said, this graph puts the lie to much of Washington’s budget debate. In terms of actual dollars over the next 10 years, the two parties are not arguing over Medicare and Social Security. And they’re not even arguing over taxes or defense, for the most part. Their biggest argument is over everything else.

A woman carries a bag containing rice donated by USAID, as she walks through a market in Leogane, Haiti. (Lynne Sladky/AP)

Development experts were enthusiastic, arguing the change would allow food aid programs to feed millions more people at lower cost. And, they said, the reforms could soften some of the harm done by U.S. aid to farmers in developing nations.

But the White House’s proposal has run into sharp resistance from members of Congress, who worry that U.S. farmers and ships will lose out. This week, both the House and the Senate agricultural committees marked up their versions of the new five-year farm bill. Neither one included the White House’s food-aid proposal. That leaves only a bipartisan bill from leaders of the House foreign relations committee — but even that faces a difficult climb.

“There’s more support for reform inside Congress than has generally been reported,” says Ben Grossman-Cohen, a spokesman for Oxfam America. “But it’s also true that there’s a good reason these reforms haven’t happened before. It’s a challenging political issue.”

Here’s the back-story: For decades, aid agencies have bought food from U.S. farmers and shipped it on U.S.-flagged ships to needy countries overseas as part of the Food for Peace program. All told, the program has fed some 1 billion people since 1954.

But the program is also fairly inefficient. The requirements to buy from U.S. farmers and use U.S.-flagged ships creates delays and extra costs. The Government Accountability Office found that all these requirements reduced the cost-effectiveness of aid programs by 25 percent. Back in 2007, the New York Times put together a graphic illustrating the long journey in getting food to poor countries like Zambia:

What’s more, the U.S. program has been criticized for hurting foreign farmers in impoverished countries like Malawi and Mozambique, who can be driven out of business when a rush of cheap foreign food enters the local market.

So, in its 2014 budget, the White House wanted to simplify the process. Nearly half of the $1.4 billion in food-aid money would instead be spent directly in the needy countries — either through bulk purchases of food from local farmers or by distributing vouchers to individuals. And the program would be run by USAID rather than the Agriculture Department.

Proponents argued that this change would allow the United States to feed an extra 4 million people each year for the same amount of money. “Doing so,” wrote Kimberly Ann Elliott of the Center for Global Development, “would both save the US taxpayer money and ensure that food assistance reaches the hungry and malnourished much faster.”

Still, many lawmakers aren’t convinced: Both Republicans and Democrats have objected to the plan, saying that it would hurt U.S. farmers, ships, and ports. Here’s a letter that Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) wrote to their colleagues, urging them to maintain the status quo:

The purchase of food from U.S. farmers and its subsequent shipment on U.S.-flagged vessels has helped support U.S. farm production and preserve the U.S. merchant marine.

Reductions in funding for this program – or changes in how it operates – would significantly reduce the amount of U.S. farm products our nation could provide to those in need around the world.  It would also threaten our national security preparedness by reducing the domestic sealift capacity on which our U.S. military depends.

Key members of the Senate are similarly opposed, with the heads of the agricultural committee, Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), stressing the importance of the current program for U.S. farmers.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), chair of the agricultural committee, basically supports the existing program. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

So far, these arguments are carrying the day. Perhaps more surprisingly, these arguments are swaying even those members of Congress who agree that the White House’s reforms make sense in principle.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) told my colleagues on the editorial board that Obama’s reforms are sensible in “an ideal world,” but they ignore political realities. It’s difficult to maintain support for food-aid programs, he said, unless they also benefit powerful stakeholders like farmers and merchant mariners. In other words, inefficiency is simply the price that has to be paid to get any foreign aid at all.

So is there any way things could change? Here’s one possibility: Rep. Edward Royce (R-Calif.) and Karen Bass (D-Calif.), who sit on the Foreign Relations Committee, have put forward their own bill that would mirror Obama’s reforms. Their pitch? U.S. farmers don’t actually need the help. “With food aid currently comprising just 0.86% of total U.S. agricultural exports and 0.56% of net farm income,” they note, “the impact of this shift will be negligible.”

For now, however, it’s unlikely that there will be much more than small tweaks. The recently passed Senate farm bill mark-up did include about $60 million over five years to buy food locally in developing countries — but that’s much smaller than Obama’s proposal. The House farm bill, meanwhile, contained virtually no reforms.

Related: The AP has a helpful short breakdown of the House and Senate farm bills.

FBI Headquarters. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

The fundamental problem is that eavesdropping facilities are a double-edged sword. They make it easier for the U.S. government to spy on the bad guys. But they also make it easier for the bad guys to hack our computers and spy on us. And, the researchers say, the Internet’s decentralized architecture makes it particularly hard to build effective and secure wiretapping capabilities online.

Since the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), telephone companies have been legally obligated to build wiretapping capabilities into their telecommunications equipment. But CALEA didn’t apply to Internet-based communications technologies. The result, the FBI says, is that its surveillance capabilities are “going dark,” as criminal suspects increasingly shift to digital communications platforms that don’t offer real-time interception capabilities.

In response, the government is reportedly seeking to impose CALEA-type requirements on Internet services. But rather than mandating the implementation of specific surveillance standards, as the original CALEA did, the government’s proposal would fine online service providers who failed to comply with a wiretapping request from the government — leaving it to each individual firm to decide the best way to comply.

Crucially, according to reporting by The Washington Post, the FBI proposal would apply even to “Internet phone calls conducted between two computer users without going through a central company server.” In a paper published Friday by the Center for Democracy and Technology, more than a dozen prominent computer security experts warn that such a requirement would be a disaster for the security of online communications.

If information isn’t flowing through a central server, then the only way to intercept it is to add surveillance software to the user’s PC. But popular software is constantly being probed by hackers seeking vulnerabilities they can exploit. The more complex a system, the more likely programmers are to make mistakes that could provide hackers with an opening. And surveillance features are particularly dangerous, the researchers argue.

“The cleverest and most dangerous cyber-attackers are those who are able to not only compromise a system but also to evade detection,” they write. “That is also precisely the objective of a government surveillance solution.”

Even worse, a huge number of companies could be forced to comply with the government’s proposed regulations. Ed Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton and one of the paper’s authors (and, full disclosure, my graduate adviser) points out that a growing number of companies are adding peer-to-peer communications capabilities to their products. For example, many multi-player video games include built-in facilities for players to communicate with each other in real time.

A wiretapping mandate could greatly increase the complexity of these products, raising development costs and increasing the likelihood of security vulnerabilities. Chris Soghoian, a computer security researcher and the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, notes that even the largest technology companies struggle to keep their products secure. “Google has hundreds of engineers doing nothing but security,” he says. Yet Google is still routinely discovering new security problems in its most popular products.

Perhaps the most serious concern the researchers point to is the danger a wiretapping mandate could pose to national security. Many government agencies use the same communications software as do private firms. Which means that wiretapping mandates could make the software the government itself uses less secure.

“When vulnerabilities in the equipment such as back doors and malicious code can be exploited by another country it becomes a priority and a national security concern,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) at an October hearing. Rogers was referring to Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese telecommunications companies Rogers suspected of helping the Chinese government to spy on Americans. But Soghoian argues the same point applies to backdoors mandated by the U.S. government. They will make American communications technologies more vulnerable to online attacks. And no one has more resources to devote to looking for security vulnerabilities than foreign governments.

This is more than a hypothetical concern. In 2005, the Greek government discovered that an unknown party was intercepting the phone conversations of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis and dozens of other senior officials in the Greek government. They had been under surveillance for almost a year.

The attack was made possible because the Greeks were using off-the-shelf telecommunications equipment. Thanks to CALEA and similar laws in other countries, the gear came with built-in wiretapping capabilities. The wiretapping feature was only supposed to be activated with the approval of Greek authorities. But someone, likely a foreign government, figured out how to activate the wiretapping feature without the Greeks noticing.

According to the authors of the CDT paper, an Internet version of CALEA would be much worse. Right now, only large, sophisticated telecommunications firms are subject to CALEA requirements, and they have carefully-designed procedures to ensure that wiretapping capabilities are not abused. An Internet version of CALEA could apply to many more firms, including many small software firms that can’t afford to hire dedicated personnel to design, administer, and audit their surveillance capabilities. So it’s likely that some of those firms will make mistakes that will leave many users’ computers vulnerable to attack.

Worst of all, the researchers say, the proposed mandate is unlikely to even be effective. People who want to evade surveillance will inevitably find ways to modify the software on their computers to deactivate the eavesdropping feature, just as many people today “jailbreak” their smartphones to activate forbidden features. Indeed, some popular communications software is open source, making it trivial to build a version of the software with the wiretapping feature removed. So an Internet wiretapping mandate will do little to help the government spy on the bad guys, while reducing security for everyone else.

According to Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and another paper co-author, the current debate over online wiretapping echos the debate over cryptography in the 1990s. During the Clinton administration, the federal government sought to limit the use of cryptography out of fear that it would undermine the government’s surveillance capabilities. They promoted a “key escrow” regime in which Americans who used encryption would be required to provide the encryption keys to the government for use in subsequent investigations.

By the mid-1990s, research by Blaze and others had demonstrated that the government’s key escrow scheme was impractical. Meanwhile, the spread of full-strength cryptographic software proved unstoppable. So by the end of the decade, the Clinton administration — wisely, in Blaze’s view — gave up and stopped trying to limit the use of cryptography. They concluded that it was more important for law-abiding Americans to have secure communications capabilities than to continue to wage a hopeless war against cryptography.

Blaze believes that policymakers today should draw the same lesson. “It’s hard enough to build a system that tries to solve the relatively simple problem of people who want to communicate securely,” he says. Adding a requirement that the government be able to intercept the communication makes the process “much more complex and therefore much harder to do securely.”

Hat-tip to a very effusive Gabe Delahaye.

Thursday, May 9

The Gang of Eight (The Washington Post).

The sponsors’ amendment (14-4)

This was offered at the start of markup by the bill’s sponsors with the idea of clarifying and tweaking a few things throughout the bill. This is a good summary. Most of it is technical stuff (one part “added a definition of the Northern Border”) but there are some real changes.

Notably, funding for the start-up costs of the State and Homeland Security Departments in implementing the bill is increased from $100 million to $1 billion, a requirement that the Secretary of Labor be consulted when determining the cap on agricultural guest workers is added, and biology is added to the list of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields for the purposes of determining visa eligibility.

All the Democrats on the committee voted for the bill, as did Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and John Cornyn (R-Tex.). Graham and Flake are in the “Gang of Eight.” Ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) all voted no.

Crossing fees banned (voice vote)

An amendment from committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) banned the imposition of any border crossing fees for pedestrians and passenger vehicles entering by land at the Canadian or Mexican borders.

Informing the Judiciary Committee (voice vote)

An amendment from Grassley added requirements throughout the bill requiring that various reports or notifications be submitted to the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, in some cases in place of submitting them to the Homeland Security committees in each house.

Annual audits (voice vote)

Another Grassley amendment requires annual audits of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Trust Fund, which funds a number of border security and other measures throughout the bill.

Aid to victims (voice vote)

An amendment from Sessions gives the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Immigration Ombudsman (a position created in the bill) the authority to assist individuals and families who have been victims of crime committed by immigrants or temporary residents, or crime committed near the border.

Better data on human trafficking (voice vote)

An amendment from Cornyn, along with Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), would classify human trafficking as a part 1 violent crime for the purpose of federal assistance to state and local law enforcement, which would require state and local agencies to collect detailed information on it, just as they do with, say, murder. This was backed by the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda.

Private land owner representation (voice vote)

An amendment from Flake would add three private landowners to the Department of Homeland Security Border Oversight Task Force, 2 from the Southern border and one from the Northern border. That brings the Task Force’s overall size from 26 to 29.

Annual GAO review (voice vote)

Another Flake amendment would require an annual assessment of the “status and progress of the Southern Border Security Strategy” by the Government Accountability Office.

Protection for children (voice vote)

An amendment from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) requires that children in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection get health care, adequate nutrition, clothing and bedding, and hygienic products, and are allowed supervised phone calls with family members. This amendment was backed by pro-immigrant group America’s Voice, as well as the ACLU and the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda.

Stonegarden reform (voice vote)

Another Feinstein amendment requires that grants under Operation Stonegarden, a DHS grant program meant to help border security but which critics argue has been used as a subsidy for activities having little to do with that purpose, be allocated from a competitive process.

Get the Coast Guard involved (voice vote)

Another Feinstein amendment instructs the Coast Guard to “acquire and deploy watercraft to provide support for border-related maritime anti-crime activities.”

Ombudsman details (voice vote)

An amendment from Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) fleshes out a bit more the Immigration Ombudsman position created by the bill. The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda backed this amendment.

Boosting the trust fund’s funding (14-4)

An amendment from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the Gang of Eight, would increase the initial allocation to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Trust Fund, which funds implementation of the bill (including its border security provisions), from $6.5 billion to $8.3 billion. That money would be paid back through fees and fines, which would, after the initial allocation is paid back, start going into the trust fund. Four Republicans — Lee, Sessions, Cornyn, and Grassley — voted against.

Securing the whole border (voice vote)

Another Grassley amendment strikes all references to “high risk” sections of the border. The bill as written would allow the path-to-citizenship section of the bill take effect when 90 percent of crossers at the high-risk sections of the Mexican border are being captured. This amendment changes that to requiring that 90 percent of crossers on all of the Mexican border be captured before the path-to-citizenship section takes effect. This amendment was opposed by pro-immigrant group America’s Voice as well as the ACLU.

Grant accountability (voice vote)

Another Grassley amendment requires regular audits of the grants issued from programs in the bill, by the relevant inspectors general. It requires preapproval of conference expenditures exceeding $20,000 and restricts grants to nonprofits that hold money offshore.

Public defender funding (voice vote)

This Feinstein amendment clarifies that the federal government will reimburse state and local governments for the cost of public defenders and clerical support in immigration-related cases, not just prosecution and detention costs. The ACLU opposed this, arguing that more reimbursement creates perverse incentives, but the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda backed it.

No reimbursement for illegal prosecutions (voice vote)

This Blumenthal amendment bans federal reimbursements for state and local immigration-related prosecution and pretrial detention “if the jurisdictions engaged in unlawful conduct in connection with immigration-related apprehensions.” This amendment was backed by the ACLU and the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda.

Family unity in detention (10-8)

This Hirono amendment would require border agents to ask if apprehended individuals are traveling with spouses or children, or whether or not they are parents or spouses. The intent is to try to ensure that families are not separated during the interrogation process, which may, Hirono argues, “make migrants more vulnerable by returning them to dangerous places without their family members.”

Critics argued this placed an undue burden on border agents, with Cornyn noting that some areas on the border lack the necessary resources to keep families together in some cases. Every Republican on the committee voted no, and every Democrat voted yes. This amendment was backed by pro-immigrant group America’s Voice and the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda.

Expanded reimbursement (10-8)

This Feinstein and Cornyn amendment expands the kind of incarcerations of undocumented immigrants for which state and local governments can be reimbursed, including by adding reimbursement for incarcerating people only charged but not yet convicted with a crime, and for incarcerating people whose immigration status can’t be verified. Leahy expressed concern that this would make it easier to game the system.

Ten senators – Feinstein, Cornyn, Graham, Hatch, Sessions, Lee, Cruz, Flake, Schumer, and Franken – voted yes, and eight – Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Blumenthal, Grassley, Leahy, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Hirono, and Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) — voted no. The ACLU opposed it, arguing it would provide an incentive for racial profiling, as did the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda.

Better border crossing infrastructure (voice vote)

Another Feinstein amendment establishes a grant program to improve the infrastructure at existing and future border crossings.

Consulting with local governments (voice vote)

This Leahy and Cornyn amendment would require DHS to consult with the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture, as well as state and local governments, in determining where on the Mexican border to place fencing, and adds flexibility for DHS to not build fencing when they determine that is not the best technology for the area in question. It also clarifies that no fencing will be placed on the Canadian border.

Adding federal judges (voice vote)

This Feinstein, Cornyn, Cruz, and Flake amendment would add eight new permanent district judges in California, Arizona and Texas to help deal with an increase immigration caseloads. This amendment was backed by the ACLU but the amendment to the amendment by Grassley that passed was opposed by it.

Tuesday, May 14

The Chargers can play home games without fear of drones due to Feinstein’s amendment. (Denis Poroy/Associated Press)

No drones in San Diego (voice vote)

This Feinstein amendment limits the use of aerial drones (but not maritime drones) for border protection in California to within three miles of the border.

Don’t drop immigrants in war zones (voice vote)

This Coons amendment would bar DHS from conducting deportations in dangerous areas of the Mexican border, and make it consider the time of deportation and ability of shelters in nearby towns when determining where to locate deportations. It also bars officials from confiscating migrants’ belongings, requiring all nonperishable items be returned to the immigrant. This amendment was backed by pro-immigrant group America’s Voice, as well as the ACLU and the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda.

Technical changes (voice vote)

This Schumer amendment makes mostly grammatical changes, including clarifying that the prevailing wage for the W guest work visa will be set by the Secretary of Homeland Security, and that money won’t be taken away from existing travel promotion programs. Nothing substantive in the bill is changed.

Hotline for displaced workers (voice vote)

This Whitehouse amendment orders the Department of Labor to set up a hotline for workers who feel that they have been displaced from their jobs by H-1B visa recipients (a.k.a high-skilled guest workers) to lodge complaints, and requires the inspector general of the department to report back to Congress every five years on those complaints.

H-1B job listings (voice vote)

This Grassley amendment changes a section of the bill which requires employers recruiting for H-1B positions to post their job offerings to a Web site run by the Department of Labor. Grassley requires additional information in the listings, such as the name of the position offered. This is intended to crack down on fraudulent uses of the program.

STEM funding (voice vote)

This Hatch amendment, offered with Klobuchar and Coons, would double the fee required for labor certifications to get green cards, and use the money to create a fund to help states and minority-serving institutions expand STEM training for minority students, women, and economically disadvantaged students.

Access for Africans and Caribbeans (voice vote)

This Schumer amendment would ensure access to nonimmigrant visas for residents of certain African and Caribbean countries, adding 10,500 new visas for those applicants, to replace the diversity visa program that’s being eliminated in the Gang of Eight bill.

Videoconferencing for immigration interviews (voice vote)

This Klobuchar, Hirono, and Lee amendment directs the secretary of State to conduct a pilot program in using videoconferencing to interview overseas visa applicants, rather than interviewing them in person at a consulate or elsewhere. This is particularly intended to boost tourism. Despite passing by voice vote, Feinstein and Sessions voted no and had their votes registered.

Require in-person interviews for dangerous applicants (10-8)

This Sessions amendment requires in-person interviews for visa applicants from areas that are of special security concern, or who individually have been tagged as persons of concern, or who are applying for a visa for which more scrutiny is judged to be warranted.

Schumer proposed an amendment to this amendment which would, instead of that, simply provide terrorism database information to consular officials for use in determining visa eligibility, and bar people on any watch lists from entry absent intervention by the secretaries of Homeland Security and State (Feinstein changed the amendment to require the national security advisor and director of national intelligence sign off as well).

The Schumer version passed, 10-8, with all Democrats voting yes and all Republicans voting no.

Medicaid for Micronesia (voice vote)

This Hirono amendment allows naturals of Compact of Free Association (COFA) countries — to whit, Marshall Islands, Palau, and Micronesia – to receive Medicaid. COFA residents are allowed to live and work in the United States for an unlimited period of time, and many do so in Guam and Hawaii, which has driven up health-care costs there, without any federal contribution. Thus, the Hirono amendment would ease the fiscal burden on her home state of these migrants considerably.

Accreditation for foreign students (voice vote)

This Grassley amendment requires accreditation for schools whose students apply for student visas, and bars such visas for flight schools that don’t have DHS and FAA approval. Two of the 9/11 hijackers had student visas associated with flight schools.

Visas for Sweden (voice vote)

This Schumer amendment allows for guest worker visas for jobs that require specialized language training that’s difficult to find in the United States. Schumer provided the examples of Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Sweden as countries whose native languages are not widely spoken in the United States and where language-related work may necessitate the use of guest worker labor.

Help for battered spouses (voice vote)

This Klobuchar amendment allows abused spouses who are present on their spouses’ visa to petition for a separate visa, so that they are not deported if they report the abuse. This amendment was backed by pro-immigrant group America’s Voice.

Better student visa data (voice vote)

This Grassley amendment requires that the database for student visas be integrated with customs databases, to enable border agents to catch people entering on expired visas. The student visa program would be suspended if the database integration is not completed within 120 days of the bill’s passage. One of the Boston Marathon bombing conspirators was able to enter on an expired visa earlier this year due to this problem.

Fishing crew rotations in Hawaii ports (voice vote)

This Hirono amendment allows Hawaiian U.S. flag fishing boats, which are currently required to do crew rotations in foreign ports, to do so in Hawaii rather than sailing all the way to Christmas Island.

Thursday, May 16

Hong Kongers can come vacation in the United States without a visa under the Hirono amendment. (Wally Santana/AP)

No visas needed for Hong Kong tourists (14-4)

This Hirono amendment makes residents of Hong Kong eligible for visa-less entry into the United States for tourist stays of 90 days or less, a privilege for which residents of many European countries, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are currently eligible. Sessions objected, arguing that China is among the worst violators of international immigration norms in the world, and while a distinct area, Hong Kong is a part of China. Sessions, Cruz, Grassley, and Cornyn voted against.

Regional centers for investor visas (voice vote)

The EB-5 visa program provides a path to permanent residency for foreign investors who put a significant amount of capital into the American economy. The Leahy amendment makes a variety of changes to the program, notably making the “regional center” program, a pilot which makes EB-5s available to investors who focus on a specific geographic region, permanent.

Hire existing guest workers (voice vote)

This Schumer amendment calls for the creation of a registry of W visa holders (a.k.a low-skilled guest workers) so that, in case some of those people are unemployed, people looking for low-skilled labor will hire existing guest workers before bringing in new guest workers. If unemployed guest workers do not have a job for 60 days, under the underlying bill they’re required to go home, so the Schumer amendment only applies to that 60-day period.

Visas for start-up incubator participants (voice vote)

This Whitehouse amendment expands eligibility for the INVEST Visa, a program created in the bill for would-be entrepreneurs and investors, to those who are participating in start-up incubators like Y Combinator or Betaspring.

Protection for E-Verify false positives (voice vote)

This Franken amendment calls for annual audits to determine the error rate for E-Verify, the legal status verification system that the immigration bill makes mandatory, and if the rate of false positives (that is, legal residents who are marked as illegal) is above a certain rate, then the maximum fine for first-time offender companies is reduced to account for the possibility of system error.

Weekly E-Verify reports (voice vote)

This Grassley amendment requires the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services to submit weekly reports to the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the individuals whose legal status couldn’t be verified through E-Verify that week, including all those individuals’ names, Social Security numbers, and their last employer

Notification for E-Verify lookups (voice vote)

This Coons amendment, co-sponsored by Lee and Franken, requires the notification of individuals when their E-Verify records are accessed.

Preventing theft of children’s identities (voice vote)

This Grassley amendment allows parents to limit the usage of their children’s Social Security numbers by the immigration system so as to prevent identity theft.

Small business advocate (voice vote)

This Franken amendment establishes the Office of the Small Business and Employee Advocate within Citizenship and Immigration Services. The office would be charged with protecting small businesses and employees from false positives on E-Verify and other problems arising from immigration enforcement.

Require pay stub disclosure (voice vote)

This Blumenthal amendment would classify as an unfair immigration-related employment practice the withholding of pay stubs and other pay and employment records by employers from employees.

Parent and guardian permission for minor labor (voice vote)

This Grassley amendment requires underage workers’ attestation of identity for immigration enforcement purposes be made by their parent or guardian, not just anyone over 21.

In short: Dunder Mifflin was a disaster as a business. And that was the reality that haunted the show — the underlying truth that created a lot of the tension always lurking for the characters. The show never would have worked if it had been set in a fast-rising Internet start-up or even a stable industry.

There’s too much overhead in this ‘Office.’ (Tyler Golden/NBC)

There are many ways in which the Dunder Mifflin business model made no sense whatsoever. It is a retailer of office paper, which is the ultimate commodity, something that companies want to buy at the lowest possible cost. Yet Dunder Mifflin pairs this low-margin, commodity product with an expansive sales force. The Scranton office alone had four or five salespeople at any given time, calling on clients and working new leads.

The entire business seems premised on the idea that a personal touch and better service will be enough to make up for prices that are higher than at Staples or Office Depot. It’s more likely that the office managers in charge of paper procurement at Scranton area businesses would be more annoyed by the constant harassment from their paper salesman than pleased by the enhanced service. If you’re selling a complex product essential to certain business operations, like software or key manufacturing equipment, it makes plenty of sense to have a large, talented staff of salespeople and customer relations experts. But this is just … paper. Dunder Mifflin sells a commodity, but it’s staffed like it sells something unique.

Then there’s the overhead. If Dunder Mifflin somehow found a way to make the paper  work as a high-touch, sales-intensive business, it would still need to keep expenses as low as possible. But this company has a tremendous burden of white-collar staff who draw salaries but do not directly drive sales. It obviously has to employ a branch manager — Michael Scott, and later Andy Bernard — because somebody has to be in charge of the sales force. But almost every other position at the Scranton branch is hard to justify.

There are three people in the accounting department (Angela, Kevin and Oscar), but bookkeeping should instead be centralized across all Dunder Mifflin’s branches. Why does an office of maybe 20 people need its own human resources person? The answer, of course, is that the managers have been walking human resources disasters. But that’s a reason to get new managers, not to employ Toby Flenderson as a full-time HR guy. Kelly Kapoor technically was in charge of “customer service” all those years, but shouldn’t that be the salespeoples’ jobs? What in the world do Creed (in charge of quality control) and Meredith (supplier relations) do all day? Darryl Philbin was promoted from running the warehouse to a white-collar management job in season six, but it was never clear why they needed yet another manager in this small office. Pam managed to give herself the title “office administrator” in the seventh season, despite all those other people already in place to administer the office. And, somehow, this is the only office in America where callers still have to go through a full-time receptionist to reach someone, rather than call the person directly.

That’s not even the end of it. In the early seasons of the show, this regional paper company that sells a low-margin, commodity good in markets like Scranton, Utica and Buffalo, located its headquarters not in some anonymous office park in one of those cities, but in . . . Midtown Manhattan, home of some of the highest rents on earth!

Add to all that, Dunder Mifflin, of course, is in a declining industry. As Michael Scott’s memorable slogan put it, “Limitless paper, in a paperless world.” It would be one thing if all this staffing were designed to accommodate future growth, but there is no reason to think that there’s any growth to come.David Wallace, the chief financial officer of this monstrosity of a company, came across as one of the few competent leaders at Dunder Mifflin. But he runs an operation with staffing and overhead horribly ill-suited to its business model.

That is the greatest mystery of Dunder Mifflin. At a time when its business model would have, in reality, been collapsing upon itself, the company had remarkable stability. Most of the workers who appeared in the premier episode nine years ago were still there trudging along this week, ensuring that the people of Scranton could get their precious paper. In a modern workplace of constant churn, that may be the most unrealistic aspect of the whole show. But it is also what made this fictional company in a drab town in a boring business the stuff of great television for nine years.

“Medicare workers in Washington are learning that door-to-door selling is a rugged job,” a writer in this newspaper declared 47 years ago.

It was March 3, 1966, after a Washington Post reporter had spent the day trailing Medicare workers who tried to sign seniors up for new program. Some didn’t answer the door. Others slammed doors in their faces. One man reportedly stuck his nose out the door to say: “I’m not 65. I’m 57 — just today.”

“Sometimes they peek through the windows when they see me coming and they won’t answer the door,” Medicare worker Jim Anderson told The Post. “They must think I’m selling books or something.”

Medicare is, these days, an incredibly popular program. Americans overwhelmingly oppose cutting it. No politician would consider repealing it. Most think providing health insurance to all Americans over 65 is worth the both the trouble and the cost.

This was not always true. Back in 1966, as Medicare was just about to launch, nobody knew whether the new program would provide benefits to millions or fail completely. Sound familiar?

“What will happen then, on that summer day when the federally insured system of paying hospital bills becomes reality?” Nona Brown, a New York Times reporter, wondered in a story published April 23, 1966. “Will there be lines of old folks at hospital doors, with no rooms to put them in, too few doctors and nurses and technicians to care for them?”

Like the Affordable Care Act, the fight over Medicare was contentious. President John F. Kennedy had tried to extend health benefits to the elderly and failed.

The American Medical Association vehemently opposed the law. Two months before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare into law, the American Medical Association ran ads across the country denouncing the program as “the beginning of socialized medicine.”

Johnson signed Medicare into law July 30, 1965. Benefits would become available July 1, 1966. That gave the Johnson administration less than a year to reach 19 million seniors. Medicare was, as the New York Times put it in April 1966, bracing “for M-Day.”

The federal government launched “Project Medicare Alert,” a program that hired 5,000 workers to enroll seniors in Medicare. The “$2 million crash effort,” as described by The Post, was meant to “inform isolated elderly Americans of the availability of Medicare benefits.” Workers, hired for a 20-week stint, were paid $1.25 per hour.

There were still concerns about whether the enrollment efforts would actually work. The seniors who needed the program the most, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry wrote, tended to be the hardest to reach. The program came with a $3 monthly premium, and Raspberry worried that “those who will have trouble coming up with the $3 a month are precisely those who can least afford not to enroll.”

On the whole, however, the enrollment effort worked. Of the 19 million seniors eligible for Medicare, 93 percent enrolled by the summer of 1966. Social Security Administration Commissioner Robert Ball “enlisted the U. S. Forest Service to send Forest Rangers out into the woods in search of elderly hermits whom he might be able to enroll.” And, much to Wonkblog’s liking, he held news conferences with charts that showed Medicare’s enrollment levels.

On July 1, 1966 (the start of Medicare enrollments), SSA Commissioner Bob Ball holds a news conference to announce SSA’s plans for implementing Medicare. (Social Security Administration)

Less than a month before Medicare was set to launch, though, one hurdle seemed insurmountable. A front page Washington Post story reported on Johnson making “an 11th-hour appeal for hospitals to end discrimination, but he failed to prevent Medicare’s start from being marred by segregation.”

Mobile, Ala., apparently had the worst showing on this front: Just 30 of the city’s 3,986 hospital beds were certified for Medicare. “The holdout hospitals,” Eve Edstrom wrote, “are expected to fall in line once community pressure builds up against denying Medicare benefits to Whites as well as Negroes.”

M-Day arrived and … it was a bit of a dud. “At 12:01 a.m. yesterday,” Dan Morgan and Martin Weil wrote on July 2, 1966, “Uncle Sam began paying the hospital bills of close to 1,000 patients over 65 in area hospitals.”

Medicare’s very first patient, incidentally, was Mary Augustus, 68, of Hartford, Conn. Her hospital received a check for $331.71 for a surgery performed July 1.

The long lines that some had worried about? They never materialized.  ”At the end of its third week,” the New York Times reported July 25, 1966, “the Medicare program was reported going smoothly, with difficulties in some areas of the South still the only major problem.”

Even the issues of segregation, which seemed to be a significant threat in early July, had largely been resolved by the end of the month. “By July 21, 1966, fewer than 0.5 percent of hospitals were not certified for Medicare eligibility,” Jill Quadango wrote in her history of the program.

Meanwhile, legislators quickly began looking for ways to expand the Medicare program and make it even larger. In January 1966, a young congressman from Michigan proposed a bill that would extend Medicare to cover drugs.

Such a program proposed by John Dingell, now the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, would not become law until nearly four decades later, when Congress created the Medicare Part D program.

KLIFF NOTES: Top health policy reads from around the Web.

America’s most expensive hospital is … in New Jersey? “Based on the bills it submits to Medicare, the Bayonne Medical Center charged the highest amounts in the country for nearly one-quarter of the most common hospital treatments,  according to a New York Times analysis of 2011 data, the most recent available. No other hospital was at the top of the price list more often.” Julie Creswell, Barry Meier and Jo Craven McGinty in the New York Times. 

Arizona is moving forward with the Medicaid expansion. “The Arizona Senate on Thursday approved expanding the state’s Medicaid program, capping a rancorous debate that had split the Republican Party and had been building since January, when Gov. Jan Brewer issued a surprise call to increase Arizona’s health-care program for the poor.” Mary Jo Pitzl and Mary K. Reinhart in the Arizona Republic.

Obamacare appears to be driving down premiums in Oregon. “On Thursday, a comparison of proposed 2014 health premiums became public online, causing two insurers to request do-overs to lower their rates even before the state determines whether they’re justified. The unusual development was sparked by a comparison that used to be impossible because plan benefits varied so widely. But under the federal reforms that take effect Jan. 1, health insurance is mandated and every insurer must offer certain standard plans.” Nick Budnick in the Oregonian. 

(For the purposes of the chart, Latin America includes Mexico.)

Note that this is only looking at legal immigration. Pew has previously estimated that there are also about 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, and the overwhelming majority of those come from Latin America and the Caribbean.

That said, legal immigration still makes up the biggest chunk of the foreign-born population in the United States — and it’s growing more rapidly. Of the 43 million foreign-born residents in the country, about three-quarters are here legally. And over the past two decades, Pew notes, the United States has added an average of 1 million legal residents per year.

Meanwhile, the pace of illegal immigration appears to have slowed down since 2007, although it’s still not entirely clear whether that’s due to better enforcement or temporary factors like the weak economy. “The best estimate available to date,” argued a recent Council on Foreign Relations report, “is that enforcement increases explain approximately one-third of the recent reduction in the flow of undocumented migrants, and economic factors the remainder.”

Further reading:

–Here’s an even longer view from NPR. Back in 1960, three-quarters of the foreign-born population was from Europe and just 1.5 percent was from Latin America.

By 2010, that had shifted dramatically, with a quarter of the foreign-born population from Latin America and just 12.3 percent from Europe.

We’re sitting in a bare conference room at his foundation’s D.C. headquarters. Gates — who Bloomberg News calculates is once again the world’s richest man — is in town to talk to members of Congress about his top priority this year: Global health – and, in particular, the total eradication of polio. He wants to drive that 6 percent even lower, and he believes he can. Wiping out a disease like polio sounds impossible. But it’s actually, Gates tells me, completely achievable. Perhaps even by the end of 2013. This is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Bill Gates holds vaccine during a news conference after his address to the 64th World Health Assembly at the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva, May 17, 2011.
(Denis Balibouse / Reuters)

Ezra Klein: Your Foundation is known for taking a particularly data-driven approach to its work. So how do you know what’s actually working when you’re in failed states with very little data-collection capacity?

Bill Gates: Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, “Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died?” People don’t forget that. If you say to them, “Did your kids get vaccines or not,” they might have done it and not remember, or they might think, “Oh, this person wants me to say yes, maybe I look bad if I don’t say yes.” Death is something we really understand extremely well.

But you can save a lot of lives. One thing about the childhood death rate is you really can split it into the first 30 days of life versus 30 days to 5 years. Thirty days to 5 years is all vaccine preventable stuff — it’s diarrhea, respiratory and malaria. The first 30 days, the primary healthcare system really has to engage with the mother pre-birth, and then get the mother to do things like keeping the baby warm, making sure to avoid doing things that break the baby’s skin, breast-feeding, and that’s been harder. We’ve had sites in India where we can cut those deaths down by over 50 percent just by training the mother. But the worker has to engage with the patient, hopefully speak the same language or be of the same caste so that they’re willing to trust the advice that they’re getting.

EK: What’s been the biggest surprise? What has the data shown works, or doesn’t work, that you simply didn’t expect?

BG: I was completely surprised that nobody was funding some of these vaccines. When I first looked at this I thought, well, all the good stuff will have been done. It was mind-blowing me to find things like Rotavirus vaccine were going unfunded. One hundred percent of rich kids were getting it and no poor kids were. So over a quarter million kids a year were dying of Rotavirus-caused diarrhea. You could save those lives for $800 per life. That’s like $20 or $30 per year of life. It’s just ridiculous that an intervention like that isn’t funded.

And I’m really surprised at the variance. Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems and some richer ones run terrible programs. The north of Nigeria has about 30 percent vaccination coverage, and they’re above average in terms of wealth within Africa. You compare that to, say, Somalia, which has absolutely no government at all, and they get about 60 percent vaccine coverage of children. So you have a place literally with no government getting a better vaccine coverage than a place that’s above average wealth.

EK: Why?

BG: Well, in Somalia they’ve given up using the government. The money goes through the NGOs. Whereas in Nigeria they’ve designed a system where the federal government buys the vaccines, the state government provides the electricity, and the one level down below that provides the salaries. It’s just a bad design. You know, the north of India has very poor vaccination rates, so we picked a state up there with 80 million people and we drove it from 30 percent to 80 percent. But they had a really good chief health minister and the federal government was providing lots of money and lots of good technocrats, so the skills were there, as long as you employed them in the right kind of system.

EK: This gets into an interesting question about public health, which is that when we think about health-care challenges, we think primarily about technological challenges. We think about cures for cancer and vaccines for AIDs. But in public health, much of the challenge is logistical and organizational — how you deliver, how you organize, who you actually partner with. And that seems much harder to replicate. If you can invent the pill, then you can probably keep reproducing the pill, but even if you get a good system in the north of India with their good health minister, it isn’t necessarily the case that you can move that over to the south of Nigeria. 

BG: It can be replicated, though. Ethiopia is a good example of a country that decided to get serious, train 35,000 health workers and actually put them in the right places. So they did the map, looked at it, got the donor money, it’s a work in progress. It’s doing quite well but there are still a few of the supply chain things that need to be fixed. So, it can be replicated. We do report cards for each country, saying OK, did you have a plan, do you have the money, did you do the personnel right, did you do the supply chain right?

EK: What’s the difference between trying to work in high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries?

BG: The low-income, middle-income and high-income health systems have extremely different problems. You know, in low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive. Whereas in rich countries, yes, you can get to your doctor. In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases. We’re dealing with countries that in the worst case where kids have death rates of 20 percent and that’s all infectious disease. And nothing else. In the U.S., in terms of kids under 5, other than premature birth, you really don’t have big problems. Kids just don’t die of infectious disease.

Then as you get into the adult phase, in the U.S., what do people die of? From age 5 till age 50, you’ve got suicide, you’ve got traffic accidents. There’s very little cancer and heart disease before age 50. Then once you get past your 50s, the poor countries basically say, “Hey, I hope you don’t get cancer, because if you do get cancer, we just don’t have enough money per person, we’re just not gonna buy chemotherapy drugs. We’re just not going to get engaged in that.”

EK: How do you make these decisions about what is and isn’t worth paying for?

BG: The way that this is talked about is, what’s a year of life worth? They call it a disability-adjusted life year (DALY). When you’re running a poor country health-care system, you can’t treat a year of life as being worth more than, say, $200, $300 or else you’ll bankrupt your health system immediately. So, with very few exceptions, you do nothing for cancer. If you get cancer, you’re going to die. And so none of the stuff that’s going on in the U.S. about $300,000 a year chemotherapy drugs is relevant.

Even simple things don’t pass the test. We’re on the verge of saying that Africa should do blood pressure medicine because it’s become generic and so cheap and that’s such a common issue in terms of heart attack death, the so-called polypill is so cheap that it’s one of the few non-infectious disease things that meets the dollars per DALY threshold to actually go into a poor healthcare system and say this is worth it given the extremely finite not only financial resources, but personnel resources, that you have.

But here’s the good news for these countries. If you spend the less than 2 percent of what the rich countries spend, but you spend it on vaccinations and antibiotics, you get over half of all that healthcare does to extend life. So you spend 2 percent and you get 50 percent. If you spend another 80 percent you’re at over 90 percent.

EK: Your top priority, I’m told, for the next year is the literal eradication of polio. What’s between here and there?

BG: Whenever you can eradicate one of these infectious disease, you get these exponential benefits. Polio’s the extreme example where we’re near the magic number of zero, so the $2 billion that the year spends protecting kids against getting polio, the day you know you’re at zero — you have to really know you’re there — then you save the $2 billion. And, you know, that happened for smallpox. Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it. It’s financially the best thing that ever happened because we’re saving all that money forever after.

So in 1988, the World Health Organization, through the World Health Assembly, declares they’re going to eradicate polio. It’s already been eradicated in North America and South America and most of Europe. Polio is paralyzing 360,000 kids a year when they start. They get it down below 10,000 by the year 2000. Then from 2000-2010 it stays flat. And they lose credibility because they’re always saying “Oh, just give us two more years,” and they’re just doing the same thing and it’s not working. And so in 2010, the polio community got together and said, “Look, are we going to succeed or not?” And so there were a lot of improvements made, those led to finally getting done in India in 2011. And India was expected to be the hardest and the last.

EK: Just a point of clarification, the functional mechanism here is a high enough level of vaccine coverage, right? When we say eradicate, we mean got it to a high enough level of vaccine coverage that the disease died out?

BG: Yeah, eradicate means there’s no poliovirus around. The method of doing that is you get to extremely high levels of vaccination –  that is, over 90 percent of the kids have the drops three times, and that protects them and the disease dies out. The number is actually well below 90 percent if you’re in a community that either has good sanitation or where the kids don’t move around much.

EK: So what did we learn that made eradication possible in India?

BG: The two things that were done super well were social mobilization and mapping where the houses were. When somebody would refuse to take the vaccine, they would mark it down and they would have either a political leader or religious leader come in and convince them. Dealing with refusals is a huge part of this. If your team goes in, maybe they don’t speak the dialect, they’re not the same caste, the family has heard a rumor that the vaccine is bad, there’s many reasons you get refusals, and so you need follow-up for refusals. Usually you’ll get 10 to 20 percent refusals. But if there’s been a rumor, you get much higher refusals.

EK: A rumor that, say, the vaccine is bad, or it makes you sick?

BG: Yeah or that the U.S. government uses vaccination campaigns to sterilize Muslim women. Vaccination always has problems with rumors. The U.S. doesn’t achieve nearly as high a vaccination rate as many countries. Vietnam is 99 percent vaccination, the U.S. is about 95 percent. Because people just hear “Oh, what about autism or something.” But it’s particularly bad in poor countries.

EK: The logistics of the operation seem basically impossible. How do you ensure you hit every tiny village in a mountainous, rural, poor country?

BG: We began using satellite maps and we’re finding particularly in Nigeria we were missing a lot of settlements, a lot of nomadic people. The thing we were missing the most was a village would be on a border, and one government would say, “Oh, that’s on their side,” and the other guy would say, “No, that’s on their side.” So your chance of getting polio was super elevated if you happened to live on the border between these local government administrative boundaries.

Then in terms of the teams doing their job, we now put a phone with a GPS sensor in it, every three minutes it says where this team is. It’s in the box with the vaccine so when they come in at the end of the day we plug that in and see if they really went where they were supposed to go.

Our biggest problems now are violence, which causes campaigns to be canceled, or people just not to be willing to go into various neighborhoods, and refusals having to do with bad rumors about the vaccine campaign. And these are both serious issues in both Pakistan and Nigeria. Afghanistan is just part of the Pakistan thing, and it’s not the big deal. The number of cases there is pretty small and it’s just in the areas where there’s fighting.

EK: I almost feel bad asking it after this particular discussion, but what has this work made you think about our health-care system’s problems, recognizing everything you said about how incredibly, incredibly different they are from, truly poor countries?

BG: It’s an important topic and I do care about it. My deep interest in this came somewhat because it’s fascinating but also because our big cause in the U.S. is education, and if you look at state budgets, they are moving money from education to health. They have to because the health costs are just exploding. So very quickly say to yourself, gosh, if there’s going to be any money left for university education and adequate money for K-12, even to stay flat, you have to figure out health-care costs.

Unfortunately, in rich-world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We’re inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation? And with chemotherapies, we’ve got things where we’ll spend our dollars on treatments where you’re valuing a life here at over $10 to $20 million. Really big, big numbers, which if you were infinitely rich, of course that would be fine.

So most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There’s a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer’s, if you could avoid diabetes — those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn’t favor them.

EK: You’ve talked a lot so far about this question of DALYs. We’re very uncomfortable putting a value on human life. The way I see our health system is we’ve chosen to pay a huge premium in order to avoid these questions. A prerequisite for the kind of cost-cutting innovations you’re talking about it is being willing to make judgments about what a human life is worth, or even what a few months of a human life are worth. Because if you can’t decide that, then of course you just pay for everything. But if you start trying to make those choices, or even get people to think about those choices, people cry “death panels!”

BG. Yes, someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we’re making trade-offs, and be explicit about that. When the car companies were found to have a memo that actually said, “This safety feature costs X and saved Y lives,” the very existence of that memo was considered damning. It was “Oh, you think human life is only a bank account.” Or when you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, “Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life,” that was a death panel. No, it wasn’t a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) stands next to a printed version of Obamacare during a news conference on May 16. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

On Thursday, the House of Representatives cast its 37th vote to repeal all or part of the health-care law. Or possibly its 38th vote. And I’ve heard some say its 36th vote. It depends how you count.

Why try another? Because a number of freshmen haven’t yet had a chance to vote on a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act. And the House Republican Conference feels that repealing Obamacare is something every House member should get to do at least once. It’s a rite of passage, like dry-heaving after Paul Ryan’s P-90X class, or offering your first amendment in committee.

The repeal passed the House though it will, as usual, be ignored by the Senate. But these news stories that put the words “repeal” and “Obamacare” near to one another have had an effect. As my colleague Sarah Kliff writes, “Last month, the Kaiser Family Foundation polled Americans on whether the Affordable Care Act is still law. Twelve percent of Americans — that’s about one in eight people — think that Congress repealed the Affordable Care Act. Another 23 percent aren’t sure or refused to answer the question.”

Another seven percent, by the way, thought the Supreme Court had overturned it. There are going to be a lot of surprised people come 2014.

This vote had another interesting side effect, though. “It also repeals a central deficit-reduction component of the GOP’s own budget by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), which was released in March with much bravado and projections that it would balance the budget within a decade,” writes TPM’s Sahil Kapur.

The Ryan budget gets trillions of dollars from Obamacare. It repeals all of its spending but it keeps both its spending cuts and its new tax revenues. Repealing the law would, as the budget does, eliminate the new spending. But it would also get rid of spending cuts and the new taxes — which equal almost $2 trillion over the next decade. Absent those, Ryan’s budget is far from reaching balance.

It’s also a reminder that three years after the passage of Obamacare, the Republican Party still hasn’t made good on its oft-repeated promise to repeal-and-replace. It’s done the “repeal” part, of course. But it’s no closer to offering a replacement than it was in 2010. In fact, it might even be further. A few weeks ago, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor suffered a surprising and humiliating defeat on the House floor when Republicans beat back a modest bill he offered to fund high-risk pools for patients with preexisting conditions. Even that was too much replacement for the Republican Party.

Just as their balanced budget relies on the cost savings in Obamacare, their health-care policy relies on the existence of Obamacare. If it wasn’t there to repeal, what would they have to say?

House Republicans desperately want to rid the world of the Affordable Care Act. On that, their sincerity cannot be doubted. But as both their budget and their health-care record show, they are woefully unprepared for a world in which they actually succeeded.

Wonkbook’s Number of the Day: 20 percent. That’s how much House Republicans want to cut spending on Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services for next year. Those reduction would come on top of sequestration.

Wonkblog’s Graph of the Day: FRED database has huge data upload of 392 Penn World Table data series.

Wonkbook’s Top 5 Stories: 1) Are the scandals petering out?; 2) House reaches immigration deal; 3) Fed debates exit; 4) DEFCON level rising for ‘nuclear option’ filibuster fix; and 5) fracking regs drafted.

1) Top story: Will scandalmania continue next week?

Obama tries to regain footing amid scandals. “If ever a White House news conference fit the metaphorical moment, it was Thursday’s rainy-day affair in the Rose Garden. From the I.R.S. scandal to the seizure of journalists’ phone records; from Benghazi, Libya, to Syria, all the president’s problems were on vivid display — swirling over his head like, well, storm clouds on a showery spring day.” Mark Landler in The New York Times.

The GOP is trying to figure out how hard to push. “The most pressing question for Congressional Republicans is no longer how to finesse changes to immigration law or gun control, but how far they can push their cases against President Obama without inciting a backlash of the sort that has left them staggering in the past…Republicans say they are mainly determined to get at the truth, and they question efforts to put their intensifying pursuit of the administration in political terms. Even the most ardent conservatives have adopted a tone of sobriety.” Jonathan Weisman in The New York Times.

@dkthomp: Finally reading about this show “Scandal” makes me think its fans’ expectations for Washington scandals have been managed hopelessly up

…But do the scandals hurt Republicans, too? “These confrontations’ most predictable effect will be to enrage the GOP base, which will strengthen the party factions most dubious about any compromises with Obama. In that way, these storms will likely weaken not only the president but also Republicans who believe the party must reboot to restore its competitiveness for the White House…[S]uch a breakdown would also endanger the GOP’s need to expand its unsustainably narrow electoral coalition. Republicans could find that stoking the flames of scandal may sear not only Obama’s hopes but also their own.” Ron Brownstein in NationalJournal.

IRS:

Daniel Werfel is the new acting IRS commissioner. “Daniel Werfel, a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget, has been named acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, according to a White House official…It is not clear whether Werfel will be nominated to fill the vacancy full-time, but he is considered to have a good relationship with Senate Republicans and has won confirmation from from the upper chamber before.” Zachary A. Goldfarb and Aaron Blake in The Washington Post.

@ekwasson: Werfel has agreed to serve at IRS until Sept. 30

…Who’s that? “Werfel, 42, rose through the ranks at the Office of Management and Budget and the Justice Department as a budget analyst and lawyer before Obama tapped him to serve as OMB controller in 2009. As controller he was responsible for the government’s financial management, contracting, information technology and personnel policy…Werfel moved to Washington after earning degrees from Cornell University, Duke University and a law degree from the University of North Carolina. He worked at the OMB before serving briefly as a career attorney at the Justice Department.” Ed O’Keefe and Josh Hicks in The Washington Post.

IRS official who oversaw during time of Tea Party targeting now running the IRS’s Obamacare office. ”The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation. Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.” John Parkinson and Steven Portnoy in ABC News.

@samsteinhp: At risk of sounding soft, can we wait and see what role Sarah Ingram played in IRS scandal b4 demanding her head? She’s not in IG report.

…And another top IRS official is leaving. “Joseph Grant, the commissioner of the agency’s tax exempt and government entities division, will retire June 3, according to an IRS statement…Grant heads the division of the agency responsible for tax-exempt organizations, where Lois Lerner works beneath him.” Zachary A. Goldfarb and Aaron Blake in The Washington Post.

Lawmakers to focus on whether IRS mislead Congress over screening procedures. “Senior lawmakers investigating what went wrong at the Internal Revenue Service are planning to focus on whether IRS officials misled Congress about a policy that targeted conservative groups for extra screening when seeking a tax exemption, congressional aides say. With the first high-profile hearing on the topic set to begin Friday morning, congressional aides say lawmakers in both chambers will seek answers about why they weren’t told that the IRS had singled out conservative groups for scrutiny despite multiple inquiries in recent years.” Zachary A. Goldfarb in The Washington Post.

Explainer: What we still haven’t learned about the IRS scandal. Lauren French and Rachael Bade in Politico.

Obama: No need for special counsel in IRS probe. “President Obama said Thursday that he does not believe a special counsel needs to be appointed to investigate the Internal Revenue Service’s practice of targeting conservative groups, saying congressional hearings and a federal criminal investigation should be enough to determine what happened.” Scott Wilson in The Washington Post.

@AlecMacGillis: Serious q: if we required disclosure of major c4 donors, would there be further need to “fix the IRS”? What more would be required?

…But the GOP is seeking a broader probe. “GOP members of the Senate Finance Committee want the IRS watchdog to learn how ProPublica, the Human Rights Campaign and The Huffington Post obtained confidential information conservative groups provided to the agency as part of the application process for tax-exempt status…Republicans are pointing to several instances in which they say the IRS improperly handled sensitive tax information from conservative groups.” Lauren French in Politico.

IRS stalled conservatives, but it gave speedy approval to Obama group. “When the Barack H. Obama Foundation sought tax-exempt status to raise money for good works in Kenya, the Internal Revenue Service provided quick help…The 34 days the IRS’s Cincinnati office took to process the foundation’s application stands in contrast to the waits of several months — and sometimes longer than a year — that several conservative groups say they experienced with the same office.” Carol D. Leonnig in The Washington Post.

Does the IRS scandal jeopardize tax reform? “The unfolding scandal over the agency improperly targeting conservative groups is forcing the chief tax writers in Congress to shift attention away from the comprehensive tax code overhaul they’ve been aggressively pursuing. Both lawmakers have said they want to move on tax reform this year, a tough challenge even before the IRS developments came to light. But the scandal throws that timeline even further into doubt as precious time — and political capital —  that would have been dedicated to seeking reform could now be co-opted by the IRS probe.” Kelsey Snell in Politico.

AP:

Obama: ‘No apologies’ for leak investigation. “President Obama on Thursday strongly defended the Justice Department leaks investigation that secretly gathered private phone records of Associated Press journalists, suggesting that protecting U.S. personnel overseas outweighs press privileges in this case.” Scott Wilson in The Washington Post.

Senate GOP divided over media shield law. “Senate Republicans are divided over whether Congress should pass a shield law for the press, which would protect reporters from having to turn over information to government investigators. Sen. Jeff Sessions doesn’t think the law should have blanket protections, particularly given the number of foreign media outlets working in the U.S… On Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he is signing on to co-sponsor the legislation, which was reintroduced this week by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) at the request of the White House. “I’m going to be the chief co-sponsor,” Graham said. He added with a laugh, “As much as I hate ya’ll, I think you should do your jobs. And my hate and disgust can’t describe it. I’ve run out of adjectives. But you should be able to be the annoyance you are.”” Ginger Gibson in Politico.

Holder endorses warrants for email. “The law has long protected Americans against warrantless wiretapping of their phone calls. But the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — ”ECPA” to nerds — enacted in 1986 provides much weaker protection for e-mail. People have been calling for ECPA reform for years. Holder’s comments are a sign that Congress might actually do it.” Timothy B. Lee in The Washington Post.

Scandal opinion roundup:

KLEIN: The scandals are falling apart. “On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough.” Ezra Klein in The Washington Post.

KRAUTHAMMER: GOP is mishandling the scandals. “Note to GOP re Benghazi: Stop calling it Watergate, Iran-contra, bigger than both, etc. First, it might well be, but we don’t know. History will judge. Second, overhyping will only diminish the importance of the scandal if it doesn’t meet presidency-breaking standards. Third, focusing on the political effects simply plays into the hands of Democrats desperately claiming that this is nothing but partisan politics.” Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post.

@RonBrownstein: The issue for GOP in #scandal focus isn’t so much overreach as opportunity cost. If this blocks action on other priorities, they lose too.

WEIGEL: How the IRS scandal is changing political debate. “The IRS scandal (or its spinners) are quickly creating a new right, a right no politician should take away—the right to start a tax-free organization that can play in politics. For the moment, anyone on the left who challenged this status quo is being ret-conned into an accomplice of the most hated Cincinnati IRS office in American history.” David Weigel in Slate.

DICKERSON: I was promised a cover-up. Benghazi isn’t. “I was told there was going to be a cover-up. After reading the 100 pages of emails related to the Benghazi media talking points, I’m hard-pressed to find evidence for the most damning accusations against the president and his staff. If they were involved, they were once again leading from behind.” John Dickerson in Slate.

BROOKS: When government goes bad. “Most government workers are amazingly dedicated and talented, and they put in a level of commitment that is far out of proportion to their salaries. But we’re also seeing government workers, who, far from checking their own desire for control, have taken it out for a romp.” David Brooks in The New York Times.

STRASSEL: It started at the top. “Was the White House involved in the IRS’s targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was. President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an “independent” agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse…Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets.” Kimberley Strassel in The Wall Street Journal.

MACGILLIS: Big-government liberalism not to blame for these scandals. “It’s becoming less and less clear just what the scandal is around Benghazi, and to the extent that grave mistakes were made there, they involved a government that had insufficient reach when it mattered…The scandal where the new narrative seems most apt is, of course, the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups. But it, too, does not sustain a grand indictment of government’s capacity to do its job. Saying it does requires overlooking a rather basic distinction: between fundamentally sensible or even half-sensible laws and regulations, and unworkable and absurd ones. It also means overlooking how the laws and regulations that were being so buffoonishly enforced in this instance came about.” Alec MacGillis in The New Republic.

NOONAN: This is a big deal. “We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don’t look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone. Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.” Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal.

Music recommendations interlude: The Eagles, “Lyin’ Eyes,” 1975.

Top op-eds

KLEIN: If Obama went Bulworth. “Right now sequestration is cutting unemployment checks by 10 or 11 percent. Do you hear anyone talking about that? Or doing anything about it? No. You hear Republicans aides telling Politico, anonymously, that the speaker is quote “obsessed” with Benghazi. You know, I don’t think most of the Republicans screaming about Benghazi could find Libya on a map.” Ezra Klein in The Washington Post.

@ModeledBehavior: The American people don’t want governance. We want excitement, titillation, scandal, outrage. Go Bulworth, President Obama. Go Bulworth.

MATTHEW C. KLEIN: How to pick the next Fed chair. “Yes, some scholars are trying to learn from experience and advance our knowledge by incorporating the financial sector into their models of the economy and monetary policy. Many of those same scholars are also trying to improve how we measure systemic risk. Others are using new computational techniques to explain why we endure cycles of growth and contraction. These reformers and revolutionaries are in the minority.” Matthew C. Klein in Bloomberg.

SCHWARTZ: How medical malpractice lawsuits can do good. “New evidence, however, contradicts the conventional wisdom that malpractice litigation compromises the patient safety movement’s call for transparency. In fact, the opposite appears to be occurring: the openness and transparency promoted by patient safety advocates appear to be influencing hospitals’ responses to litigation risk…My study also shows that malpractice suits are playing an unexpected role in patient safety efforts, as a source of valuable information about medical error. Over 95 percent of the hospitals in my study integrate information from lawsuits into patient safety efforts. And risk managers and patient-safety personnel overwhelmingly report that lawsuit data have proved useful in efforts to identify and address error.” Joanna C. Schwartz in The New York Times.

Serious art interlude: The faces of soldiers before, during, and after war.

2) House reaches immigration deal

House reaches immigration deal. “A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House of Representatives has reached an immigration deal “in principle.” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) tweeted Thursday afternoon. A senior House GOP leadership aide confirmed the outline of a deal, but did not provide any details of the agreement.” Rachel Weiner in The Washington Post.

Senate bets on bipartisan support for immigration reform. “The bipartisan Senate group behind a comprehensive immigration bill is working privately to satisfy concerns raised by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), hoping he will support the legislation and influence fellow GOP lawmakers. The bid to bring Hatch into the fold highlights the strategy of Senate immigration proponents who believe that building as much bipartisan support for the bill is crucial to improving its chances in the Republican-led House…If the immigration bill were to pass the Senate with more than the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster, proponents say, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) would be motivated to allow a vote on the legislation even if a majority of his caucus opposed it.” David Nakamura and Ed O’Keefe in The Washington Post.

GOP bid to strengthen border protections yet further gets nixed. “Democrats touted the Senate Judiciary Committee’s passage of three Republican amendments to crack down on the future hiring of illegal immigrants but senior Republicans on the panel were left disgruntled by the failure of stronger proposals.” Alexander Bolton in The Hill.

Hilarious what if Sartre wrote a cookbook interlude: “I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone. I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese.” (Bonus: Another Sartre parody here.)

3) Fed debates exit

To buy bonds or not to buy bonds, that is the Fed’s question. “The flurry of commentary, given in various speeches over the past two days, show Fed officials debating when to scale back the bank’s so-called quantitative-easing program, but not in agreement, as is often the case. The willingness of Mr. Williams to consider the first stages of a retreat this summer suggests key decisions about the program’s fate could be made in the next few months.” Victoria McGrane and Michael S. Derby in The Wall Street Journal.

…They differ on how to steer the recovery. “Federal Reserve officials are grappling with how to decipher the economy’s mixed signals and what to do with the central bank’s multibillion-dollar stimulus effort. The past two days have brought an unusual but uncoordinated flurry of speeches by the central bank’s top brass. Six Fed officials outlined diverse — and sometimes opposing — interpretations of the direction of the recovery and the appropriate response.” Ylan Q. Mui in The Washington Post.

Permits, not starts, tell story of housing. “Housing starts fell 16.5% in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 853,000 units, the lowest level since last November but still up 36% from the level of a year earlier…Building permits, which are less volatile and serve as a leading indicator of future construction, rose to the highest level since June 2008. They increased 14.3% to an annualized rate of 1.02 million in April.” Nick Timiraos and Alan Zibel in The Wall Street Journal.

Jobless claims rise by 32,000. “Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased by 32,000 to a seasonally adjusted 360,000 in the week ended May 11, The Labor Department said Thursday. It was the largest one-week gain in new benefit requests since November 2012. The prior week’s level was revised up by 5,000…The four-week moving average of claims, which smooths week-to-week volatility, increased by 1,250 to 339,250. The prior week’s average, which was revised up slightly, was the lowest level since January 2008, just after the most recent recession started.” Eric Morath and Jonathan House in The Wall Street Journal.

Low inflation is a problem at home… “Consumer prices fell 0.4% in April, the second straight month of declines, the Labor Department said Thursday. Over the past year, prices have risen just 1.7%, omitting food and energy, below the roughly 2% level that Federal Reserve officials consider healthy for the economy. While tame inflation is good news for consumers, it also reflects the considerable slack in the economy—including factories with spare capacity that isn’t being used and the nearly 12 million Americans who are looking for work but can’t find it.” Neil Shah and Jonathan House in The Wall Street Journal.

…Just as it is all around the world. “That was the astoundingly consistent theme out of a range of data released Thursday. Prices rose 1.1 percent over the 12 months that ended in April in Germany, 0.8 percent in France and 1.3 percent in Italy. In the United States, the consumer price index rose 1.1 percent over the last year. Japan reported surprisingly strong first-quarter growth this week as its aggressive new stimulus policies took effect, but that came against a backdrop of continued falling prices; its consumer price index fell 0.9 percent in the year that ended in March” Neil Irwin in The Washington Post.

SEC under pressure to give up on corporate disclosure. “During a three-hour hearing, lawmakers said they were disturbed to learn that the SEC is considering a petition that would require publicly traded companies to disclose their political contributions. They described the initiative as highly partisan and said it would undermine the agency’s credibility if adopted, especially in light of the controversy that has recently enveloped the Internal Revenue Service.” Dina ElBoghdady in The Washington Post.

How Apple CEO Tim Cook wants to overhaul corporate taxation. “Apple chief executive Tim Cook plans to propose a “dramatic simplification” of corporate tax laws when he testifies for the first time before Congress next week, just as lawmakers are considering an overhaul of the tax code… He will speak at a Senate hearing Tuesday that is taking aim at companies that shift profits overseas to lower their tax bills.” Cecilia Kang in The Washington Post.

Is God dead? interlude: Christianity is undergoing a historic collapse in Britain. 

4) DEFCON level rising for ‘nuclear option’ filibuster reform

Will the Senate finally change its rules for Cabinet nominees? “Democrats say that Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, in recent days has been trying to gauge whether there is sufficient support among Democrats to force a rule change that would limit the filibuster on presidential nominees. He could conceivably try to enact a rule change with a simple majority — a tactic known as “the nuclear option.” Any revisions to Senate rules usually require 67 votes, a threshold that is impossible to obtain without significant Republican support…“The showdown is coming,” said Senator Jeff Merkley.” Jeremy W. Peters in The New York Times.

Senate confirms Moniz as Energy Secretary. “The Senate unanimously confirmed Ernest Moniz, a scientist and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to be secretary of energy Thursday…The Senate vote was 97 to 0.” Al Kamen in The Washington Post.

Senate committee approves McCarthy nomination. “President Obama’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency was quickly approved by a Senate committee Thursday when Republicans abandoned their boycott of a vote on the career environmental administrator, after what Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) described as “significant steps forward” on transparency issues important to the GOP. The Committee on Environment and Public Works voted 10 to 8 along party lines in favor of Gina McCarthy, the EPA’s assistant administrator in charge of air and radiation. The vote sends McCarthy’s nomination to the Senate floor. However, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) still has a hold on her nomination that will have to be withdrawn before a floor vote can occur.” Lenny Bernstein in The Washington Post.

…And Perez also clears his hurdle. “Members of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee voted 12-10 along party lines, with all Republicans opposing the nomination while the Democrats supported it.” Josh Hicks in The Washington Post.

Biological interlude: This beautiful drawing of the tree of life is worth having in poster form.

5) Draft of fracking regs out

Obama administration releases draft of fracking regs. “The Obama administration drew sharp criticism from environmental and oil industry groups Thursday when it issued a new draft of regulations for fracking on federal and Indian lands…In its first update of hydraulic fracturing regulations in three decades, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management would require wider disclosure of chemicals used in drilling. It would also require that companies have a water-management plan for fluids that flow back to the surface and take steps to assure wellbore integrity and prevent toxic fluids from leaking into groundwater.” Steven Mufson in The Washington Post.

97 percent of scientists recognize global warming, say it is anthropogenic. “Ninety-seven percent of scientists say global warming is mainly man-made but a wide public belief that experts are divided is making it harder to gain support for policies to curb climate change, an international study showed on Thursday…Experts in Australia, the United States, Britain and Canada studied 4,000 summaries of peer-reviewed papers in journals giving a view about climate change since the early 1990s and found that 97 percent said it was mainly caused by humans. They also asked authors for their views and found a 97 percent conviction from replies covering 2,000 papers. The data will be released at (www.skepticalscience.com). The report said it was the biggest review so far of scientific opinion on climate change.” Alister Doyle in Reuters.

EPA will review concerns of anti-conservative bias. “The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general will review claims the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refuses to waive public records fees for conservative groups while granting the waivers for environmental organizations.Acting Administrator Robert Perciasepe asked the agency’s inspector general to review claims after GOP lawmaker accusations of a double standard…Perciasepe told lawmakers he’s asking the inspector general to help conduct a “programmatic audit” of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request fee decisions.” Ben German in The Hill.

Reading material interlude: The best sentences Wonkblog read today.

Wonkblog Roundup

The federal government wants to change the definition of ‘drunk’. Dylan Matthews.

The more remote the state capital, the more corrupt. Brad Plumer.

Eric Holder endorses warrants for e-mail. It’s about time. Timothy B. Lee.

If Obama went Bulworth, here’s what he’d say. Ezra Klein.

Why the health cost slowdown is great for grandparents. Sarah Kliff.

Inflation is too low almost everywhere on earth. Neil Irwin.

U.S. retailers aren’t signing a new safety agreement for Bangladesh. Here’s why. Brad Plumer.

Yes, the 37th Obamacare repeal vote matters. Sarah Kliff.

The scandals are falling apart. Ezra Klein.

Et Cetera

GOP plans to offer huge cuts to spending on HHS, Labor, and Education Departments. David Rogers in Politico.

A bipartisan House group identifies $200b in savings in bill based on GAO report. Pete Kasperowicz in The Hill.

Second appeals court invalidates NLRB recess appointments. Josh Gerstein in Politico.

Who benefits from the mortgage interest deduction? Lisa Prevost in The New York Times.

Sequestration forcing Air Force to work in the dark. Pete Kasperowicz in The Hill.

House votes to repeal Obamacare for 37th time. David A. Fahrenthold in The Washington Post.

What #ObamacareInThreeWords reveals about health reform. Rachel Weiner in The Washington Post.

Sebelius can cut costs in place of IPAB if no IPAB exists. Sam Baker in The Hill.

A stronger regulatory standard for childcare? Julian Hattem in The Hill.

Dems put forward gun control measure inspired by James Bond movie. Pete Kasperowicz in The Hill.

Future retirees at risk of downward mobility, Pew finds. Michael A. Fletcher in The Washington Post.

Got tips, additions, or comments? E-mail me.

Wonkbook is produced with help from Michelle Williams.

Attorney General Eric Holder (J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

The law has long protected Americans against warrantless wiretapping of their phone calls. But the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — ”ECPA” to nerds — enacted in 1986 provides much weaker protection for e-mail. People have been calling for ECPA reform for years. Holder’s comments are a sign that Congress might actually do it.

When ECPA was written, storage was expensive and online services charged high per-minute fees. So users would log into their online services, download their e-mails, and log off. Congress assumed things would always work this way, so they didn’t provide strong privacy protections for e-mail that was left on the server indefinitely.

A generation later, most people use cloud e-mail services, resulting in a crazy quilt of privacy protections. While an e-mail is “in transit,” explains Julian Sanchez, a privacy researcher at Cato, the government needs a warrant to read it. But once the user of a cloud service such as Gmail opens the e-mail, the government can (with some exceptions) read it with a simple subpoena — no judicial approval required. And an e-mail is available without a warrant after 180 days whether or not it’s been opened.

Believe it or not, that’s the simplified version. Some e-mail providers have insisted that the government get something called a 2703(d) order, which the government can get merely by convincing a judge that email is “relevant” to an investigation (much easier to prove than the “probable cause” standard for a warrant), before they will hand over emails. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which serves California and other Western states, has interpreted ECPA to effectively require a warrant even after it’s been opened. But that protection still ends after 180 days. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which serves Ohio and nearby states, has ruled that warrantless e-mail searches violate the Fourth Amendment, no matter what the law says.

Even the Justice Department, which long defended the permissive status quo, now admits that it doesn’t make sense.

“Some of the lines drawn by the SCA that may have made sense in the past have failed to keep up with the development of technology,” a Justice Department official told the House Judiciary Committee in March. “There is no principled basis to treat e-mail less than 180 days old differently than e-mail more than 180 days old,” she said. “Similarly, it makes sense that the statute not accord lesser protection to opened e-mails than it gives to e-mails that are unopened.”

Now the question is whether Congress will do something about it. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved an e-mail privacy bill last month, but that bill has not passed the full Senate. E-mail privacy legislation is also under consideration in the House of Representatives.

Update: Sanchez tweets to add that after the Sixth Circuit ruled that a warrant was required in 2010, some email providers, including Google and Microsoft, started insisting on warrants nation-wide.

The New York Times reported Thursday that President Obama frequently fantasizes to close aides about “going Bulworth,” a reference to the 1998 movie in which Sen. Jay Bulworth, played by Warren Beatty, drops all pretense and begins saying exactly what he thinks. So I asked a number of ex-Obama aides and political consultants what the president would say if he went Bulworth. This post is based on those conversations — it’s what the people who have heard Obama vent about Washington in private believe he wishes he could say in public. That said, this is the Internet so let’s be crystal clear: This is a work of fiction. Informed fiction, but fiction nevertheless. 

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good afternoon. As you know, on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Lew asked for and received the resignation of acting IRS director Stephen Miller. I want to reemphasize that my administration will not tolerate this kind of behavior at the I.R.S. or any other agency. But I don’t want to see this whole town get distracted from the other pressing work we have to do, either. The American people deserve a government they can trust. But they also deserve one that makes progress on problems like unemployment and immigration and sequestration. In fact…I mean, I should be clear. [Heavy sigh.] Actually, why don’t I just take some of your questions.

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. At this point, though, can the American people actually trust their government? There’s a sense that these issues might just be the tip of the iceberg.

OBAMA: [Long pause.] Are you kidding me?

No, the American people can’t trust their government. They can’t trust their media either, I might add. But that’s not because of a couple of I.R.S. agents out in Cincinnati. We can fix the Cincinnati office. Let me be clear: We’re already fixing the Cincinnati office. This problem was solved a year ago. The guy who solved it just got fired anyway because you all wanted to see some blood on the walls and I’m just political enough to give it to you.

Look, the reason the American people can’t trust their government is here in Washington. Right now sequestration is cutting unemployment checks by 10 or 11 percent. Do you hear anyone talking about that? Or doing anything about it? No. You hear Republicans aides telling Politico, anonymously, that the speaker is quote “obsessed” with Benghazi. You know, I don’t think most of the Republicans screaming about Benghazi could find Libya on a map. I don’t think 10 of them knew our ambassador’s name. And, let me be clear, Speaker Boehner certainly wasn’t obsessed with giving us the money we asked for to keep the embassy’s safe.

But now he’s obsessed with Benghazi. And not even Benghazi. The Benghazi talking points. Are you kidding me? He’s not obsessed with global warming or unemployment or rebuilding our infrastructure.  And now that there’s conflict, all of you are obsessed with Benghazi talking points too, and meanwhile, we’re cutting the National Institutes of Health and we’re cutting too deep into the military and we’re making life harder for the unemployed and we’re doing nothing to keep this planet in good shape for our kids.

Look, this is why the American people can’t trust their government. Because this town is obsessed with conflict and political advantage and not with real problems. We worry about the wrong things so much that we don’t even have time to talk to the American people or each other about the right things. And that’s not the I.R.S.’s fault.

Q: Sir, you’ve been criticized in recent weeks for being overly passive. And as you say here, it’s your view the government isn’t doing enough on the problems facing the American people. Isn’t it up to you to lead?

OBAMA: Let me be clear. This kind of question right here is the problem. You have no idea what it actually is that you’re asking. If you did, you wouldn’t use the word “lead.” You’d be specific. You’d say, shouldn’t I be putting forward a budget that includes serious compromises on entitlement spending to show I’ll meet the Republicans halfway. But I did that. You’d say shouldn’t you be reaching out more to the Hill, trying to build some personal relationships with more congressional Republicans, maybe invite Paul Ryan to lunch? But I did that. You’d say, shouldn’t you just sign an executive order repealing sequestration. But I can’t do that, and you know that. You could say, why aren’t you ordering the army to march on Capitol Hill and simply take the place over? But I’m not going to stage a coup, and you don’t want me to.

So you use this word “lead.” And it gives you cover. It lets you say the fault here is on both sides. The Republicans, they won’t compromise, and they won’t work with me, and they keep threatening to shut down the government or breach the debt ceiling. But, on the other hand, I’m not leading. And so it’s all kind of even. And then no one can criticize you for being partisan. No one can say you’re taking a side. No one can criticize you at all because no one can argue with the word “lead” until you define it, which you never do.

But let me be clear, you are taking a side. You’re taking the side of this town not working again. You’re taking the side of the media backing off of its role as a neutral arbiter and becoming an enabler of whatever irresponsible political strategy one party or the other happens to pick that week. You’re taking the side of what’s easy for you over what your readers and listeners need you to do.

Look, I’m happy to lead. I’ve sent young men and women to die in battle. I ordered a raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound that, if it went wrong, could’ve destroyed my presidency. I made decisions to rescue banks and automakers that honestly turned my stomach. I’ve told my base things they really didn’t want to hear on entitlements and the public option and the Bush tax cuts. I pushed health-care reform over the finish line even after the polls had dropped and everyone was saying it would be my Waterloo. I’ve proven that I’ll lead. I need some Republicans to lead, too. That’s the only way this works. Yes, in the front.

Q: In Wednesday’s Politico, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write that, and I’m quoting, “D.C’ turns on Obama,” They say that “Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of this president to begin with, are starting to speak out. And reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.” Can you govern in this town without the support of this town?

OBAMA: Are you serious?

Q: Um, yes?

OBAMA: Let me be clear. I hate this town. If it hates me back, well, I welcome its hatred. I take that as a badge of honor. The place Politico means when it talks about D.C. — which is a place, by the way, that doesn’t include 97.5 percent of the people who live in the actual Washington, D.C. — is a bad city with bad values and I’m ashamed to be part of it.

You guys always want me to tell you what I’m doing wrong. Here’s what I’m doing wrong. I still let myself care about Politico’s Washington. I let myself care what’s written on op-ed pages and what’s said on cable news. I read this stuff and I get mad. And every moment I spend doing that is a moment when I’m getting further and further away from real peoples’ problems. Every moment I spend doing that is a moment I’m not checking up on the implementation on health reform or hearing more options on Syria. Every moment I spend meeting about our “message” is a moment I’m not spending on the road around people’s kitchen tables letting them tell me what they’re worried about.

Look, I wanted to change Washington. And I think that the legislation we passed has changed America. But to be honest, so far as the way Washington works goes, Washington has changed me, and I don’t like it. That’s one place I broke a promise to the American people. And today is part of my repentance.

Q: But Mr. President, if LBJ had taken that attitude, would we really have gotten the Great Society?

OBAMA: Oh, Jesus Christ. [drops mic]

A couple retiring this year are projected to need $220,000 to cover their health care costs, a decrease of 8 percent from the $240,000 that Fidelity projected for those leaving the workforce in 2012.

For the past decade, the Wall Street Journal reports, this number has increased by about 6 percent annually. So to see it drop isn’t exactly normal. It’s largely due, Kelly Greene writes, “to lower-than-expected Medicare spending in recent years, as well as a reduction in projected Medicare spending in the near future” and “smaller payment increases to hospitals, doctors and health plans.”

Even with Medicare coverage, American seniors do end spending a significant amount on medical bills. This chart from the Fidelity report shows that retirees over 65 spend more on health care than food:

A quarter of all Medicare beneficiaries spend all their assets on health care in their last five years of life. While Medicare does provide coverage to seniors, there is still a significant amount that the program does not cover, left over for seniors to pay.

NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman (Ann Heisenfelt/AP)

Time to close your tab: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) wants to reduce the amount of booze you have to drink to count as a “drunk driver.”

Currently, the threshold is set at a blood alcohol content of 0.08 percent, as a result of a transportation bill signed into law by President Clinton in 2000, which stated that states had to adopt the 0.08 threshold by 2004 or else have their highway funding revoked.

But in a new report, the NTSB argues that this threshold is too high, and that it should be reduced further to 0.05. For reference, the average woman weighing 165 pounds would have to consume three beers to top 0.05, four to top 0.08, and five to top 0.10 (change that to four, five and six for the average man weighing 195 pounds).

It’s unlikely that this change will happen any time soon. The NTSB first recommended lowering the threshold from 0.10 to 0.08 in 1982. Utah, which has a large Mormon teetotaling population, adopted the new standard the next year, but by the time the federal government adopted the standard in 2000, only 18 states and the District of Columbia had followed suit. Passing the federal standard took some political heavy lifting on Clinton’s part, and that was after decades of lobbying from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and other groups for the new standard. So don’t expect the 0.05 standard to get by too easily.

But leaving political plausibility to the side, is the 0.05 standard a good idea? There’s some evidence to suggest that reducing the threshold for drunk driving can save lives:

The 0.08 switch worked

 (Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post)

One way to evaluate that would be to see whether the national switch to the 0.08 standard made a difference in terms of traffic deaths and injuries. There was considerable research before the bill was passed predicting that it would. Perhaps the most notable study, a 1996 paper in the American Journal of Public Health by Boston University’s Ralph Hingson, Timothy Heeren and Michael Winter, compared states that had voluntarily adopted the 0.08 limit to nearby states that had not.

They found that states that had adopted the limit experienced a 16 percent decline in the share of fatal car crashes that involved a fatally injured driver whose BAC was 0.08 or above, relative to states that hadn’t adopted the limit. They concluded that the lower standard would, if adopted nationally, probably prevent 500 to 600 fatal crashes a year. A 2000 study by the same authors found similar effects for states that had recently adopted the new standard, estimating that national adoption would save 400 to 500 lives a year (a lower number because more states were already on board).

A 2001 study by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration researchers investigating the 1997 implementation of the 0.08 standard in Illinois found similar results. They built a model to predict the share of fatalities where drivers had positive BACs, and compared its predictions to what actually happened in 1997, 1998 and 1999. They found that the new limit caused a sudden break with previous patterns:

They estimate that the change probably saved about 60 lives in Illinois in 1998. And these are just the tip of the iceberg. Numerous other pre-federal change studies found that states that had adopted the 0.08 standard had lower rates of alcohol involvement in crashes. Just about the only one that didn’t concerned North Carolina’s law, where no statistically significant effect was found.

And studies since the bill’s adoption back that up. A 2005 meta-analysis analyzing 19 jurisdictions with the 0.08 limit found an average decline in the share of fatal crashes involving drinking drivers of 14.8 percent, and concluded that national adoption would have saved 947 lives in 2000. A 2007 retrospective study, looking at deaths through 2002, after the national standard law was passed, estimated that the standard saves about 360 lives a year.

Would going lower help?

If you drank all these, you definitely wouldn’t be allowed to drive in Germany. (Michael Dalder/Reuters)

That last study extrapolates out to estimate that a 0.05 standard would save another 538 lives a year. We actually don’t have to extrapolate from U.S. experience, though, as 0.05 is, by far, the most common international threshold. France, Germany, Australia, Italy, Spain and Israel all set their thresholds at 0.05. Some countries set them lower still. Norway and Sweden use a 0.02 threshold, while Japan uses 0.03.

In countries that reduced to 0.05, research suggests that fatalities fell. The University of Barcelona’s Daniel Albalate found that European countries such as France and Germany that adopted the lower standard in the 1990s saw reductions in road fatalities relative to ones like the UK that didn’t lower their standards, amounting to a 6.1 percent reduction in the fatality rate per kilometer driven. Australian researchers in 1997 found that New South Wales and Queensland, which had adopted the lower 0.05 standard, experienced substantial reductions in serious injuries and fatalities as a result. A 2000 evaluation of Austria’s adoption of the lower limit found a significant decline in accidents, and a truly dramatic one (over 30 percent) for novice drivers.

All told, one literature review found eight studies on transitioning to a 0.05 threshold, all of which found positive effects.

What else could we do?

Ignition interlocks! (Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post)

Of course, lowering the legal limit isn’t the only way to crack down on drunk driving, though the evidence suggests it would help. South Dakota, for example, has experimented with a program called the 24/7 Sobriety Project, wherein offenders were required to either wear a constant alcohol monitoring device or else go in for breathalyzer tests twice a day. A RAND evaluation found the program led to a 12 percent reduction in a repeat DUI arrests and a 9 percent reduction in domestic violence arrests.

A program called Saving Lives in Massachusetts, which involved a variety of approaches,  from setting up peer education programs in schools to awareness days to police training, was found in a quasi-experimental study to reduce alcohol-related fatal crashes by 42 percent, and all fatal crashes by 25 percent. A randomized evaluation of a program that involved counseling problem drinkers during emergency room visits also found good results.

A checkpoint system in Tennessee was found to reduce fatal accidents by 20.4 percent, and two randomized studies found that a Maryland policy requiring “ignition interlock” systems, wherein offenders with alcohol-related traffic violations have to pass a breathalyzer test before their cars will start, reduced recidivism considerably. One study found a 64 percent reduction in new traffic violations in the first year as a result of the interlock, and another found a 36 percent reduction when the interlock is in effect, and a 26 percent reduction for the two years afterward. Non-randomized studies have also found ignition interlocks significantly reduce re-offense.

Almost all of those programs had more significant effects than reducing the threshold was found to in the studies reviewed above. That suggests that even if reducing the threshold helped, other, less controversial policies could do the trick with less political resistance.

The Minnesota State Capitol. We’re not making any comments on its corruption level–this is just a neat photo. (AP Photo/Genevieve Ross)

The first NBER paper, written by Filipe R. Campante of Harvard Kennedy School and Quoc-Anh Do of Singapore Management University looks at state capitals in the United States and finds that “isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption.”

In particular, they measure a state’s shadiness by looking at the number of federal convictions for public corruption between 1976 and 2002. As it turns out, this correlates reasonably well with a state capital’s geographic remoteness from major population centers. We’re looking at you, Springfield, Illinois and Pierre, South Dakota:

But why would this be? There are a couple of theories here. The authors found that state capitals located in remote areas tend to receive less newspaper and media coverage. What’s more, voter knowledge about the goings-on in these isolated statehouses tends to be lower. And, as a result, voter turnout for state elections tends to be depressed.

By way of illustration, the authors compare two corruption scandals, one surrounding New York Senate Majority leader Joseph Bruno, and one around former House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi, in Massachusetts. The scandals seemed reasonably similar, but the Boston Globe and Boston Herald covered the DiMasi story more heavily than the New York Times, New York Daily News, and New York Post covered the Bruno story. Was that because Boston is a major population center while Albany is more remote? That’s the theory, at least.

Interestingly, the authors also scrutinize one of the original rationales for locating so many state capitals away from population centers — which was the idea that they could be more independent of industry influence. As it turns out, this rationale doesn’t seem to hold up. States with isolated capitals actually have higher levels of money in their campaigns.

So that’s the United States. What about the rest of the world? In a separate paper, Carmante, Do, and Bernardo V. Guimaraes find a similar pattern in capital cities around the world — those that are more remote also tend to be more corrupt.

But since it’s tougher to compare all the different countries of the world, many of which are at wildly different stages of development, the authors have to come up with a different theory to explain corruption here. Remote national capitals in developing countries, they argue, are safer from the threat of insurgencies, which can act as a constraint on corruption. Here’s the idea:

Causality runs both ways: broader power sharing (associated with better governance) means that any rents have to be shared more broadly, hence the elite has less of an incentive to protect its position by isolating the capital city; conversely, a more isolated capital city allows the elite to appropriate a larger share of output, so the costs of better governance for the elite, in terms of rents that would have to be shared, are larger. We show evidence that this pattern holds true robustly in the data.

That’s… a considerably more complicated argument.

In any case, the recommendations for the United States are vague but reasonable enough. “In terms of policy,” they note, “one is led to conclude that extra vigilance might be needed, when it comes to polities with isolated capital cities, in order to counteract their tendency towards reduced accountability.” Now as for ideas on how best to do that…

Update: Josh Keating at Foreign Policy also has a great discussion of these papers, and adds this smart point: “ I wonder if part of the issue may be the ability to attract qualified — and not corrupt — civil servants. No offense to Albany or Abuja, but I’m guessing the governments based in Boston, or Denver, not to mention Paris and Tokyo, might have an easier time attacting the best and the brightest.”

That was the astoundingly consistent theme out of a range of data released Thursday. Prices rose 1.1 percent over the 12 months that ended in April in Germany, 0.8 percent in France and 1.3 percent in Italy. In the United States, the consumer price index rose 1.1 percent over the last year. Japan reported surprisingly strong first-quarter growth this week as its aggressive new stimulus policies took effect, but that came against a backdrop of continued falling prices; its consumer price index fell 0.9 percent in the year that ended in March.

Source: EuroStat

The leading central banks at this point are all unified on this: 2 percent is the amount of annual inflation they are aiming for. And they are all failing in that mission, and nearly all failing in the same direction (Britain is the notable exception; prices there rose 2.8 percent over the year that ended in March, the most recent data available).

The below-trend inflation is partly attributable to falling commodities prices, and just as policy shouldn’t overreact when a short-term commodity blip causes inflation, it shouldn’t make the same mistake in reverse. But even excluding food and energy, U.S. CPI was up only 1.7 percent, still below the level of inflation the Federal Reserve is aiming for. And the situation in Europe is particularly worrisome; if the euro zone is going to have any hope of rebalancing its economy without a prolonged depression, it will need higher inflation in core European countries like Germany and France, offset by lower inflation in countries like Greece and Spain. Instead, prices are rising too slowly even in the core, and there is deflation, or falling prices, in Greece.

The biggest conclusion to draw from all of this is that warnings that massive quantitative easing efforts would spark explosive inflation are turning out to be as wrongheaded as can be. In the United States and Japan, central banks now have open-ended policies of printing money to buy assets. But while the money seems to be finding its way into asset markets, such as for stocks and corporate debt, it isn’t being circulated so widely as to drive up prices for consumers.

This is the opposite of what the currency war alarmists have warned about. Instead of  creating rounds of vicious inflation while trying to expand the money supply in a race to the bottom, central banks are all trying to get inflation up to their target and coming up short. Deflation is looking like a greater risk that inflation, despite the extensive hand-wringing over the latter in the last several years. It’s a currency war in which almost every country is losing.

There’s some positive news in the low inflation numbers, particularly in the United States. The composition of the newest CPI report was quite hopeful: Falling gas prices (down 8.1 percent in April) leave consumers with more money to spend on everything else. And — this is crucial — inflation expectations seem to be well-anchored at almost precisely the Fed’s target. Bond prices suggest that investors expect annual inflation over the coming five years to average 2.003 percent.

If global inflation is the dog that won’t bite, and large chunks of the world economy remain depressed, it is a moment for some reflection. The 2 percent inflation target that has been adopted by the major world central banks is, to a large degree, arbitrary. It’s low enough that prices feel stable, yet high enough that when there is an economic slump, the central bank can end it by achieving negative real interest rates (that is, it can push interest rates to zero at a time of 2 percent inflation, resulting in a negative 2 percent inflation-adjusted interest rate).

But the apparent impotence of the central bankers to achieve that 2 percent inflation in the last few years makes us question if it is too low to begin with. If they had anchored expectations at 2.5 or 3 percent, they would have had more room to adjust short-term rates to help the economy before entering the world of quantitative easing, where even trillions of dollars and yen seem to have precious little effect on the real economy.

For now, Americans can enjoy the benefits of cheaper gasoline, and the Fed can pat itself on the back for keeping expectations for future inflation stable. But that doesn’t mean the situation we find ourselves in is one to be particularly proud of.