Month: March 2017

Quote of the Day

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“The New Rules Hurting Retirement Security” [Democracy Journal]. “Fewer than one third of Americans aged 65 to 74 have any savings in a retirement account and the accounts that exist are inadequate to provide a secure retirement—the median balance is just $49,000. The situation for younger workers is even more dire.” So, in the face of this crisis, liberals have a complicated “nudge theory” Rube Goldberg device, which sucks, and conservatives have a simple machine (in this case, the screw). The unasked question: Why should people have to “save for retirement” at all?

—Lamberth Strether at Naked Capitalism

Except for calling the screw a simple machine, I think of it as a helical wedge, and think that the ancient Greeks were in error giving it status as a separate element, I agree completely.

Private retirement accounts are primarily about lining Wall Street’s pockets, which is why the Clinton/Obama wing of the Democratic Party has been Jonesing to privatize Social Security for decades.

I Knew That It Was Bad………

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But I did not realize that Trumpcare was actually worse than a complete repeal of Obamacare:

The Congressional Budget Office recently said that around 24 million fewer Americans would have health insurance in 2026 under the Republican repeal plan than if the current law stayed in place.

That loss was bigger than most experts anticipated, and led to a round of predictable laments from congressional Democrats — and less predictable ones from Republican senators, including Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Thune of South Dakota, who told reporters that the bill needed to be “more helpful” to low-income people who wanted insurance.

But one piece of context has gone little noticed: The Republican bill would actually result in more people being uninsured than if Obamacare were simply repealed. Getting rid of the major coverage provisions and regulations of Obamacare would cost 23 million Americans their health insurance, according to another recent C.B.O. report. In other words, one million more Americans would have health insurance with a clean repeal than with the Republican replacement plan, according to C.B.O. estimates.

I knew that it was bad legislation, but I did not know that it was literally worse than nothing.

This is a level of active stupidity that literally buggers the mind.

“Literally worse than nothing,” kind of sounds what a mandated truth in advertising law would label Republican think tanks.

ICE Needs to Be Burnt to the Ground and Rebuilt from Scratch

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Recent incidents related to Trump’s Muslim ban indicated that that there was some rot, but this shows that there is nothing but rot.

This is the sort of abuse of law enforcement power that would give J. Edgar Hoover a hard on:

Federal agents privately alerted two magistrate judges in late January that they would be targeting the Austin area for a major operation and that the sting was retribution for a new policy by Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez that dramatically limited her cooperation with them, according to one of the judges.

The revelation — made Monday in open court by U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin — conflicts with what Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told local leaders after the sweep, when ICE characterized the operation as routine and said the Austin area was not being targeted. It also provides evidence after weeks of speculation that Hernandez’s policy triggered ICE’s ire.

“We had a briefing … that we could expect a big operation, agents coming in from out of town, that it was going to be a specific operation, and at least it was related to us in that meeting that it was the result of the sheriff’s new policy that this was going to happen,” Austin said.

“My understanding, what was told to us, is that one of the reasons that happened was because the meetings that had occurred between the (ICE) field office director and the sheriff didn’t go very well,” he said.

In case you wondering, these folks are clearly feeling empowered by the Trump administration, and are revealing themselves to be people who should be kept far, far, FAR, away from anything resembling law enforcement.

Live in obedient fear, citizen.

It’s Cheap, It Works Better, Let’s Kill It

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I just discovered that the Veterans Administration has a medical records system that it been running and evolving since the late 1970s.

It runs better than commercial systems, largely because doctors have been brought into the system early, and because it has an open architecture it can be easily adapted to the specific needs of specific departments and locations.

It’s also much cheaper than the commercial alternatives.

Of course, this means that it must be replaced by an over priced under performing system from a politically connected contractor:

Four decades ago, in 1977, a conspiracy began bubbling up from the basements of the vast network of hospitals belonging to the Veterans Administration. Across the country, software geeks and doctors were puzzling out how they could make medical care better with these new devices called personal computers. Working sometimes at night or in their spare time, they started to cobble together a system that helped doctors organize their prescriptions, their CAT scans and patient notes, and to share their experiences electronically to help improve care for veterans.

 Within a few years, this band of altruistic docs and nerds—they called themselves “The Hardhats,” and sometimes “the conspiracy”—had built something totally new, a system that would transform medicine. Today, the medical-data revolution is taken for granted, and electronic health records are a multibillion-dollar industry. Back then, the whole idea was a novelty, even a threat. The VA pioneers were years ahead of their time. Their project was innovative, entrepreneurial and public-spirited—all those things the government wasn’t supposed to be.

 Of course, the government tried to kill it.

 Though the system has survived for decades, even topping the lists of the most effective and popular medical records systems, it’s now on the verge of being eliminated: The secretary of what is now the Department of Veterans Affairs has already said he wants the agency to switch over to a commercial system. An official decision is scheduled for July 1. Throwing it out and starting over will cost $16 billion, according to one estimate.

What happened? The story of the VA’s unique computer system—how the government actually managed to build a pioneering and effective medical data network, and then managed to neglect it to the point of irreparability—is emblematic of how politics can lead to the bungling of a vital, complex technology. As recently as last August, a Medscape survey of 15,000 physicians found that the VA system, called VistA, ranked as the most usable and useful medical records system, above hundreds of other commercial versions marketed by hotshot tech companies with powerful Washington lobbyists. Back in 2009, some of the architects of the Affordable Care Act saw VistA as a model for the transformation of American medical records and even floated giving it away to every doctor in America.

………

The Hardhats’ key insight—and the reason VistA still has such dedicated fans today—was that the system would work well only if they brought doctors into the loop as they built their new tools. In fact, it would be best if doctors actually helped build them. Pre-specified computer design might work for an airplane or a ship, but a hospital had hundreds of thousands of variable processes. You needed a “co-evolutionary loop between those using the system and the system you provide them,” says one of the early converts, mathematician Tom Munnecke, a polymathic entrepreneur and philanthropist who joined the VA hospital in Loma Linda, California, in 1978.

………

Munnecke, a leading Hardhat, remembers it as an exhilarating time. He used a PDP11/34 computer with 32 kilobytes of memory, and stored his programs, development work and his hospital’s database on a 5-megabyte disk the size of a personal pizza. One day, Munnecke and a colleague, George Timson, sat in a restaurant and sketched out a circular diagram on a paper place mat, a design for what initially would be called the Decentralized Hospital Computer Program, and later VistA. MUMPs computer language was at the center of the diagram, surrounded by a kernel of programs used by everyone at the VA, with applications floating around the fringes like electrons in an atom. MUMPS was a ludicrously simple coding language that could run with limited memory and great speed on a low-powered computer. The architecture of VistA was open, modular and decentralized. All around the edges, the apps flourished through the cooperation of computer scientists and doctors.

………

This is bitter fruit for many VistA fans. Some still say the system could be fixed for $200 million a year—the cost of a medium-sized hospital system’s EHR installation. “I don’t know if there even is an EHR out there with data comparable to the longitudinal data that VistA has about veterans, and we certainly do not want to throw that data out if a new EHR were to be used,” says Nancy Anthracite, a Hardhat and an infectious-disease physician.

Eventually, this system will be shut down, and replaced by a more expensive inferior commercial system, because that is how the government rolls these days.

It’s been heading in this direction for a while, but the institutionalization of dumbing down government agencies so as to require expensive contractors really got its start in Dick Cheney’s programs when he was Secretary of Defense, and it became an existential need in response to the Clinton administration’s “Reinventing Government” initiative.

It all comes down to normalizing corruption.

It’s Official” The “Resistance” Is the Effort to Protect Incompetent Democrats

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It turns out that the usual bunch of incompetent looters in the national Democratic Party are running the resistance:

The Democratic Party’s top officials will meet with some of their wealthiest donors in Washington, D.C., this week to plot the Trump resistance, according to documents obtained by The Daily Beast.

The chairs of the Democratic National Committee and the party’s House and Senate campaign arms will huddle with activists, operatives, and deep-pocketed Democratic financiers at a biannual conference hosted by the Democracy Alliance, a leading left-wing donor collaborative at Washington’s ritzy Mandarin Oriental hotel.

They will discuss strategy for immediate opposition to President Donald Trump’s policies, begin laying the groundwork for Democratic campaigns in next year’s midterm elections, strategize future efforts for congressional redistricting, and promote an agenda focused on the state level, where Democrats still retain some power and hope to build a model for national progressive victories. And perhaps most importantly, map out how to fully fund their opposition to all things Trump.

These are the the same ratf%$#s who continue to ignore the party base, corrupted the party to force the worst possible candidate down our throats, and then ran the worst Presidential campaign since the founding of the Republic.

You guys want to run “The Resistance”  ……… Seriously?

You do not have my support, and your wealthy contributors need to understand the problem of throwing good money after bad.

I’d sooner have a surgeon with end stage Parkinson’s perform a vasectomy on me ……… With a spoon, than be a part of a political movement that you morons run.

Quote of the Day

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If those are largely rhetorical questions, they do identify the core contradiction that frames human rights law: that human rights is used to guarantee that corporate profiteering continues without interruption.

—Stefanie Khoury & David Whyte On how there has been a concerted attempt to grant a right to profit to corporations under human rights law while largely indemnifying them from human rights abuses that they conduct.

Corporations are not people, and there should be no right to profit. 

Profit is not property, at best it is a possibility of accumulating property at some point in the future.

Linkage

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Remember that video that went viral with the kid barging in on an interview?

Here is the best of the parodies:

So Not a Surprise

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It appears that while teaching law school courses, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch made much over how women “abused” their employers over maternity benefits:

A former law student of Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, alleges that in a course she took from Gorsuch at the University of Colorado Law School last year, the judge told his class that employers, specifically law firms, should ask women seeking jobs about their plans for having children and implied that women manipulate companies starting in the interview stage to extract maternity benefits.

The concerns were shared in a letter, posted Sunday evening by the National Employment Lawyers Association and the National Women’s Law Center, written by Jennifer Sisk, a 2016 graduate of the University of Colorado Law School. It was sent on Friday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

………

On April 19, 2016, Sisk wrote, Judge Gorsuch used a hypothetical from the prepared material for the class, in which a female law student applies for jobs at law firms because the student has a large debt to pay off. The student also intends to have a family with her husband.

“He interrupted our class discussion to ask students how many of us knew women who used their companies for maternity benefits, who used their companies to — in order to have a baby and then leave right away,” Sisk said.

She recalled that few students raised their hands and Gorsuch became animated. “He said, ‘Come on, guys. All of your hands should be up. Many women do this,'” Sisk said.

Sisk offered overall praise of Gorsuch as a teacher and legal mind, outside of this incident.

Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

This whole Handmaidens Tale thing is a feature, not a bug of conservative jurists.

Democrats will roll over on his nomination anyway.

Best Lede of the Day

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Jacobin, is an excellent place to find reasoned and concise writing from an unabashedly socialist* perspective.

I find this article a bit Panglossian, I believe that the reports of the death of Neoliberalism have been greatly exaggerated, it does raise some interesting issues.

What’s more the lede for the article is a hoot:

PBS NewsHour is generally pretty staid stuff — like Ambien but less habit-forming.

They owe me a screen wipe.

*A firmly democratic socialist perspective. No Trotskyites here.

I Was Waiting for this Tech to Hit Commercial Use

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We have finally seen a the first non-US commercial satellite with all electric propulsion delivered to a customer:

Eutelsat’s new 172B satellite marks a new step in the operator’s push toward widespread use of electric propulsion. Company executives believe all conditions are gradually being met to make such power both a reliable and economical option. There is more than one launcher available for this size spacecraft, a trade-off has been found between efficiency and transfer time to orbit, and an Ariane 6 feature will further reduce time to market.

Mainly thanks to electric propulsion, the weight of 172B has been limited to 3.5 metric tons (7,700 lb.) instead of 6 tons for a more conventional satellite. For that weight class, the lower position under Ariane 5’s fairing had long been the only option for launch, Eutelsat’s chief technology officer Yohann Leroy, notes. Other options that were technically feasible were not economical. Satellite operators are leery about relying on a single launcher, Leroy emphasizes, and that reluctance had stalled the advent of electric propulsion. “SpaceX’s Falcon 9 changed the game,” he says.

As a second launcher became available for the new weight class in commercial communications geostationary satellites, Eutelsat forged ahead, and in 2015 a Falcon 9 launched Eutelsat 115 West B, the operator’s first satellite using electric power for both station-keeping and orbit-raising.

The Eutelsat 115 West B was built by Boeing. But the France-based operator no longer has to depend on the U.S. industry. Thales Alenia Space and Airbus now also offer all-electric platforms, thus increasing the number of supplier options.

In 2014, Eutelsat ordered 172B from Airbus. The satellite uses Airbus’s upgraded Eurostar 3000 EOR (electric-orbit-raising) platform. “It is the first fully electric satellite not developed in the U.S.; it is a first for us and the European industry,” says Nicolas Chamussy, head of space systems at Airbus Defense and Space. Airbus was hoping to source the thrusters from Safran, in an attempt to have an entirely European spacecraft. Autonomy in space technology is a goal shared by the European Commission and the Continent’s industry.

………

Energy use onboard 172B is optimized thanks to two robot arms—two thrusters can be found at the end of each arm. Thrust can thus be precisely vectored. The axis of the thrust always goes through the satellite’s center of gravity, Arnaud de Rosnay, Airbus Defense and Space’s director for communications satellites, explains. Moreover, the arms help remove heat from the electronics hardware inside the spacecraft.

Assuming that VASIMR technology can reach a commercially acceptable state, it could provide relatively high thrust at lower efficiencies for orbital transfer, and lower thrust, and higher efficiency for station keeping, which would allow for both the advantages of Ion and Hall effect thrusters.

In either case, this promises to reduce the cost of satellites, because, much like ground round, you pay for launches by the pound.

The Iron Law of Organizations* Made Manifest

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By a wide margin, the most popular politician on America’s national scene right now is Bernie Sanders, and the Democratic Party establishment appears to think that its first priority is taking him, and his supporters, down:

If you look at the numbers, Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America – and it’s not even close. Yet bizarrely, the Democratic party – out of power across the country and increasingly irrelevant – still refuses to embrace him and his message. It’s increasingly clear they do so at their own peril.

A new Fox News poll out this week shows Sanders has a +28 net favorability rating among the US population, dwarfing all other elected politicians on both ends of the political spectrum. And he’s even more popular among the vaunted “independents”, where he is at a mind boggling +41.

………

One would think with numbers like that, Democratic politicians would be falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially considering the party as a whole is more unpopular than the Republicans and even Donald Trump right now. Yet instead of embracing his message, the establishment wing of the party continues to resist him at almost every turn, and they seem insistent that they don’t have to change their ways to gain back the support of huge swaths of the country.

Politico ran a story just this week featuring Democratic officials fretting over the fact that Sanders supporters may upend their efforts to retake governorships in southern states by insisting those candidates adopt Sanders’ populist policies – seemingly oblivious to the fact that Sanders plays well in some of those states too.

Sanders’ effect on Trump voters can be seen in a gripping town hall this week that MSNBC’s Chris Hayes hosted with him in West Virginia – often referred to as “Trump country” – where the crowd ended up giving him a rousing ovation after he talked about healthcare being a right of all people and that we are the only industrialized nation in the world who doesn’t provide healthcare as a right to all its people.

One would think with numbers like that, Democratic politicians would be falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially considering the party as a whole is more unpopular than the Republicans and even Donald Trump right now. Yet instead of embracing his message, the establishment wing of the party continues to resist him at almost every turn, and they seem insistent that they don’t have to change their ways to gain back the support of huge swaths of the country.

These are people who have made their careers sucking up to Wall Street and other corporate interest.

If the Democratic Party moves back toward actually protecting ordinary people from the “Malefactors of Great Wealth,”† they will lose power, and likely their phony baloney jobs.

*That power WITHIN an organization will be pursued at the even at the expense of the power OF that organization.

†Ironically, I am quoting a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt.

Single Payer Now

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We have now discovered that our healthcare system has even corrupted the world renowned Mayo Clinic:

Mayo Clinic, one of the country’s top hospitals, is in the midst of controversy after its CEO said that the elite medical facility would prioritize the care of patients with private health insurance over those with Medicare and Medicaid.

The prioritization by the Rochester, MN-headquartered medical practice was recently revealed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And it has quickly drawn out some sharp critics—as well as sympathizers.

In a statement to the Minnesota Post Bulletin, Dr. Gerard Anderson, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Hospital Finance and Management, compared the prioritization to policies seen in developing countries. “This is what happens in many low-income countries. The health system is organized to give the most affluent preference in receiving health care,” he wrote.

Likewise, Minnesota Department of Human Services Commissioner Emily Piper, expressed surprise and concern by the statements of Mayo’s CEO, Dr. John Noseworthy. “Fundamentally, it’s our expectation at DHS that Mayo Clinic will serve our enrollees in public programs on an equal standing with any other Minnesotan that walks in their door,” she said. “We have a lot of questions for Mayo Clinic about how and if and through what process this directive from Dr. Noseworthy is being implemented across their health system.”

………

Mayo can use its standing as a prestigious institution to negotiate higher prices with commercial insurance companies, but it can’t do the same with the government. As such, those with private insurance can bring more money to the hospital than patients with the same treatments on government programs. Under the ACA, the number of people covered by Medicare and Medicaid has expanded. However, the law also decreased the number of uninsured, which can be costly to hospitals.

In his speech, Noseworthy said that Mayo had reached a “tipping point” with a recent 3.7 percent surge in Medicaid patients. “If we don’t grow the commercially insured patients, we won’t have income at the end of the year to pay our staff, pay the pensions, and so on,” he said. “So we’re looking for a really mild or modest change of a couple percentage points to shift that balance.”

Nevertheless, the nonprofit still generated substantial profits in 2016: $475 million.

Seriously:  We need to burn down the existing healthcare system.

This is Not a Surprise

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Concealed within the 123 pages of legislative verbiage and dense boilerplate of the House Republican bill repealing the Affordable Care Act are not a few hard-to-find nuggets. Here’s one crying out for exposure: The bill encourages health insurance companies to pay their top executives more.

It does so by removing the ACA’s limit on corporate tax deductions for executive pay. The cost to the American taxpayer of eliminating this provision: well in excess of $70 million a year. In the reckoning of the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank that analyzed the limitation in 2014, that would have been enough that year to buy dental insurance under the ACA for 262,000 Americans, or pay the silver plan deductibles for 28,000.

As part of an effort to rein in soaring executive pay, the ACA decreed that health insurance companies could deduct from their taxes only $500,000 of the pay of each top executive. That’s a tighter restriction than the limit imposed on other corporations, which is $1 million per executive. The ACA closed a loophole for insurance companies enjoyed by other corporations, which could deduct the cost of stock options and other “performance-based” pay; for insurance companies, the deduction cap is $500,000 per executive, period.

The idea was to signal that the ACA, which cemented health insurance companies into the center of American healthcare, wasn’t a pure giveaway to the industry.

“Consumers across America should know that when they pay their hard-earned dollars to cover the soaring cost of premiums, they are not just chipping in to pay for the CEOs’ next new yacht,” said then-Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).

………

The House Republican bill repeals the compensation limit as of the end of this year. The GOP hasn’t exactly trumpeted this provision; it’s six lines on page 67 of the measure, labeled “Remuneration from Certain Insurers” and referring only to the obscure IRS code section imposing the limit. Repeal of the provision apparently means that the insurers will be able to deduct $1 million in cash per executive, plus the cost of “performance-based” stock awards and options, like other corporations.

This is just how Republicans roll.

Take money from poor people so that rich folk can afford that 3rd yacht.

They really should have been drowned at birth, all of them.

Adding to Your Vocabulary

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I was in kitchen, and the radio show Wait Wait ……… Don’t Tell Me was on, and they were talking about the Canadian sex toy manufacturer who has been sued for collecting data from their internet enabled vibrator.

I casually commented to Charlie, who was drinking a Coke at the time, “They caught them coming and going.”

Charlie was caught mid drink, started to laugh, and proceeded to spew Coke from his nose, thankfully he made it to the trash can before he started to completely lose it.

This raises the obvious question, what is the term for spewing a drink from your nose caused by laughter?

According to the Urban Dictionary, there are two words, snork, and schnarf.

I should note that it was not my intention to get Charlie to schnarf his drink, but I might have chuckled.

I am a bad, bad man.

And the Taxpayer Will End Up Paying for This

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It looks like Wall Street is looking to capitalize on the collapse of the American Mall for its next speculative cash cow:

Wall Street speculators are zeroing in on the next U.S. credit crisis: the mall.

It’s no secret many mall complexes have been struggling for years as Americans do more of their shopping online. But now, they’re catching the eye of hedge-fund types who think some may soon buckle under their debts, much the way many homeowners did nearly a decade ago.

Like the run-up to the housing debacle, a small but growing group of firms are positioning to profit from a collapse that could spur a wave of defaults. Their target: securities backed not by subprime mortgages, but by loans taken out by beleaguered mall and shopping center operators. With bad news piling up for anchor chains like Macy’s and J.C. Penney, bearish bets against commercial mortgage-backed securities are growing.

In recent weeks, firms such as Alder Hill Management — an outfit started by protégés of hedge-fund billionaire David Tepper — have ramped up wagers against the bonds, which have held up far better than the shares of beaten-down retailers. By one measure, short positions on two of the riskiest slices of CMBS surged to $5.3 billion last month — a 50 percent jump from a year ago.

If history is any guide, they will make out like raped apes, and the rest of us will be left holding the bag.

I don’t know how exactly they will f%$# the rest of us, but history shows that their profits are financed by our money.

The Oxford Comma, Bitches, It Just Works

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on the one hand I love the #oxfordcomma, on the other hand these sentences truly are SO GOOD pic.twitter.com/Gst0OSY0Wo

— Jules (@scuttling) March 6, 2017

There is a dispute in linguistic circles as to whether or not you should the Oxford comma, which is the comma used by some before the,”And,” of the last item of a list.

If you use the Oxford comma, you write, “I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty” and if you eschew this convention, “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.”

To my mind, the latter form strongly states that your parents are Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty, so I am, and likely always will be, a strong supporter of the Oxford (aka serial) comma.

Well, it appears that a judge in Maine agrees with me, ruling that an employer is liable for overtime pay for their truckers because of a missing comma:

Never let it be said that punctuation doesn’t matter.

 In Maine, the much-disputed Oxford comma has helped a group of dairy drivers in a dispute with a company about overtime pay.

 The Oxford comma is used before the words “and” or “or” in a list of three or more things. Also known as the serial comma, its aficionados say it clarifies sentences in which things are listed.

………

 In a judgment that will delight Oxford comma enthusiasts everywhere, a US court of appeals sided with delivery drivers for Oakhurst Dairy because the lack of a comma made part of Maine’s overtime laws too ambiguous.

 The state’s law says the following activities do not count for overtime pay:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

 (1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.

The drivers argued, due to a lack of a comma between “packing for shipment” and “or distribution”, the law refers to the single activity of “packing”, not to “packing” and “distribution” as two separate activities. As the drivers distribute – but do not pack – the goods, this would make them eligible for overtime pay.

 Previously, a district court had ruled in the dairy company’s favour, who argued that the legislation “unambiguously” identified the two as separate activities exempt from overtime pay. But the appeals judge sided with the drivers.

 Circuit judge David J. Barron wrote:

We conclude that the exemption’s scope is actually not so clear in this regard. And because, under Maine law, ambiguities in the state’s wage and hour laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose, we adopt the drivers’ narrower reading of the exemption.

The AP REALLY needs to rewrite its style guide on this matter.

I’m sure that Merle Haggard’s wives would agree.

You Have to Read This

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It’s an essay about economists by an economist titled, The Wrongest Profession, and the can of whup ass that it’s author, CEPR economist Dean Baker, unleashes on the dismal science is a thing of beauty:

Over the past two decades, the economics profession has compiled an impressive track record of getting almost all the big calls wrong. In the mid-1990s, all the great minds in the field agreed that the unemployment rate could not fall much below 6 percent without triggering spiraling inflation. It turns out that the unemployment rate could fall to 4 percent as a year-round average in 2000, with no visible uptick in the inflation rate.

As the stock bubble that drove the late 1990s boom was already collapsing, leading lights in Washington were debating whether we risked paying off the national debt too quickly. The recession following the collapse of the stock bubble took care of this problem, as the gigantic projected surpluses quickly turned to deficits. The labor market pain from the collapse of this bubble was both unpredicted and largely overlooked, even in retrospect. While the recession officially ended in November 2001, we didn’t start creating jobs again until the fall of 2003. And we didn’t get back the jobs we lost in the downturn until January 2005. At the time, it was the longest period without net job creation since the Great Depression.

When the labor market did finally begin to recover, it was on the back of the housing bubble. Even though the evidence of a bubble in the housing sector was plainly visible, as were the junk loans that fueled it, folks like me who warned of an impending housing collapse were laughed at for not appreciating the wonders of modern finance. After the bubble burst and the financial crisis shook the banking system to its foundations, the great minds of the profession were near unanimous in predicting a robust recovery. Stimulus was at best an accelerant for the impatient, most mainstream economists agreed—not an essential ingredient of a lasting recovery.

While the banks got all manner of subsidies in the form of loans and guarantees at below-market interest rates, all in the name of avoiding a second Great Depression, underwater homeowners were treated no better than the workers waiting for a labor market recovery. The Obama administration felt it was important for homeowners, unlike the bankers, to suffer the consequences of their actions. In fact, white-collar criminals got a holiday in honor of the financial crisis; on the watch of the Obama Justice Department, only a piddling number of bankers would face prosecution for criminal actions connected with the bubble.

I think that the last graph is a bit to kind to Obama, but it’s well worth the read.