Woodchipper Maintenance

CT has shut down the LFG’s patented Conserv-o-grinder for scheduled maintenance. Not to worry – we’ll be back next week, freshly tuned and oiled, ready to serve all your grinding needs.

In the meantime, feel free to explore our archives. (April is currently a staff favorite.) http://carltonthurman.me/2014/04/

Thanks – and see you soon –

woodchipper 3

Fig. 1. THE FIELD GUIDE’S ACME MODEL 88 CONSERV-O-GRINDER, FEATURING FEET-FIRST LOADING CAPABILITY, SELF-MODULATED CHIPPING AND GRINDING, AND HANDS-FREE CLEANUP.

Medicare For All

The notion that a country can pay LESS for healthcare and get BETTER outcomes is not theoretical – it is demonstrable. Nearly every western country pulls off this feat vis-a-vis the US every year. The notion that government-run health insurance can outperform private insurers is likewise NOT theoretical, but demonstrable, both between and within countries. Other countries’ publicly financed healthcare systems beat the US privately financed system, as measured both in lower costs and longer lives. So there’s no need for ex ante theorizing – we’re left to the task of explaining post hoc why US private insurers get outdone year-in and year-out.

Medicare (public) beats Medicare Advantage (private), no matter how you measure it. Medicare has lower costs, slower cost growth, lower overhead, and even has better outcomes. Medicare Advantage’s net cost to taxpayers has been estimated at about $10 billion per year – that’s the extra amount that Americans end up paying simply because 30% of seniors are enrolled in Medicare Advantage instead of conventional Medicare. And CBO projects that the situation will only worsen over time, as Medicare continues to do a far superior job at containing cost growth.

But Medicare Advantage has become big business for insurers, who use a fraction of insurance premiums to lobby Congress to keep the party going. Lobbying and advertising costs, incidentally, are not counted in the overhead estimate for private insurers, which run about eight times higher than overhead for traditional public Medicare.

The solvency of Medicare’s trust fund is not about health or economics, but politics. That insurers are quicker to jack your premiums than politicians are to fund Medicare is a matter of cultural idiosyncrasy, not the reality of paying to heal the sick. Americans lay out about $8000 per person per year on health care – double the OECD average. Conservatives would have you think that people prefer paying $8000 in fees and premiums to insurers and providers, instead of $4000 in taxes to the government for the same services. Given all that we know about public versus private health insurers, an all-public system – Medicare-for-all – would almost certainly have lower costs and better outcomes than the current mostly-private system.

Surely there other factors that partially explain inferior health outcomes in the US. Relative to other westerners, Americans are more likely to be obese, poor, drive without seatbelts, own guns and abuse drugs. But they are also less likely to smoke, and more likely to exercise. Observing, for instance, that even Americans who are not obese live shorter lives than their non-obese counterparts abroad, the most comprehensive study on point concludes that the US health care apparatus is itself one likely partial explanation for lower US life expectancy.

The ACA is a step in the right direction, in that it will bring insurance to many who previously lacked it. But the ultimate goal should be Medicare for all.

 

Refs:

big report (300pp+): obssr.od.nih.gov/pdf/IOM%20Report.pdf

report brief (4pp): http://www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/Report%20Files/2013/US-Health-International-Perspective/USHealth_Intl_PerspectiveRB.pdf

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2014/04/16/Medicare-Advantage-Isn-t-Reducing-Health-Care-Costs

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-efficient-than-private-insurance/

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2013/february/setting-the-record-straight-on-medicare%E2%80%99s-overhead-costs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Advantage

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Publications/Issue-Briefs/2008/Sep/The-Continuing-Cost-of-Privatization–Extra-Payments-to-Medicare-Advantage.aspx

Coal (literally) Blows

Each year, from its smokestacks, a typical coal plant blows off 200 lbs of arsenic, 170 lbs of mercury, 100 lbs of lead, 4 lbs of cadmium, smaller amounts of thorium and uranium, plus an extraordinary 1 MILLION lbs of assorted particulate junk, perfectly sized to fit into your lungs’ alveoli. Remarkably, coal contains 76 of the 92 naturally-occurring elements on planet Earth – so when it’s burned, clouds of toxins are released into the environment, to settle on lakes, farms and cities, to find their way into our bodies through the food we eat and the air we breath. We havent even mentioned the coal ash that gets left behind – which is so radioactive that, kW for kW, coal delivers 100 times more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power.

And so even if coal released no CO2 at all – as in the case of so-called “clean coal” (which doesnt exist) – it would still spectacularly suck. But coal billows CO2 into the atmosphere like nothing else. Few are aware that even though natural gas and coal create electricity via similar processes, coal is so inefficient that it releases DOUBLE the CO2 per unit of energy generated.

Obama this week released a plan to reduce American CO2 emissions. Given that 40% of all such emissions come from electric power plants, and 40% of all American electricity is generated by burning coal, any such plan will involve transitioning out of coal. But what makes the transition so economically attractive in the short term isnt about CO2 – it’s about the 25,000 premature deaths and MILLIONS of days of work lost each year in the US because of all the other stuff released when we burn coal.

Quite reasonably, rich and poor countries have different attitudes toward environmentalism. In rich countries, people have huge individual stockpiles of human capital, and so it’s extremely costly when workers get sick and are unable to work – and even more costly if they die prematurely, taking their human capital with them. In poor countries, coal may make economic sense, because workers are less productive, and so you can come out ahead trading off health for cheaper fuel. Even poor areas within rich countries may likewise be tempted by cheap energy. The logic driving the demand for coal in China also drives demand in Kentucky.

In rich countries, coal is only cost-effective because health and environmental costs incidental to its use are not internalized by users. Coal would not be cheap if the electric companies who burn it, and their customers, bore the cost of the harm that their activities impose on others. Again, it isnt just about the CO2 they pump into the atmosphere, adversely affecting climate for everyone on the planet – it is no less about the people downwind from coal-fired plants who are sickened and killed. One major problem with the US federal system – and Obama’s state-by-state plan – is that the costs and benefits of coal use sprawl across state lines. Coal might be mined in West Virginia, burned in Ohio, to generate cheap electricity in Pennsylvania and lung disease in New Jersey.

Environmentalism disproportionately benefits middle class people in wealthy countries. The poor would often prefer to have a bit more income, at the cost of their health – ask any coal-miner. The rich frequently have the means to buy their way out of environmental degradation, e.g., by moving to someplace cleaner, or by filtering their air and water. It’s the middle class who gain the most by sacrificing a fraction of their income for a cleaner environment.

And thus conservative opposition to environmentalism usually takes the form of the wealthy and powerful drumming up support from low-wage workers – which, for the GOP, is simply business as usual. Environmentalism for Americans of ordinary means is common sense. Many of the tradeoffs conservatives cite in opposition to environmentalism generally – and the move to cleaner fuels specifically – are false in rich countries. American lives are too valuable to be compromised by a 19th century fuel source, which made sense in its time and place, but is today an anachronism. Coal indeed helped America become rich – but to continue to improve our lives, we as a nation must move on to cleaner energy.

 

Refs:

http://news.yahoo.com/u-unveil-sweeping-rules-cut-power-plant-pollution-101054675–finance.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coal_industry#Annual_excess_deaths

http://www.desmogblog.com/coal-power-industry-united-states-facts

http://www.psr.org/resources/coals-assault-on-human-health.html

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/whats-the-deadliest-power-source

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/

http://www.euractiv.com/climate-environment/europe-loses-5-working-days-year-news-528512

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station#Environmental_impacts

 

 

Get Out and Stay Out (of the hospital)

America doesnt have one problem with its healthcare apparatus*, but many – including shorter lives, higher costs, and inadequate access to care. The ACA is likewise meant to ameliorate not one but several problems. One change the ACA introduced are penalties for underperforming hospitals, whose patients have a tendency to go back to the hospital within a short time of being discharged.

Hospitals are the most expensive place to render healthcare, with per-patient costs typically approaching $2000 per day, and the aggregate amounting to about one-third of all US national health expenditures. Medicare noticed that, all too often, shortly after someone is discharged from a hospital, they get readmitted for reasons that were entirely avoidable. And while high readmission rates dont speak well of patients’ health, they’re great for the health of a hospital’s bottom line, because hospital stays are highly profitable – and two stays pay twice as much as one. Churning patients out and ignoring them is great business for hospitals, but awful for patients, and costly to insurers. But under new ACA readmission rules for Medicare patients, that jig is up.

Across the country, so-called “readmission rates” vary considerably place to place and hospital to hospital. The ACA made changes in Medicare to penalize hospitals with high readmission rates – to give them a stiff incentive to see to it that their patients remain healthy after discharge – so that physically leaving a hospital does NOT also mean leaving their care altogether. The new rules only apply to Medicare patients who go to the hospital for 3 specific conditions: heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia. If, after discharge, such a patient is readmitted to any hospital within 30 days, it’s counted against the original hospitals’ readmission stats. If the rate goes too high, penalties accrue – with the size of the fine commensurate with hospital performance.

The good news is that hospitals are altering their post-discharge procedures for the better. To ensure that patients understand post-discharge care instructions, hospitals are following up with phone calls. They’re dispatching nurses to make house calls. They are GIVING AWAY FREE MEDS to their poorest patients! While all of this costs money, overall these new policies are cost-effective, simply because hospitalizations are so outrageously expensive that you can spend a small fortune avoiding them and still come out ahead. The fines are meant to get hospitals on the same page with patients and their insurers.

So far so good: According to a CEA report, growth in healthcare costs during 2010-13 were the lowest ever recorded in any 3 year period in US history, with Medicare leading the way, and hospitalizations performing especially well. In the years ahead, Medicare plans to add other diseases to the no-fly list for readmissions – and private insurers are expected to phase in their own penalties for underperforming hospitals. The US healthcare apparatus is multi-faceted, and solutions to its many issues will require creativity. But the new Medicare readmission policy so far is working as planned – for the good of senior’s health, and for the good of the nation’s financial health as well.

 

Refs:

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/hospital-of-tomorrow/articles/2013/08/09/hospitals-focus-on-maximizing-medicare-payments-by-minimizing-readmissions

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2013/august/02/readmission-penalties-medicare-hospitals-year-two.aspx

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2013/march/14/revised-readmissions-statistics-hospitals-medicare.aspx

 

* some, CT included, use the term “US healthcare system” – but “system” is simply too flattering. “apparatus” is itself too kind, if easier to type than “thingamabobby.”

Of a Healthcare System on the Moon

A nation might build the universe’s greatest hospital on the moon – but in the absence of a lunar lander, the claim that that nation has the “best medical care” cannot be made without irony. But this is what conservatives who defend America’s national healthcare apparatus must do every day. The US healthcare system, by design, keeps needed care out of reach for a large fraction of the US population. And so millions of Americans get told every day that America has “the best healthcare in the world” – though they themselves are unable to access it. For them, it might as well be on the moon – which only a lunatic could envy.

In theory, any country could improve healthcare for a fraction of its population by excluding another fraction from care. Putting aside the morality of such a system, you dont come out ahead in the bargain anyway, because you tend to lose more at the bottom than you gain at the top. The metrics, which count everyone, betray the true cost of such policies, as seen in higher American mortality, from birth through till age 75.

American babies are more likely to die before their 1st birthday than babies in other rich countries. American children are more likely to die before age 5 than children in other rich countries. American adults at all ages are more likely to die than adults in other rich countries. It’s only Americans surviving till age 75 who compare favorably with 75 year-olds elsewhere – and we’re left to wonder whether it’s their single-payer government-provided universal health insurance (aka Medicare) that’s responsible – or if it’s merely selection bias: that it’s so much harder for Americans to make it to 75 without dying, that those who succeed are hardier.

We might parse out health outcomes by income, and find the same result. Wealthy Americans live shorter lives than their wealthy counterparts in other rich countries. Poor Americans live MUCH shorter lives than their poor counterparts in other rich countries. White babies born in America are more likely to die before their 1st birthday than white babies born in other rich countries.

To put it differently, it is NOT the case that the US has a bimodal distribution of life expectancy, with rich Americans doing better and poor Americans doing worse. ALL Americans do worse – it’s just a matter of degree. Hey, if living long is important to you, it definitely helps to be born rich, white and female – but it’s also beneficial to be born elsewhere.

To give it a Rawlsian twist: imagine yourself as an Unincorporated Spirit, hovering in the ether, about to be inserted into some body to live out a life. You are given a choice of populations to be cast into randomly. If life expectancy is your sole criterion – the US would be about 30th on your list of preferred destinations. As Regina sings it: it’s all about the moon.

Refs:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2661456/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62362/

Click to access USHealth_Intl_PerspectiveRB.pdf

Cynicism with a Body Count

The government shutdown and the downgrading of the nation’s creditworthiness over the debt-ceiling was the previous high water mark for GOP cynicism. But now the GOP has outdone themselves – the toll for their refusal to expand Medicaid in 24 states might as well be measured not in dollars, but in corpses.

A new study out of Harvard Medical School estimates that between 7,000 and 17,000 people will die as a result of states’ refusal to expand Medicaid. And how much money will those states save, to justify that loss of life? Nothing at all! Zero, zippo, nada. As a kicker, businesses within those states will be subject to fines of $2,000 per uninsured – and workers within those states will still pay the same federal taxes to benefit the residents of the 26 other states who opted into expanded Medicaid. To score political points, the GOP is today killing poor working people – while local business pays for the fun. Expanded Medicaid is already paid for – state officials just have to sign on the dotted line to start receiving benefits – but conservatives would rather pay the bill and refuse the benefit, ensuring that thousands of poor people will needlessly die.

People with incomes between 100% and 138% of the federal poverty line do NOT qualify for federal subsidies to purchase private insurance. (Subsidies only go to people between 138% and 400% of the poverty line.) Their solution was Medicaid expansion. When the Supreme Court rewrote the law to let states opt out, those people were given no alternative – they were categorically shut out of the system. Plan B for the working poor is Dont get sick. Many of them now will not get screened for breast or cervical cancer; many diabetics will have to do without medicine; many others will be at greater risk of depression; many will be bankrupted by catastrophic medical expenses. And many will die – needlessly.

This study is not alone. More modest studies scrutinizing individual states tell a similar story. When a state opts out of Medicaid expansion, people die, businesses get hit with penalties, and Federal taxes effectively siphon money out of the state – paying for a benefit that they obtusely refuse to receive!

Still more studies are already documenting how opting out adversely affects the numbered of uninsured. Opt-out states have seen rates of uninsured drop by just 1.5% since September – while opt-in states have seen that rate fall by 4%. As of March, the rate of uninsured for opt-in states was 12.4% – while for opt-out states it was 18.1%.

Medicaid expansion is a sweetheart deal for states. For the first 3 years of the program, states pay nothing at all. Their share gradually increases thereafter, but will never exceed 10%. And since expansion is likely to offset other state expenditures, states’ effective share of the program is likely to be even less than 10% over the long haul. Adding perversity to perversity, conservative refusal to expand Medicaid serves to regressively redistribute wealth out of poor (GOP) states and into rich (DNC) states – yet another opportunity for the GOP to sock it to their own constituents for a hollow ideological purpose.

 

Refs:

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2014/01/30/opting-out-of-medicaid-expansion-the-health-and-financial-impacts/

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3801

http://pnhp.org/blog/2014/01/30/state-medicaid-opt-out-will-cost-over-7000-lives-maybe-17000/

http://orlandoweekly.com/news/the-perils-of-florida-s-refusal-to-expand-medicaid-1.1665144?pgno=2

http://www.wral.com/new-studies-medicaid-opt-out-costly-for-nc/13349683/

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obamacares-impact-differences-emerge-between-states/

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168634/supreme-court-upholds-mandate-mixed-ruling-medicaid-expansion

 

Gun Economics

(For Memorial Day – a favorite from the LFG archive.)

It was another splendid morning in America – as folks woke up to the news that yet another child had gloriously sacrificed her 9 year-old life for other peoples’ enjoyment of their 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Gabby Giffords took time out of her busy skeet-shooting and armadillo-hunting schedule to advocate for more stringent background checks. Surely, Madison would weep for joy at all his law had engendered….

There’s a stark asymmetry: that the people who ENJOY the right to keep and bear arms are rarely the same people who PAY the cost of their enjoyment. And so I began a-wondering: would gun manufacturers., sellers, buyers and owners make different decisions if they had to absorb the full cost of their actions? At the extreme, one might have a law that prescribed the death penalty for a gun owner whose weapon caused the death of another person, no matter if he or someone else pulled the trigger. Yeah, that’ll never happen, but….

What if lawmakers (1) make the parties to gun transactions (manufacturer, buyer, seller, owner) strictly liable for all damages the gun causes; (2) and require the parties to obtain insurance to cover prospective losses.

Economically, the market for guns is rife with negative externalities that keep prices artificially low. Forcing market participants to absorb the full costs of their decisions will only improve market efficiency. Conservatives will love it, because, y’know, they’re all about free enterprise – and surely it will pain them to recognize that gun owners, effectively, are welfare moochers, leaving a tab for society to pick up.

An employed middle-income 40something with a clean record might pay a pittance to insure a shotgun or hunting rifle that’s kept in a safe. A gun shop owner will be happy to have him as a customer. But an unemployed 20something male might pay a small fortune to insure a 12-in-the-clip 9mm that he plans to keep alternately in his glove compartment and night stand. Shop owners, seeking to control their premiums, might be very careful about who they sell to. And of course, a careless shop owner might find himself unable to obtain affordable insurance. These are all positive effects.

The present interpretation of the 2nd amendment is not likely to survive another Democratic presidential term. But even assuming that we have to operate within that stricture, it should be clear that the 2nd amendment does NOT require that guns be free. Requiring that gun sellers and owners bear the full cost of their actions does NOT technically increase the cost of selling and owning guns – it simply reallocates the cost onto the parties themselves, and off of society.

 

What the Living Owe the Not Yet Alive

If it werent for the fact that real, live women are people already – complete with feelings, desires and free will – the abortion issue would be a purely intellectual matter. But recognizing the rights of zygotes, embryos and-or fetuses is a zero-sum game that necessarily abrogates the rights of the women carrying them – women whose thoughts, sensibilities and volition are NOT mere theoretical constructs, nor the invention of medieval mythologies, but observable facts. The question ultimately posed by the issue of abortion is: What duty should we place on existing people to bring subsequent people into existence?

Best we can reckon, the great preponderance of material in the universe is unconscious and dumb – water, dirt, sunlight, air. Entities like you and your dog – with the ability to see, feel, think, desire, enjoy and fear – are spectacularly rare. Instinctively to us all, life has inherent value – and accordingly, actions that create or destroy life are vested with significance. Abortion is problematic because it terminates the developmental path of a discreet, identifiable entity that had the potential to become just like us – alive, awake, aware – turning it back to the mass of dumb and insensate material that comprises the bulk of everything.

The issue as to where that path begins, or where on that path lie its most significant markers, is not easily resolved. The Monte Python bit, “Every Sperm is Sacred”, pokes fun at the absurdity of tracing the path too far back. Similarly, while seeking to make a larger point about the double standard for men and women, Oklahoma State Senator Constance Johnson tried to illegalize male masturbation. The text of her amendment read, “Any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.” All are surpassed by Bill Maher’s satirical proclamation: “Life begins at erection!”

Conception isnt nearly a guarantee of achieving anything resembling life as we value it (seeing, feeling, thinking, etc.) The data is murky, but the most thorough study suggests that miscarriage rates are greater than 30%. (The rate most frequently cited is 15-20% – but that figure is for detected pregnancies. Perhaps half of all miscarriages end pregnancies that were never detected.) If we back it up another step, we find that in any given month, 25% of women seeking to become pregnant will succeed – and so when one forgoes sex, or uses contraception, there’s an excellent chance of preventing pregnancy (which is why birth control is so popular), ending someone’s potential journey from non-existence to conscious being.

Other than birth and fetal viability, there isnt one discernibly ascendent moment in the long process through which new people are made. The imposition of Christian mythology is particularly unhelpful in resolving the matter, since it relies solely on magical thinking, not reason, fact or science. The notion of “souls” leaping into newly formed zygotes is of the same species of inanity as the theory that malevolent fairies cause laryngitis when they leap into the throat. For centuries, Christian “thinkers” deemed the quickening (when the fetus is first felt to kick) to be the magic moment of “ensoulment”, after which abortion was not permitted. This changed abruptly in 1869, when Pope Pius IX declared it to be conception. Both positions are fundamentally arbitrary, primitive expressions of animism.

Debate must exclude opinions based solely on religion, because as articles of faith they cannot be engaged rationally, and so cant be discussed, but only offered for belief without evidence or argument. The extreme zealot’s position – if you conceive it, you’re stuck with it – cannot be given any weight in a non-sectarian, polyglot society, which depends on reason as a universal language to resolve differences.

Beautiful though life may be, rights bestowed on zygotes, embryos, and-or fetuses come at the cost of rights lost by women. And so any argument for forcing women to continue an unwanted pregnancy must, at a minimum, bear a substantial burden, and be supported by fact-based, logical reasoning, not mere recourse to mythology. Since distinctions among abstinence, contraception, and termination of an early-term pregnancy are based primarily on magical thinking – not science, and surely not rationality – they do not meet the minimum standard for inclusion in the debate.

 

Refs:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/26/960283/-Life-Begins-at-Erection-It-s-all-about-the-Sperm

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/pro-choice-oklahoma-senator-adds-amendment-to-pro

http://global.christianpost.com/news/pro-choice-oklahoma-politican-proposes-masturbation-ban-69236/

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/27/us/study-finds-31-rate-of-miscarriage.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/17/miscarriage-cause_n_4116712.html

http://miscarriage.about.com/od/pregnancyafterloss/qt/miscarriage-rates.htm

PS Death isnt an end, so much as life is a pause – between two comparably infinite stretches of nonexistence. Take a moment to look out your window, walk down your street or hold your children, and wonder at it. Life is an exceedingly brief window, between the darkness we left and the same darkness to which we’ll return. When contemplating what it will be like, consider that everyone alive today will probably experience the year 2200 the same as they experienced the year 1800, during which there were some great parties, a few disasters, some notable events, some perhaps involving family members – all of which slipped by undetected to us.

Given the brevity of it, it’s extraordinary, bizarre, miraculous and FORTUNATE – that people can get so bent out of shape by the minutia of the quotidian. (We should be grateful for our ability to be so easily distracted.) Analogously, it’s difficult to assess or express the tragedy of beings who never even attain consciousness for the short time life affords it…. Have a nice Memorial Day weekend. Make sure you take 5 to grab a beer and a hot dog, chill, and gaze into the sky. Repeat if necessary.

Deportation by the Numbers

Some have taken to calling Obama the “deporter-in-chief.” At the same time, John Boehner says that Obama cant be trusted to enforce immigration laws. While being attacked from both left and right is just a day in the life for a centrist politician, the numbers behind both accusations merit a look.

To start, we might reconsider our use of the term “deportation.” Homeland Security employs two more precise terms in its place: “return” and “removal.” A “return” is the confirmed departure of a “deportable” alien from the US. A “removal” is a return subject to a court order, often with sanctions attached, which are triggered if the individual attempts to reenter. Returns are the more benign of the two, allowing an alien to reenter without any special consequences. Removals however can subject an alien to prison and other penalties if they try to come back.

And so it might surprise liberals to learn that Obama can be fairly dubbed the “remover-in-chief,” since his administration has eschewed “returns” for harsher “removals.” This trend began under Clinton. Looking at statistics going back to 1892, removals never exceeded 40,000 per year, and were often less than 10,000. But under Clinton, they more than quadrupled, reaching 188,000 in his last full year in office (2000).

Returns have been much more variable since measurement began in 1927. Under 10,000 per year for most of WWII, they surged past 1 million in 1954, only to fall beneath 100,000 for the decade after. Starting in 1970, returns began a steady climb, again reaching 1 million in 1985, 1.5 million in 1996, and hitting an all-time high of 1.675 million in 2000. Clinton might fairly be called the “returner-in-chief.”

Bush Duh paradoxically oversaw a halving of returns, but a doubling of removals. By his last full year (2008), removals had risen to an all time high of 360,000 – while returns had fallen to a 30 year low of 811,000. Under Obama, this trend continues, with removals reaching nearly 420,000 in 2012; and returns falling to 230,000, their lowest level since 1968.

Looking at the big picture, removals have increased almost every year since 1984, and returns have declined almost every year since 2000. It’s worth noting that definitions of “return” and “removal” have changed over time, and have recently been a source of controversy – though no matter the interpretation, the overall trends remain.

To get an idea about how very different is Obama’s approach to immigration enforcement, consider that in 2011 and 2012 removals exceeded returns for the first time since 1941. And not all returns are equal. While the Obama administration has had far fewer than any recent administration, qualitatively, those returns tend to be much harsher. Obama has ramped up an especially nasty return program (ATEP), which transports Mexicans caught at the border to places thousands of miles from their entry point, to both impose an effective penalty, and to make reentry that much more difficult. This measure is controversial because people subject to it are vulnerable to crime and official corruption, both of which are rampant in poor border towns. Another program, MIRP, is similar in practice and effect. Alone and without resources, even if they manage to avoid drug traffickers, common criminals and corrupt cops, deportees face significant hardship in returning home. (N.b. Obama has started classifying ATEP returns as removals – also amid some controversy.)

The Obama administration’s record on immigration enforcement is mixed – liberal in some respects, harsh in others. More people are caught along the southern border than ever before, and those caught are now more severely treated. But if they succeed in getting inside the country, undocumented aliens are now much less likely to be returned or removed, and can live and work in relative security. Some of these policies are consistent with the US interest in tighter border security – though at 2000 miles in length, the southern border is not going to be secure any time soon. All tolled, a greater share of federal police resources are now expended toward immigration than any other objective, including drug enforcement.

One must appreciate Obama’s decisions in light of the fact that existing laws were not written to deal with the reality of 12 million undocumented aliens – roughly 4% of the US population. Obama is rightly questioned over his emphasis on removals, and his use of ATEP and MIRP; however his decision to back off on returns is reasonable, given that the administrative tools available to the executive are simply inadequate for the present situation. The country desperately needs a legislative solution – which doesnt seem likely to come in the near future.

 

Refs:

the data since 1892: http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ois_yb_2012.pdf

most comprehensive report: http://cis.org/ICE-Illegal-Immigrant-Deportations

other fun stuff:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/19/high-rate-of-deportations-continue-under-obama-despite-latino-disapproval/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/02/obama-is-accused-of-inflating-his-deportation-numbers-whats-really-happening/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/24/lamar-smith-obama-deportation_n_1828860.html

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/29/local/la-me-immigrant-deport-20110930

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370784/obama-administration-inflating-deportation-numbers-andrew-stiles

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-20140402-story.html

http://blog.pe.com/multicultural-empire/2014/04/02/illegal-immigration-ways-of-counting-deportations/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Requiem for Brown

Hailed as the most important Supreme Court case of the 20th century, Brown v. the Board of Education on its diamond anniversary is no more than a gorgeous corpse. Brown today prevents state and local governments from hanging a “colored only” sign on the schoolhouse door – unfortunately it allows them to do everything they need to do to produce precisely the same outcome, without need for the sign. Eviscerated by subsequent decisions, Brown’s awesome potential is unrealized, and unlikely to ever be, doing nothing for an increasing fraction of students who attend legally segregated schools across the US. The nation should end its sardonic celebration of Brown’s 60th, and be rededicated to the task of desegregation.

Brown invalidated the Jim Crow establishment of parallel white and colored schools, repudiating the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine with its overruling of Plessy v Ferguson (1896). Brown was truly a giant leap forward for the US, predating the Civil Rights Act by a decade. So it was for the Warren Court: ever on the vanguard, dragging a reluctant nation into modernity. But Earl Warren, the chief justice, author and architect of Brown‘s 9-0 decision, retired in 1969. Nixon replaced him and 3 other justices, setting the stage for Brown‘s demise.

While every schoolkid learns the historical significance of Brown, few are taught Millken v. Bradley, which in 1974 cut Brown off at the knees. Board of Ed. of Oklahoma City v. Dowell was a conservative Court’s 1991 coup de grace,* rendering Brown a nullity.

Milliken is a quintessentially cynical conservative decision, in which 5 justices feign ignorance to the most basic facts in order to arrive at an indefensible decision. Milliken‘s majority observed that neighborhoods can become segregated by socio-economic factors. School districts in such neighborhoods, they explain, can as a consequence become segregated without any action on the part of the government. And thus may poor black neighborhoods beget poor black schools, and rich white neighborhoods beget rich white schools – and Brown, those 5 conservatives pronounced, has nothing to say about that. “Segregation is dead – long live segregation, y’all,” – their holding might well have been

Justice William O. Douglas takes Milliken‘s shiftless majority to task in a dissent that expounds the obvious: where school district lines are drawn and whether they get redrawn; where schools are erected; where municipal lines begin and end; where public housing projects are put up; and nearly every factor that integrates or segregates a given community’s public schools is determined by the government. The government’s decision to countenance racially segregated schools, rather than working to integrate them, is precisely that: a government decision. The Milliken majority acknowledges that where Detroit meets its suburbs there’s a line in the dirt, and the black kids on one side get routed into poor black schools, while white kids on the other side get routed into well-funded white schools. At this point the majority pretends to not grasp the obvious fact that the government chooses where that line is drawn, and whether it is redrawn to integrate schools, as Brown commands, or left alone.

5 conservative justices finished Brown off in its 1991 Oklahoma City decision. Oklahoma has among the most egregious records on segregation. The cordoning off of black kids into black-only schools was written into the state constitution from the day Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907. Despite Brown, the Civil Rights Act, and an 11 year federal court battle, Oklahoma City schools were still segregated in 1972. Finally a new plan was implemented – and it worked: in 1977, a federal judge declared Oklahoma City schools to be integrated – 23 years after Brown!

But just 8 years later, Oklahoma City enacted a different plan to allocate students – and by 1989, its schools were segregated again. When plaintiffs sought to reopen the federal case that ended 70 years of Oklahoma City school segregation, 5 conservatives on the Supreme Court slammed shut the courthouse door. Never mind those 70 years, this conservative majority argued, asking us to believe that this more recent variety of segregation is the permissible Milliken kind, driven by economic decisions by private citizens. A mere 10 years of desegregation in the preceding 80 had miraculously turned Oklahoma into Massachusetts. Segregation is dead – long live segregation.

Justice Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown before the Court in 1954, took on the Oklahoma City majority in his pointed dissent. The effect of Oklahoma City is to allow miscreant school districts – who were once subject to a desegregation order, and who subsequently satisfied that order by integrating – to backslide into segregation again by “private economic decisions” – and then when they get sued, they can hide behind Milliken, throw up their hands, and claim that this “new” segregation is not the result of government action. Long live segregation, y’all!

Milliken made sure that Brown could not apply outside of the south, allowing states like New York and California to have some of the most segregated school systems today. Oklahoma City next gave southern school districts the opportunity to be treated like New York and California – they need only desegregate for a few years, after which they can return to segregated business as usual.

Yeah I know it sucks – sorry to be the bearer of bad news – but Brown, in many respects now does more harm than good. Ironically, Plessy v. Ferguson might produce better results today, since it requires EQUAL to go along with separate. Brown, twisted from its original meaning by 40 years of conservative jurisprudence, is now the facilitator and protector of a system of separate and unequal schools across the country.

 

Refs:

http://news.yahoo.com/us-schools-largely-segregated-60-years-brown-v-201333080.html

http://www.freep.com/article/20140517/NEWS07/305170070/U-S-public-schools-still-segregated-report-says

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/60-years-brown-v-board-school-segregation-isnt-yet-american-history/

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ny-schools-are-most-racially-segregated-in-nation-report-says/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/26/new-york-schools-segregated_n_5034455.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/most-segregated-cities-in-america-2013-11?op=1

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=498&invol=237

http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/418/717/

http://carltonthurman.me/2014/03/28/segregation-new-york-style/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/us/mrs-obama-cites-view-of-growing-segregation.html?_r=0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Court

 

 

 

 

 

 

* CT kindly requests that all world citizens, francophonic or otherwise, enunciate the final c in “coup de grace.” Failure to do so results in “coup de gras”, which – though it may be poetically construed as a drink on Fat Tuesday, or, more farfetched, a judo move involving the buttocks – is unbearably grotesque in ears of a certain stripe. Grazi-yay a todo.