“Other federal guidelines limit the amount of benzene that manufacturing plants can emit, or set standards for transporting benzene on the nation’s highways… Without specific rules to help them, health authorities confronted with oil spills usually turn to these disparate guidelines and scientific studies to decide whether an evacuation is needed.”

“After oil spills, public health decisions usually fall to county or state officials. In Mayflower, those decisions were made by the Arkansas Department of Health (ADH), which set a benzene threshold of 50 ppb… InsideClimate News tried to compare that 50 ppb guideline with guidelines established by other agencies, but found that it was virtually impossible to make a direct comparison.”

The post Feds Absent on Oil Spill Health Issues appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“Set aside, for a moment, the explosive issue of black or brown versus white, which underpins much of the discussion about affirmative action… Having lived in the United States for almost thirty years, I am always amazed that Americans persist in believing that this is a land of unparalleled opportunity and social mobility… for all too many working-class Americans—and a lot of them aren’t members of minority groups—U.S. society is less of a launchpad than a glue trap.”

“The motivating force wouldn’t be righting the wrongs of slavery… It would be a desire to make real the vision of a society in which rewards are based on effort and talent, rather than family connections. And that, surely, should be something that even some conservatives could sign onto.”

The post Why Affirmative Action Is So Important appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“NEPA forces officials to consider the environment before approving federal projects… In early 2010, the White House suggested it would make an update to NEPA that would require counting greenhouse gas emissions among the impacts worthy of a NEPA review. But those standards have been on ice ever since they were written.”

“Several former U.S. officials said the White House is at least a year away from blessing a climate change component of NEPA – if such a move is taken at all.”

The post White House Continues to Weigh Climate Change Options appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“But given the US GDP is growing, while Europe is in a recession, can it make any sense to downgrade the US?  Remember, the rating agencies claim their ratings are RELATIVE measures of risk.  In other words, the rating agencies are ranking each country relative to other countries.”

“Our guess is that what’s happening here is the result of a fair share of awkwardness surrounding a situation in which many of the rating agencies’ outstanding ratings may not reflect their current opinions.  If they delayed implementing the downgrade since the US first failed to meet the relevant criteria necessary to maintain the AAA rating, they would now look a little silly downgrading so long after the fact, now that the economy has stabilized, or turned the corner.”

The post Are the Credit Rating Agencies Too Much Too Late? appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“Several states — including California, Oregon and New York — have already set up exchanges, secured vendors, built system infrastructure and created Web sites to educate consumers. These states are now shifting their focus to developing marketing and outreach strategies for the new systems.”

“States that have opted to use federally provided health insurance marketplaces are still awaiting the exchanges, and concerns persist over whether these exchanges will integrate with state health and human service computer systems.”

The post Setting Up Obamacare Exchanges Comes Down to the Wire appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“For those who would look to Congress to keep open, and expand, the right to vote for the presidency and for members of Congress, Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for a majority (seven to two on several points, six to three on one other very key point) promised that Congress could pass its own laws on the voter registration process, and states would have to yield to those.”

“On the particular point at issue in this case…the Scalia opinion said that a state was free to ask the federal government for permission to add that requirement.   And, Scalia said, if that doesn’t work — either because the federal agency that would deal with such a request is either not functioning or says no — then a state would be free to go to court… The opinion seemed to leave little doubt that, if Arizona or another state went to court to try to establish such a constitutional power, it might well get a very sympathetic hearing.”

The post Arizona Voting Case Raises More Questions appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“The number of people living in fire-prone areas has grown dramatically… State and local governments are mostly in charge of deciding whether to develop this land. Yet the federal government picks up the biggest piece of the tab for fire suppression and protection — now spending about $3 billion per year.”

“For starters, the feds can tighten fire standards and building codes for homes in these areas. Congress could also limit the mortgage-interest deduction for homes built in especially vulnerable regions — or require homeowners to buy federal fire insurance.”

The post Smart Policy Can Reduce Damage From Wildfires appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

– Gavyn Davies looks at the recent surge in “short rates” 3 to 5 years our (in green, purple, and light blue), arguing that “the Fed has lost control of the ‘instantaneous’ rates which are built into the shape of the yield curve.”

“The problem is that, once the market starts to believe that the Fed is ‘done’, it will inevitably start to build into the yield curve a rising probability that the FOMC will embark on a normal path of tightening before too long… The Fed has of course said that it will keep short rates at near zero until the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.5 per cent, subject to projected inflation remaining under 2.5 per cent. One way of forcing home the message that this will not happen soon would be to reduce the unemployment threshold to 6.0 per cent.”

Cullen Roche pushes back against recent reporting on “surging” interest rates: “People who don’t understand the monetary system are still making the same old tired ‘bond vigilante’ argument… Stop panicking.  Things aren’t nearly as bad as they want you to think.”

The post Chart of the Day appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“Democratically elected governments in Europe, Latin America, and Asia are going to be expected to take steps to safeguard their own citizens’ privacy vis-a-vis the United States. Ideally that would take place through the mechanism of international privacy protection agreements that allow us to keep the international internet that we know and love. But if it’s not possible to reach agreement, then U.S.-based tech firms are going to find themselves subject to overlapping and contradictory regulatory schemes.”

“The status quo in which American companies operate as a stalking horse for foreign intelligence operations isn’t going to be sustainable.”

The post NSA Spying Chills Globalization appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“Both approaches would give employers a big incentive to hire legalized immigrants in order to dodge ObamaCare’s fines for failing to provide affordable, comprehensive health coverage to workers. That’s because such fines may be levied based on the number of full-time employees who actually get subsidized coverage via ObamaCare’s exchanges.”

“For each subsidized worker, many employers will owe a $3,000 nondeductible fine, which equates to $5,000 in wages for a profit-making firm that pays a combined 40% federal and state tax rate.”

The post Why Obamacare Should Cover Newly Documented Immigrants appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“I expect no policy change following the FOMC meeting with the Fed continuing to purchase $85 billion in longer-term Treasury and agency mortgage-backed securities per month… I expect Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to argue we still need to see ‘substantial improvement’ in the labor market, and to note the downside risks to the economy, especially from current fiscal policy.”

Jon Hilsenrath and Phil Izzo: “At the conclusion of its two-day policy meeting on Wednesday, the Fed will release its updated projections of growth, inflation and unemployment. The evolution of these forecasts is a critical issue… If they maintain confidence in their economic forecasts, it could signal they think they’re on track to begin pulling back the program later this year.”

“A number of these economists believe the Fed will be disappointed by growth again—as it has so many times in this four-year-old recovery—and that a pullback in the bond-buying program will come later rather than sooner.”

The post What to Expect From the FOMC Meeting appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“Expensing investments and taxing earnings moves the income tax code a long way in the direction of a tax on consumption rather than on incomes. The basic efficiency advantage of consumption taxes is that they do not distort the decision to consume now rather than consume later since the returns on savings and investments are not taxed. By contrast, income taxes do distort this decision since they tax the incomes earned on savings as well as the incomes that led to the savings.”

“Whether ones moves to a consumption tax or not, taxes should be simpler and flatter because that would reduce the large cost of tax compliance, and encourage greater investment and work effort. A reasonable proposal that would maintain progressivity yet have a much flatter tax structure would be to have only two or three tax rates.”

The post What Would Tax Reform Look Like? appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“While it is true that an American communication can be accidentally intercepted after an analyst makes a decision to intercept a foreign communication, it would be just plain illegal for an analyst who believes that his or her target is an American to begin the interception process, the content interception process, without a FISA warrant.”

“The NSA has a bit of a safe harbor period — details classified — if certain conditions — details classified — are met, when it comes to an emergency interception of a domestic end of a telephone call or e-mail. Think: an actual ticking time bomb scenario. But…if the FISA court refuses to issue a warrant, the interception would stop… If there’s emergency situation involving an American, NSA sends a bulletin to the FBI through the National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia and lets them deal with it.”

“If you’re an agent of a foreign power, or there’s a reason to believe you’re associated with a group of bad guys and you’re not a U.S. person, the NSA can indeed begin to intercept your communications without a FISA order in certain, classified circumstances.”

The post The Legal Limits of NSA Surveillance appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“The new inequality is about capital owners and non-capital owners. And increasingly, it’s about technology capital owners. Those who own the robots and the tech are becoming the new landlord rentier types… The owners of the capital — which has the potential to create abundance — are protecting their rate of profit by stalling efficiency (a la patent trolling) and by means of the monopolisation effect.”

“This may not go on forever if the rise of technology jumps over into the Wiki open commons world… But for as long as the monopolies exist and gate-keep access to the higher living standards provided by their own technology, some sort of subsidising effect is needed from the government to stop people becoming totally disenfranchised from the system… or governments should work harder to dissipate the tech-based monopolies which are emerging.”

The post Is More Education Enough Anymore? appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“It’s illogical to compare Social Security to a ‘ponzi scheme’.  Ponzi schemes run out of funding at some point.  But the US government can’t run out of dollars so that’s clearly wrong.  Now, it could make the dollar worthless by creating too many of them, but that’s very different than running out of dollars.”

“I am not saying there’s a free lunch here.  Absolutely not.  But if we’re going to have an intelligent debate about all of this we should at least start by understanding what the real debate is about.  This isn’t about whether we have the ability to fund Social Security.  This is is about understanding the real constraint on our government (the inflation constraint) and how we are going to balance government spending with the side effect of inflation.”

The post Why Social Security Is Not a Ponzi Scheme appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“NSA is almost certainly using the data it gathers under PRISM and from Verizon (and perhaps other carriers) solely for identifying potential terrorism or espionage threats to the United States… But perception can sometimes matter as much as reality, and some overseas observers appear to believe that the NSA surveillance has an economic component.”

Benjamin Wittes: “the U.S. position on cybersecurity is not exactly a model of consistency—amounting in effect to shock that anyone would conduct cyber attacks on us. Our position on espionage is similar: We engage in it unapologetically for our strategic purposes but we object strenuously to other countries—whose strategic purposes may be more economic than ours—conducting espionage against our companies.”

The post NSA Leaks Will Increase Cyber Espionage Against the US appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

The post Wild Horse Wars appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“Most observers knew QE2 was coming well before the Fed made its official announcement. It may well be that at least some of the reduction in interest rates in the months prior to the announcement in fact reflected an anticipation of what everybody saw coming… One sees the same pattern in…the current bond-buying program (often called QE3). Rates dropped prior to the bond purchases, with little discernable change after the announcement itself.”

“And just as a weak economy was the primary reason the Fed embarked on QE3, a strengthening economy will be the primary reason the Fed ends it. And if the economy is strengthening, interest rates will be headed up, regardless of whether the Fed keeps buying bonds or not. It’s worth emphasizing that the recent rise in interest rates has been a global phenomenon, not just something seen in the United States.”

“If you want to claim that the recent rise in rates is just an anticipation of what the Fed is going to do, the story has to be that the U.S. Federal Reserve is causing the whole world to move.”

The post Don’t Blame the Fed for Rising Interest Rates appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

– The New York Times charts the spike in college graduates in the US in the wake of the Great Recession, after “more than two decades of slow growth in college completion, which caused the United States to fall behind other countries.”

“The increases appear to be driven both by a sharp rise in college enrollment and by an improvement among colleges in graduating students.”

Matthew Yglesias: “This brings a more precise datapoint to bear on an argument I made last year about why I don’t agree with people who say we’ve had stagnating living standards for the past 40 years… And it’s true that published inflation-adjusted wage and income series appear to show substantial stagnation. But if you look at actual quantities consumed it’s very hard to see where this stagnation is happening.”

“We’ve increased our consumption of goods and services, men work fewer hours per year than they used to, and women have more career opportunities. There are a lot of problems, but the trajectory is positive even in the ‘technological frontier’ countries.”

The post Chart of the Day appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“Would-be competitors have some catching up to do… Myriad should have tons of data it’s collected from two decades of providing the testing almost exclusively… Opening up testing to more companies was one of the major reasons Myriad Genetics’ opponents had sued the company in the first place.”

“The human body doesn’t naturally make cDNA like the synthetic BRCA1 and BRCA2 that Myriad makes—but viruses are able to make cDNA. The Supreme Court ruling addressed this by saying that it’s a rare phenomenon. But how rare is rare enough? This issue may make its way to courts in the future… In addition, cDNA may not hold up to patent challenges in the future because the methods for making cDNA are well known and commonly used.”

The post Court Ruling Leaves Open Questions on Gene Patenting appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“To recap, the goal of that policy is to ensnare Iran and Hezbollah into a protracted, resource-draining civil war, with as minimal costs as possible.  This is exactly what the last two years have accomplished…. at an appalling toll in lives lost.”

“Arming the rebels is not the same thing as a no-fly zone or any kind of ground intervention.  This is simply the United States engaging in its own form of asymmetric warfare.  For the low, low price of aiding and arming the rebels, the U.S. preoccupies all of its adversaries in the Middle East. The moment that U.S. armed forces would be required to sustain the balance, the costs of this policy go up dramatically, far outweighing the benefits.”

The post Arming Syria’s Rebels Won’t Lead to Another US War appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“Polls have shown that the public is largely ignorant about the law and how it operates… It also means that congressional offices — Republican and Democratic— are likely to face a slew of calls from people learning about their benefits for the first time.”

“A few GOP lawmakers said they are not preparing for a lot of calls, or haven’t thought about what to do. GOP leaders have not issued detailed instructions to their members on how to handle ObamaCare inquiries… There are some Republicans who plan to answer constituents’ questions, however.”

The post Republicans Divided on Constituents’ Obamacare Inquiries appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

Tuesday, June 18
8:30 AM: Housing Starts for May. Total housing starts were at 853 thousand (SAAR) in April, 16.5 percent below the revised March estimate of 1.021 million… The consensus is for total housing starts to increase to 950 thousand (SAAR) in May.
8:30 AM: Consumer Price Index for May. The consensus is for a 0.2% decrease in CPI in May and for core CPI to increase 0.2%.

Wednesday, June 19
2:00 PM: Federal Open Market Committee policy statement.  No change to interest rates or QE purchases is expected at this meeting.
2:00 PM: FOMC forecasts. This will include the FOMC participants’ projections of the appropriate target federal funds rate along with the quarterly economic projections.
2:30 PM: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke holds a press conference following the FOMC announcement.

Thursday, June 20
10:00 AM: Existing Home Sales for April from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The consensus is for sales of 5.00 million on seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) basis. Sales in April were at a 4.97 million SAAR.

Friday, June 21
10:00 AM: Regional and State Employment and Unemployment (Monthly) for May 2013.

The post The Weekly Numbers appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“The United States government leaks like a sieve. Presidents denounce the constant flow of classified information to the media from unauthorized, anonymous sources. National security professionals decry the consequences. And yet the laws against leaking are almost never enforced. Throughout U.S. history, fewer than a dozen criminal cases have been brought against suspected leakers. There is a dramatic disconnect between the way our laws and our leaders condemn leaking in the abstract and the way they condone it in practice.”

“This article challenges the standard account of this disconnect, which emphasizes the difficulties of apprehending and prosecuting offenders, and advances an alternative theory of leaking. The executive branch’s ‘leakiness’ is often taken to be a sign of institutional failure. The article argues it is better understood as an adaptive response to external liabilities (such as the mistrust generated by presidential secret-keeping and media manipulation) and internal pathologies (such as overclassification and bureaucratic fragmentation) of the modern administrative state.”

“The leak laws are so rarely enforced not only because it is hard to punish violators, but also because key institutional actors share overlapping interests in maintaining a permissive culture of classified information disclosures. Permissiveness does not entail anarchy, however, as a nuanced system of informal social controls has come to supplement, and all but supplant, the formal disciplinary scheme. In detailing these claims, the article maps the rich sociology of governmental leak regulation and explores a range of implications for executive power, national security, democracy, and the rule of law.”

The post Abstract of the Week appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.

“Some economists and politicians have pushed the idea that Obamacare is leading to increased uncertainty in the business world and that this uncertainty is preventing business leaders from investing… there is one sector in which this story makes sense and at least a casual look at the data supports it – that is health care itself… look at health care equipment. Nice steady growth until a swoon from 1992 until 1995. Then rapid growth until around 2007. Note that the spending slowdown here predates the Great Recession.”

“A story here is that the swoon in 1992 and the stagnation after 2006 were both caused by political uncertainty… The government began talking about the need to reign in health care costs. Providers got nervous and reduced investment. This in turn slowed the growth of health care costs. Slower health care inflation caused the overall inflation rate to fall and the Fed responded by reducing interest rates and increasing investment in structures and transportation equipment.”

The post Does Health Care Uncertainty Boost Economic Growth? appeared first in Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire on rollcall.com.