Fixing Obamacare: The Democrats Have To Talk About It →

Last week Aetna, one of the country’s largest insurance companies, announced that it was cutting back its participation in the health care exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). With several other major insurers also cutting back their participation, there will be very limited competition in many markets. This prospect has supporters of the ACA worried and opponents gleefully looking forward to the day when millions may lose their insurance.
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There are two simple ways to address this problem. For one, the insurers are still making money in the individual market outside of the exchanges. We could simply make participation in the exchanges a condition for participating in the individual markets. This in effect tells the insurers that if they want to make money insuring healthy people, they will also have to bear the risk of insuring less healthy people.
The other route would be to do what President Obama originally proposed in his 2008 campaign: set up a Medicare-type public option in the exchanges. This would ensure that everyone had an efficient low cost plan which they could buy into.

U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds →

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

'Islam for Dummies': IS recruits have poor grasp of faith →

Nothing seems to be a good predictor of whether or not someone turns to extreme political violence, though there are a few interesting themes amongst those who do...

The jihadi employment form asked the recruits, on a scale of 1 to 3, to rate their knowledge of Islam. And the Islamic State applicants, herded into a hangar somewhere at the Syria-Turkey border, turned out to be overwhelmingly ignorant.
The extremist group could hardly have hoped for better.
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The findings address one of the most troubling questions about IS recruitment in the United States and Europe: Are disaffected people who understand Shariah more prone to radicalization? Or are those with little knowledge of Islam more susceptible to the group's radical ideas that promote violence?
The documents suggest the latter. The group preys on this religious ignorance, allowing extremists to impose a brand of Islam constructed to suit its goal of maximum territorial expansion and carnage as soon as recruits come under its sway.

The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation →

The immediate macroeconomic problem is how to cure the hangover from the housing bubble in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century – the still-incomplete recovery in the United States and the non-recovery in Europe. But even a straightforward success that restored the growth rate experienced in the 1990s would not restore the world as we thought we knew it.
Do we also suffer from Bernanke's global savings glut, produced by ill-coordinated national policies toward recovery? His prescription is reform that gives governments better incentives to pull together in harness. Or is it the hangover from Rogoff's supercycle of imprudent debt accumulation that can only be remedied by painful deleveraging while building an effective macroprudential regulatory framework to prevent a repeat performance? Or, as Krugman counsels, is the deeper problem our reluctance to use the full panoply of monetary policy and fiscal tools that Keynes and his disciples developed? Or, à la Summers, are our problems more fundamental, requiring a paradigm shift in the means and ends of economic policy?
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Finally, however, there are signs that economists (the smart ones, anyway) are learning that past shocks doesn't tell us much about future ones. They are instead painting possible "if these trends continue" scenarios of major transformations.

Thus, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics speculates about a scenario in which wealth inequality brings about the end of the social democratic era that began at the start of the 20th century. Robert Gordon of Northwestern looks toward the likely end of the buoyant GDP growth brought on by the second industrial revolution in the late 19th century and Eric Brynjolfsson of MIT projects a future in which our principal economic problem is not scarcity, but finding useful and meaningful work to do.

Secure the Vote Today →

There may be a future for electronic voting, but right now there's too much uncertainty:

As Dan Wallach (a Computer Science professor at Rice and a world-recognized expert on voting systems) eloquently put it, election security is a national security issue. The computer security field has intensely studied the problem of conducting elections for more than a decade. From the very beginning of this effort, the computer experts have almost universally agreed: we can’t secure purely electronic voting systems. It may be surprising to outsiders, but computer scientists believe in paper ballots, either directly marked by the voter or created by a machine and placed in the ballot box.
Voting systems need to convince rational losers that they lost fairly. In order to do that, it is critical to both limit fraud and have the result be easily explained. It is impossible to prevent all fraud but we must ensure that the cost of fraud scales with the size: it should take 100 times more effort to change 100 votes compared with the effort associated with changing one vote. Any voting system in which fraud is constant—that is, in which changing 100 votes takes the same effort as changing one—must be viewed as critically flawed.

How eggs became a victory for the animal welfare movement →

...In recent years, there has been a veritable revolution in public attention to eggs and the chickens that produce them. In the past two years, nearly 200 U.S. companies – including every major grocery and fast-food chain – that together buy half of the 7 billion eggs laid monthly have pledged to use only cage-free eggs by 2025.
Grudgingly, the industry group that represents 95 percent of domestic egg producers says a cage-free future is a fait accompli.
The fast shift toward uncaged hens is a sign of Americans’ increasing concern about animals, even ones known more for clucking than cuteness. But it also amounts to one of the animal advocacy movement’s biggest victories in decades – one brought about by ballot measures, campaigns against companies, foodie culture and, above all, the power of the Internet.

‘They Will Kill Us’: Afghan Translators Plead for Delayed U.S. Visas →

Congress has dragged its feet on this for years, but now it may be a one-sided partisan problem...

Republican infighting, infused with nativist tones, has left in question whether a special visa program for translators and interpreters who assisted the military during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will be renewed, a potentially devastating blow to approximately 12,000 Afghans whose immigration applications are in limbo.
“We’ve really been trying to reinforce the fact to Afghans that we are committed to you, and this gives the enemy some propaganda to say, ‘Hey, these people really aren’t committed to you,’ ” said Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, spokesman for the American command in Afghanistan.
“It’s our credibility that is on the line,” he added.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a longtime champion of the visa program, was blunt. “People are going to die,” Mr. McCain said on the Senate floor, challenging a fellow Republican who was blocking more visas. “Don’t you understand the gravity of that?”

It's time to acknowledge the genocide of California's Indians →

I had no idea about this before reading this article. I'm always glad to learn history, even if the knowledge imposes moral burden.

Between 1846 and 1870, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Diseases, dislocation and starvation caused many of these deaths, but the near-annihilation of the California Indians was not the unavoidable result of two civilizations coming into contact for the first time. It was genocide, sanctioned and facilitated by California officials.
Neither the U.S. government nor the state of California has acknowledged that the California Indian catastrophe fits the two-part legal definition of genocide set forth by the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948...
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The issue of genocide in California poses explosive political, economic and educational questions for the state, California’s tribes and individual California Indians. It is up to them — not academics like me — to determine the best way forward.
Will state officials tender public apologies, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did in the 1980s for the relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II? Should state officials offer compensation, along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion Congress paid to 82,210 of these Japanese Americans and their heirs? Might California officials decrease or altogether eliminate their cut of California Indians’ annual gaming revenues ($7.3 billion in 2014) as a way of paying reparations? Should the state return control to California Indian communities of state lands where genocidal events took place? Should the state stop commemorating the supporters and perpetrators of this genocide, including Burnett, Kit Carson and John C. Frémont? Will the genocide against California Indians join the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust in public school curricula and public discourse?
These are crucial questions. What’s beyond doubt is that the state and the federal government should acknowledge the genocide that took place in California.