Also available in Orange

From one of my comments in buhddydarma’s most excellent diary:

I’d liken it to a vicious dog behind a fence. Given access to the fence, he will worry it and try to dig under it, or hang out by the gate and eventually get out. Like a group of corporation with massive profits locked behind a regulatory wall, who will eventually find a way to get a loophole put into the wall.

Tie the dog up in the yard so he can’t get at the fence, the combination is more effective than either alone.

A robust public option works like the leash tying the dog up. The corporate insurance companies cannot squeeze too much harder than the public choice without losing market share, so it will be much harder for them to organize to break the regulations in the health care exchanges.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

crossposted from The Hillbilly Report, also available in Orange

The Appalachian Hub Part 2: The Charleston WV Hub

The increasingly infamous Appalachian Development Highway program started out with the goal of supporting the potential for genuine economic development in Appalachia by improving transport links into and within the region.

And yet, with the decentralized, state-based system for planning 110mph, 125mph and 220mph High Speed Rail systems, there is the threat that the very problem that the Appalachian Development Highway system was established to address will be re-created as we modernize our regional passenger transport backbones from asphalt to steel.

An Appalachian Hub project would aim to drag these laudable goals into the 21st Century by filling the gaping hole in Eastern US planning for High Speed Rail systems. “Would”, since this is an exploration of what such a system might look like if West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee joined this planning process – not a report on ongoing, formal projects such as the Midwest Hub or Ohio Hub.

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Next American Revolution

crossposted from The Hillbilly Report, also available in orange

From some online dictionary somewhere:

Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance

So: (1) Public Choice

“No Taxation without Representation”. Every single person facing an individual mandate must be provided with the choice of a publicly administered plan. Otherwise the government is forcing the citizen to pay without the elected representatives of the citizen controlling the spending.

You want to put a trigger on the public option. Fine, except the exact same trigger applies to the individual mandate.

You want to restrict access to the public option to some smaller group? Fine, except the same restriction applies to the individual mandate.

The system is not politically legitimate if it requires payment to for-profit commercial corporations.

(2) Robust

It cannot be lumbered down with any restrictions not faced by private insurers.

State by state public options? Really? You are really prepared to restrict the corporations to firms with no commercial activity across state lines? If they are free standing state by state public options, it has to be state by state for profit corporations. Oh, not allowing UHC into the exchanges defeats the purpose of lining private pockets at the public expense? Yeah, kind of thought so.

crossposted from The Hillbilly Report, now up at Agent Orange

David Axelrod made the case for insisting on the public option if there is an individual mandate to buy from health insurance exchanges, on the Rachel Maddow show last night (segment page). Of course, he thought he was making a different case:

And there is an incentive for the insurance industry to go along and not try to fight these, and that is that there is going to be a larger insurance market, and they have to make that calculation, but we are prepared to do it easy or do it hard, we want to make it work for consumers.

One reading of Axelrod is:

“M’lords, the peasants are getting restive, and if you want to avoid a revolt or other crisis – say, a majority of the House of Representatives elected without being beholden to your largesses – you have to make concessions. However, make the calculation – in some versions of this reform, because of the greater number of peasants you will be taxing in your domains, you will be better off.”

Update: Also see: crossposts at ProgressiveBlue and MyLeftWing, and a response to Nicholas Beaudrot drinking the Axelrod cool-aid that the Public Option will “the Public Option will only affect a small number of people”, in a comment at Donkelylicious.

     NO CAPTIVE MARKETS!

   WE ARE NO CORPORATE PLAYING FIELD:
      LEVEL US AT YOUR PERIL

   NO GOVERNMENT MANDATED
      CORPORATE MURDER BY SPREADSHEET

     HEALTH INSURANCE BOARDS ARE THE REAL DEATH PANELS

     NO WELFARE FOR INSURANCE CORPORATIONS

     NO CAPTIVE MARKETS!

crossposted from MyLeftWing

Having lost sight of our goals we redoubled our efforts
– Mark Twain

I have blogged on this topic before (links below the fold), and the concept is both powerful and simple. Electrify main rail corridors and provide the capacity to support 100mph Rapid Freight Rail. The points are direct:

• Electric rail freight needs under 10% the energy of diesel truck freight
• Even with short-haul trucking to origin railhead and from destination railhead, 100mph Rapid Freight Rail is faster door to door freight than long-haul trucking
• In underused Rights of Way, rail capacity is decreasing cost, with additional capacity cheaper than existing capacity
• As a side-effect benefit, any system that supports high reliability scheduled freight delivery automatically support substantially upgrade passenger rail services

With the focus on Long-Haul Freight, this proposed system has been dubbed the “Steel Interstate” (pdf).

Virginia is facing a Dinosaur Economy proposal to expand I-81 to  eight lanes to cope with the combination of truck and car traffic. RAIL Solutions has turned to the Steel Interstate that:

• is a lower cost alternative
• is not addicted to oil,
• and takes semi-truck traffic off I-81, rather than imposing more semi-truck traffic on the motorists using I-81.

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Next American Revolution

The White House has said it will do anything to “get a win”.

Clearly, there are several Democratic Senators who will vote no, even if they vote for cloture.

Which means that with 50+ Congressmen willing to stand firm for the Public Option, it only requires 10 Senators willing to stand firm for the public option to force the President to go all in for the Public Option.

My Senator Sherrod Brown sounds like he’s close.

Barcelona Fell, and I was not There

Nor saw shells exploding in air

Nor slipped out with leaders to France

Nor saw Fascists dance a victory dance

Barcelona Fell, and I was not There

To see victors writing Foul as Fair

To hear quiet sobbing in the still of night

To see heads turn from the loss of the fight

Barcelona Fell, and I was not There

A Generation Unborn, I was nowhere

A Generation to come, where will they say

They lament its falling as it fell, today

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence , crossposted from The Hillbilly Report

It is widely remarked that the US Department of Transport map of High Speed Rail Corridors leaves a lot of obvious holes.

Often, this reflects a misunderstanding of what the DoT is mapping. This is not a “Master Plan”. There is no HSRail planner division inside the Federal Rail Administration inside the Department of Transport that is working away at deciding which corridor should be added to the corridor.

Instead, what they have mapped are the corridors that are eligible for HSRail funding. The way that things are set up is that a state or group of states do some planning, petition Congress be designated as a HSRail corridor, or added to a corridor, or for less sweeping changes petition the Department of Transport to revise an existing corridor, and {*voila*}, that’s a designated corridor.

Morris says he and his tag-team High Speed Rail partner Ed Glaeser … that’s HSR or #HSrail for short … are taking at least a one week break. So Robert Samuelson steps into the breach.

He repeats the old familiar argument:

• (1) Amtrak requires operating subsidies.
• (2) Rail operators overseas had the same problem.
• (3) Rail operators overseas found out that increasing the speed solved the problem.
• (4) So if we do the same thing, it will lose money.

Why does (4) follow from (1), (2), and (3)? It doesn’t, of course, its just guilt by association given the form and shape of an argument to allow intellectually dishonest rhetoric to pass as if it were real argument.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Freakonomist Eric Morris finishes up his tag-team attack with Ed Glaeser on the HSR policy with a post that confesses to the hack jobs both are doing on HSR policy – but works hard to spin the confession into a defense of the hackery.

Eric Morris’s efforts have been clearly the weaker of the two, to the point where Ryan Avent, who wrote blog posts to pick apart the analytical flaws of Ed Glaeser’s four part series as well as the first posts by Eric Morris, responded to Eric Morris’ last effort via twitter:

@ryanavent: Eric Morris closes HSR series by referring readers to Randal O’Toole. You know, in case you thought he and Glaeser were aiming for an honest critique

The main takeway point from below?

So the bait and switch is as follows. By overstating the costs and understating the benefits of Express HSR, “it costs too much”, or is only useful in a very few special cases, and therefore we cannot afford its “transformative benefits”. And by ignoring the fact that the benefit of investing in Emerging HSR is greater than the cost, and focusing on dismissing the quality of the benefits, the Emerging HSR is “unworthy” of investment because it is not “transformative” enough.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism, xposted from My Left Wing

OK say, just hypothetically, that you are an administration looking to get one of your two signature policies passed. And the Senate, deeply entrenched in the pockets of the affected industry, looked like it will gut your legislation so badly that getting the result passed will stink of failure almost as much as the stench of failure if it is defeated.

Suppose its so bad that the Senate action is the most likely way for your party to lose the Majority in the House is for the disappointed Democratic supporters of so-called “Blue Dogs” to stay home in the midterms while fire up Republican opponents turn out in large numbers.

That would be the time to bring out the “nuclear option” … the threat to radically change the Senate Filibuster rule so it can no longer be used as a roadblock to reform.