Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Too inconsequential to be sued

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

We still have time to mess this up!

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

Word salad with all caps

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Yes we did.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

No one could have predicted…

The Math Demands It!

This blog will pay for itself.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Lighten up, Francis.

This Blog Goes to 11…

We have all the best words.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

Our job is not to persuade Republicans but to defeat them.

You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Glibertarianism

Glibertarianism

Open Thread: Cheap Laffs from the Peanut Gallery

by | 81 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Open Thread: Cheap Laffs from the Peanut GalleryPost + Comments (81)

Oscar lays off their underpants gnomes

by | 22 Comments

This post is in: , ,

 

February:

Oscar is able to get young and healthy people on an expensive network and high risk adjustment payments.  I can’t figure out their business model past the buzzwords.

March:

Oscar is incurring losses of roughly $145 Per Member Per Month (PMPM) in its biggest market.  It is charging roughly $190 PMPM in net premiums.  Some of the loss is due to risk adjustment (~$20 PMPM) as Oscar’s entire business strategy is to cater to tech savvy individuals who tend to be young and healthy…

I think there are two take-aways.  First, I still can’t figure out Oscar’s business model.

Secondly, setting up an insurance company or expanding an incumbent carrier into new lines of business and new areas is tough.

 May:

Oscar’s strategy has been to use their web/mobile technology platforms to be the hip/cool/disruptive insurer for the next generation.

The market segment that both of these plans seem to be aiming for are people who are fairly young, active, technologically savvy and very healthy….

Assuming a hypothetical individual could be covered by both insurers for the same treatment, Centene is paying significantly less per service than Harken because Centene’s basing its provider contracts on Medicaid rates instead of commercial or Medicare rates.

Centene and other Medicaid like Exchange providers are targeting roughly the same type of population but since they are much cheaper post subsidy, they are probably getting a far larger population to amortize their fixed costs over plus any service that they do need to pay for, they are paying for at a lower rate.

From here, I am having a hard time seeing how plans that have a “lifestyle” component can compete against Medicaid like Exchange providers.  Maybe it is different off-Exchange where everyone is paying full premium and “cheapness” is not a strong selling point.

June

I’ve been skeptical about Oscar as I can’t figure out their business model besides build a cool app and then profit???

Ohhh… no one has ever thought about medical management and early chronic care intervention.  My cube wall mate spends 90% of her time working on our algorithms to identify members who are likely to be expensive before they become expensive so that we can intervene. …

Oscar is trying to go narrow network or quasi-TPA support for health systems that want to run a home host insurance product that should allow them to control costs. But those strategies are common.  That is what I spent most of 2013 working on building hyper narrow networks for both Exchange and Commercial ESI.  That is what my 11:30 meeting tomorrow is about.

And August from Bloomberg:

Oscar, which pitches itself as a tech-savvy alternative to traditional health insurers, plans to end sales of Affordable Care Act plans in Dallas, a market it entered this year, and New Jersey. It’s part of a more conservative approach by the New York-based company as it plans to introduce insurance products for businesses next year….

The company said it’s quitting New Jersey mainly because its network of doctors, hospitals and other health providers isn’t a “narrow network” — a relatively closed, but lower cost, group of providers that many in the industry see as a way to keep expenses down….

In the interview, Schlosser said the company’s new plans focus more on Oscar’s strengths, particularly narrow networks. Along with lower costs, using more narrow networks gives the company a larger role in coordinating the care of its customers…

By the end of next year, Oscar wants to begin offering health plans for larger employers, Schlosser said.

I have not been able to figure out Oscar’s business model.  It was always a flashy app/front end with loads of good marketing and Venture Capital buzzword bingo, handwaving about disrupting the marketplace and then PROFIT!!!

The little bit about Oscar trying to go to the large group market segment is interesting as in some ways that is the easiest segment to operate.  Bills get paid on time, there is no risk adjustment payment flows to worry about and the population is comparatively health with comparatively low variance.  It is also a segment that is most inclined to want big networks and is the least price sensitive.  It is a hard market to get into but a fairly easy market to set up the plumbing for.

But as the reality that being an insurer is HARD sinks in, let us all have a moment of silence for all of the now laid off underpants gnomes who have nothing to do between deploying cool frontward facing tech and PROFIT.  They have a rough life so let us appreciate those gnomes.

Oscar lays off their underpants gnomesPost + Comments (22)

Weirdness Open Thread: Peter ‘Bathory’ Thiel Vants to Transfuse Your Plasma

by | 86 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

And here we all assumed Ayn Rand fanatic Thiel was just encouraging strapping young men to drop out of college and visit his palatial seasteading for the usual reasons. According to Inc:

More than anything, Peter Thiel, the billionaire technology investor and Donald Trump supporter, wants to find a way to escape death. He’s channeled millions of dollars into startups working on anti-aging medicine, spends considerable time and money researching therapies for his personal use, and believes society ought to open its mind to life-extension methods that sound weird or unsavory.

Speaking of weird and unsavory, if there’s one thing that really excites Thiel, it’s the prospect of having younger people’s blood transfused into his own veins.

That practice is known as parabiosis, and, according to Thiel, it’s a potential biological Fountain of Youth–the closest thing science has discovered to an anti-aging panacea. Research into parabiosis began in the 1950s with crude experiments that involved cutting rats open and stitching their circulatory systems together. After decades languishing on the fringes, it’s recently started getting attention from mainstream researchers, with multiple clinical trials underway in humans in the U.S. and even more advanced studies in China and Korea…

In Monterey, California, about 120 miles from San Francisco, a company called Ambrosia recently commenced one of the trials. Titled “Young Donor Plasma Transfusion and Age-Related Biomarkers,” it has a simple protocol: Healthy participants aged 35 and older get a transfusion of blood plasma from donors under 25, and researchers monitor their blood over the next two years for molecular indicators of health and aging. The study is patient-funded; participants, who range in age from late 30s through 80s, must pay $8,000 to take part, and live in or travel to Monterey for treatments and follow-up assessments…

Because the RNC convention was such a multi-ring circus, I never found time to link to the NYTimes essay on Thiel’s speech endorsing Trump there. “Peter Thiel’s Heroic Political Fantasies,” frankly, presented Thiel as someone who thinks of himself along the lines of the genetic vampires in Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight — a member of a predator species only distantly related to Homo Sap.

But that’s an unduly heroic fantasy. Thiel’s just another Dives trying to avoid the final judgement — during the first Gilded Age, he’d have been visiting Switzerland to have monkey glands (or the testicles of executed criminals) sewn into his scrotum.

Weirdness Open Thread: Peter ‘Bathory’ Thiel Vants to Transfuse Your PlasmaPost + Comments (86)

SATSQ: Conservative wonk edition

by | 132 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

Via Vox, an answer to stupid or evil:

This revisionism, according to Roy, points to a much bigger conservative delusion: They cannot admit that their party’s voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by conservative ideals.

“Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

No fucking shit.

At least it updates our priors to weight willfully blind if not stupid.

Open thread

SATSQ: Conservative wonk editionPost + Comments (132)

The value of 12 days

by | 46 Comments

This post is in: , ,

That is what this chart asks:

An $80,000 per course of treatment that is better than the previous regime. It providers, on median, an extra twelve days of life before half of the cohort dies.

Backing out some very rough calculations, that gives a quality adjusted life year cost of at least $2.5 million dollars. It could be much more as I am assuming that each day is a great day instead of probably a severely discounted day.
Update 1: Someone who actually knows WTF they are talking about passed me the Journal of Clinical Oncology CBA on this drug. I was off by a bit.

Incremental cost per life year saved
† 410,000
Incremental cost per qualityadjusted
life year
† (low impact
of diarrhea to high impact of
diarrhea)
430,000-510,000

For 2007 US Dollars.

In Great Britain, a drug that has an incremental improvement over regimes like this might be worth a couple thousand dollars. If the drug prolongs life but keeps a person in the ICU for the incremental days, its incremental value would be close to zero. If the twelve extra days on average are spent out of the hospital and in great shape, it might be worth $4,000.

In the United States, we are paying 625 100 times the British willingness to pay for a quality adjusted life year in this case.

Is that how we want to use our resources? If so, than be ready to see health care costs continue to accelerate. If not, then we need to change our intellectual property regime as well as incorporate and accept some systems of no in order to get the price for a drug like this down to reasonable levels.

The value of 12 daysPost + Comments (46)

KY and a dry screw

by | 13 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

Kentucky submitted their Medicaid Expansion waiver today. and it is a doozy.  There are a couple of interesting and potentially useful nuggets ( I liked the wrap-around policies so that a family that qualifies for multiple categories of aid stay on one plan for simplicity’s sake), a couple of things that I could live with but don’t like and then work requirements tied to health insurance which CMS has always shot down.

Below is a pair of screen shots from the cost justification section of the waiver that I found utterly fascinating.  The top shot is what the state projects will be the enrollment and cost per person per month (PMPM) growth without the waiver.  The  bottom is what the state projects would happen to enrollment and costs with the waiver.  The 1115 waiver is supposed to be at least budget neutral and coverage neutral.

TLDR: Fewer people enrolled at higher costs.

Let’s look at the data below the fold:

show full post on front page

KY and a dry screwPost + Comments (13)

Late Night Open Thread: Among the Wild Libertarians

by | 44 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Yes, it’s almost too easy a target. But then again, they’re Libertarians, so they should be used to it by now. The NYTimes:

… In a year when the two major parties are consumed by tensions, defections and chaos, the Libertarian Party, which sees itself as their alternative, displayed some of the same traits as it wrestled with nominating two former Republican governors for its presidential ticket at its annual convention over the weekend. But there was also a palpable sense of excitement at the event, held at a hotel here less than 10 miles from Disney World.

For an antiwar party that promotes legalizing marijuana and tearing up the tax code, 2016 has brought hope that acceptance in the political mainstream is imminent amid broad discontent with the probable nominees from the major parties.

The Libertarian Party is the country’s third largest by voter registration, excluding people who consider themselves independent, but it is often overlooked as a political sideshow with a hodgepodge of positions that many consider to be either overly liberal on social issues or too conservative fiscally…

Dave Weigel, at the Washington Post, is far more sympathetic:

ORLANDO — Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson won the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination on Sunday, fending off five rivals from different factions on two closely fought ballots and securing more than 55.8 percent of the total vote.

But Johnson’s near-miss on the first ballot kicked off an afternoon of protests and delegate glad-handing, with the vice presidential race to be decided later. Johnson had run a careful campaign with an eye on the general election, picking former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld — like him, a Republican who switched parties — as his running mate. In Saturday night’s debate, Johnson, alone among the top-five contenders, said that he would have signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and that he thought people should be licensed to drive cars. He was loudly booed for both positions…

Johnson’s rivals, especially Libertarian activist Austin Petersen and software engineer John McAfee, saw an opportunity to drag out the process. They briefly huddled on the convention floor and worked delegates, as Johnson had unfruitful conversations with critics and then walked outside for an interview with MSNBC…

(Earlier WaPo reports here and here.)

show full post on front page

Late Night Open Thread: Among the Wild LibertariansPost + Comments (44)

Peter Thiel Makes The Case For Confiscatory Taxation On Billionaires

by | 167 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

This broke over at Forbes and is bouncing around the ‘nets today:

Peter Thiel, a PayPal cofounder and one of the earliest backers of Facebook FB +0.49%, has been secretly covering the expenses for Hulk Hogan’s lawsuits against online news organization Gawker Media. According to people familiar with the situation who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, Thiel, a cofounder and partner at Founders Fund, has played a lead role in bankrolling the cases Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hogan, brought against New York-based Gawker. Hogan is being represented by Charles Harder, a prominent Los Angeles-based lawyer.

Whatever you think of Gawker, Hulk Hogan, or Thiel himself, this is yet one more way in which extreme income inequality destroys civic life. It’s actually worse than many, given the clandestine way it deepens the corruption of the system that could (in theory) provide a check on the damage that purchased legislative and executive branches can do.

Lazarus_in_Heaven_and_the_Rich_Man_in_Hell_LACMA_M.88.91.91

Here’s a take on the poison here revealed from Caterina Fake:

Champerty, as third-party litigation funding used to be called (and should probably be called again!) was formerly a crime, but the commercial litigation finance industry has been growing in recent years.

Fake notes that much of such litigation is actually a form of speculation, in which rich folks gamble on the possibility of significant payout.  One can imagine the “free market” argument that such funding levels the playing field, allows those who’ve suffered real harm to recoup, and thus makes the legal system a more efficient and effective dispute-settling and behavior-changing engine. But Thiel’s pursuit of Gawker illuminates what this leads to in the real world:

Generally, people avoid frivolous lawsuits because it often exposes them to as much scrutiny as those they sue, so what is significant about this case is that by funding Hogan behind the scenes, Thiel could get his revenge, escape exposure, and influence the outcome of the case.

For the very rich, this is a win however it goes, and damn the collateral damage.

Hogan’s lawyers made decisions against Hogan’s best interests, withdrawing a claim that would have required Gawker’s insurance company to pay damages rather than the company itself–a move that made Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s founder and CEO, suspect that a Silicon Valley millionaire was behind the suit.

I leave it to the actual lawyers to weigh in on the ethics (and consequences, if any) for such a litigation approach. For myself, I’ll note that what you have here is an insanely rich guy gaming the legal system to destroy a media outfit that pissed him off.

And with that, one more thought:  Franklin Roosevelt created the social welfare state in the US as an alternative to revolution.  Today’s plutocrats might want to think about that.  In plainer terms: to remain democracies, modern democractic states need to tax polity-buying wealth out of individual hands; income taxes and a levy on inheritances.  A 90% rate that kicks in well below an estate value of a billion bucks seems a good place to start.

A blogger can dream…

Image: Cornelius Bos, Lazarus in Heaven and the Rich Man in Hell, 1547.

Peter Thiel Makes The Case For Confiscatory Taxation On BillionairesPost + Comments (167)

Open Thread: Republicans Get Their Third-Party Challenge

by | 144 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

From his hometown paper, the Boston Globe:

Former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld will announce Thursday that he is running for vice president, rejecting the Republican Party of which he has long been a member in favor of the Libertarian Party ticket of another former GOP governor, Gary Johnson of New Mexico, campaign aides to Johnson said Wednesday.

The two former chief executives are expected to announce their partnership Thursday in New York City, the Johnson aides said, the latest sign of the national Republican Party’s struggle to come to grips with the party’s takeover by presumptive nominee Donald J. Trump.

The decision, first reported Wednesday by the Associated Press, took Weld’s business partners and the current Republican governor, his protégé Charlie Baker, by surprise.

Weld’s strategy, according to people with whom he has spoken, is to take advantage of the anticipated media attention paid to two former governors from different parts of the country joining forces, hoping to win sufficient support to land in the televised debates….

I have a not-as-hard-as-for-most-Repubs spot in my heart for Bill Weld, among the last of the old-time Moderate Northeastern Repubs (and the guy who signed the very nice form letter required before our Wiccan friend could legally perform our marriage ceremony in this state). He has every reason to despise the Frothing Rightwing Nutball wing of his former(ish) party, per the NYTimes:

… Mr. Weld’s best-known previous turn on the national stage was in 1997, when he resigned as governor to focus on his appointment by President Bill Clinton as ambassador to Mexico.

That did not go well: He was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms and withdrew his nomination after a heated battle in which Mr. Weld, a pillar of what was left of the moderate northeastern Republican establishment, loudly assailed Mr. Helms and the archconservatives who stood behind him.

A former prosecutor, Mr. Weld could appeal to some disaffected Republicans on a ticket alongside Mr. Johnson, at a time when other efforts by Republicans to recruit a third-party candidate — in part in the hopes of keeping anti-Trump Republican voters from staying home and costing the party’s lower-tier candidates — are close to fizzling…

I know next to nothing about Gary “420” Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, although I’m sure some of you can clue me in. (One reason Weld is a good choice: He gets attention from the ‘one of us’ Northeastern media claque.) The Libertarian National Convention will take place in Orlando over the Memorial Day Weekend, after which (assuming they beat their challengers; I’m assuming there will be challengers?) Johnson/Weld 2016 can start campaigning for the 15% polling level that will ensure them a spot at the national presidential debate…

It may be a portent that the news has already managed to get the Daily Caller overexcited…

Open Thread: Republicans Get Their Third-Party ChallengePost + Comments (144)

Open Thread: The Free Staters Are Coming (Again)

by | 182 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

Ah, a political splinter group which we can all agree deserves our mockery! From the Mother Jones article:

On February 18, hundreds of libertarians will flock to the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire, for the ninth annual Liberty Forum, a four-day conference featuring presentations on topics such as religious freedom, school choice, and “Anarchy: Dressing for Success.” A big draw will be Edward Snowden’s keynote speech, delivered over a live video stream. As the exiled NSA whistleblower speaks, conference goers may mull their own flight from government oppression—not to Russia, but to the haven of New Hampshire.

The Free State Project, which runs the Liberty Forum, has spent 15 years trying to recruit 20,000 libertarian-minded activists to take up residence in the Granite State. By accruing a critical mass of small-government advocates in a state with just 1.3 million people, the project seeks to exert substantial influence on state politics to create a utopia of social liberties and deregulated markets. Those who sign the Free State pledge promise to make the move to New Hampshire once 20,000 participants have signed up. Now, with 19,858 signers, the project’s organizers say they are finally recruiting the last of those volunteers.

However, the organizers readily admit they don’t know how many of the would-be Free Staters will actually come to New Hampshire. “That is the million-dollar question,” says Free State Project president Carla Gericke. “It’s all speculative at this stage.”…

I think that should be declared the official Libertarian motto: “It’s all speculative at this stage.”

Since [2003], 1,909 early movers have settled in New Hampshire, according to organizers. They have started a church, installed Bitcoin ATMs, and protested against an Uber ban. One Free Stater became a school board chairwoman and then used tax money to pay private school tuition for kids in her district. Free Staters in Grafton tried to declare their no-stoplight town a United Nations-free zone. In Keene, libertarian transplants upset old-timers by videotaping and challenging parking officers enforcing “the king’s tariff.”…

Still, it only became obvious recently that the project would hit its 20,000-pledge trigger. Last fall, after years of standing around conferences with clipboards and taking out advertisements in Reason magazine, the project’s organizers turned to Facebook. More than 2,500 new participants signed on during a four-month ad campaign targeting users who “liked” pages for Bitcoin, “voluntarism,” and George Carlin. In recent weeks, the group has ramped up its Facebook ad spending to $500 a day. Nearly 20 early movers have been arriving in New Hampshire each month—even in winter. “I really hope we can build something that’s historic,” Gericke says. “People are coming.”…

I’d like to hope that those Free State Projectors will spend the days between now and the NH primary harassing the media following the various GOP candidates, but I suspect they’re too busy screwing up the Sanders GOTV campaign. Nice enough people, individually, those Free Staters, but most of them could screw up a free lunch by asking for the change, as the proverb says.

Open Thread: The Free Staters Are Coming (Again)Post + Comments (182)

Open Thread: The Grift Dream Will Never Die!

by | 57 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

It says something about the sheer inanity of this year’s Repub field that Little Prince Rand can’t even get point-and-mock traction with stuff like this. Not to mention (via) Audit the Ted, because “the Ted Crus” receives funds from “the Goldmaine Sox”:

“I even like his hair!”

Open Thread: The <del>Grift</del> Dream Will Never Die!Post + Comments (57)

Good news everybody – a punchable face may get punched

by | 117 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

Good news everybody – a punchable face may get punchedPost + Comments (117)

Open Thread: Would That It Were So Easy

by | 101 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

Aaaand the Libertarian viewpoint, from Mr. Megan McArgleBargle…

…. because whatever happens among the wild things, he expects to come home to his comfy bed and find his supper waiting — still warm! (Between this & Cruz misunderstanding Green Eggs & Ham, maybe we should just keep Repubs away from the childens’ section entirely.)

Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Open Thread: Would That It Were So EasyPost + Comments (101)

I Am No Better, and Neither Are You

by | 98 Comments

This post is in: , ,

The sad, sad talking points after the GOP voted to allow people on the no-fly zone to continue to buy guns, because freedumb:

The Wisconsin Republican said part of the discussion surrounding mental health legislation is who should and shouldn’t have access to guns, but he signaled that barring gun purchases by people on no-fly terror lists — as President Obama urged Wednesday — is not an option.

Ryan said government officials put people on such lists without any due legal process and so denying those listed the right to bear arms would violate their rights.

“People have due process rights in this country,” he said.

Rubio too:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) says a majority of the people on the federal “no-fly list” do not belong there and therefore should not have their right to purchase firearms taken away.

“These are everyday Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism, they wind up on the no-fly list, there’s no due process or any way to get your name removed from it in a timely fashion, and now they’re having their Second Amendment rights being impeded upon,” Rubio said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

The GOP presidential hopeful said the lists are far from perfect and a poor measure of who should and should not have access to a gun.

“The majority of the people on the no-fly list are often times people that just basically have the same name as somebody else who doesn’t belong on the no-fly list,” he said. “Former Senator Ted Kennedy once said he was on a no-fly list. There are journalists on the no-fly list. There are others involved in the no-fly list that wind up there.”

My response:

THEN GET THEM OFF THE FUCKING LIST. Fer fuck’s sake, your ok with them staying on the list as long as it just fucks with their travel, but when it keeps them from buying a gun, well god damn, that can’t happen.

Fucking assholes.

I wish we had a constitutional right to not be gunned down by some sociopath with a gun. On the other hand, maybe this might finally motivate them to finally fix the damned list.

I Am No Better, and Neither Are YouPost + Comments (98)

Correlation Is Apparently In The Opposite Galactic Quadrant From Causation

by | 43 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

I’m relatively sure that a Five Thirty Eight piece on how Democrats are suppressing the vote by having off-year elections with the “advantage” of low turnout is the actual definition of peak data journalism.

Why do Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups prefer off-cycle elections? When school boards and other municipal offices are up for election at odd times, few run-of-the-mill voters show up at the polls, but voters with a particular interest in these elections — like city workers themselves — show up in full force. The low-turnout election allows their policy goals to dominate.

Anzia shows that off-cycle elections lead to higher salaries and better health and retirement benefits for teachers and public employees. Anzia studies these effects in many different ways. The simplest way is by looking at eight states that allow local governments to set their own election dates. She compares school districts that hold school board elections on-cycle and off-cycle within the same state. Controlling for factors that might make districts different from one another — like their population size, income, racial composition, partisan leanings and how urban or rural they are — Anzia found that the maximum base teacher salary is over 4 percent higher in districts with off-cycle elections.

Higher salaries and better benefits for municipal employees can be a good outcome. What is interesting is that this outcome is the result of a deliberate move to hold municipal elections at times when few voters are participating.

Proponents of the off-cycle strategy argue that local issues get drowned out when local elections are held concurrent with presidential or congressional elections. People who show up to vote in those big elections may not be equipped to weigh in on the local issues. Anzia quotes a Texas school official who defends off-cycle elections because they bring out “an educated voter … people who really care about the issues and who are passionate about their district.” In off-cycle elections, proponents claim, the electorate is a concentrated set of voters who are engaged in the local issues, which yields better results for the community.

For readers who are sympathetic to the perspective of the off-cycle election proponents (typically Democrats), it is worth noting that these are very much the same arguments that Republicans might make in favor of voting restrictions that make voting a little bit harder for the average American. Just like voter ID or voter-registration requirements, off-cycle elections impose a cost on political participation. The cost is evidently high, since very few people participate in local elections when they are held in odd-numbered years. Maybe the cost leads to a more enlightened electorate. Or maybe it is Democratic-sponsored voter suppression.

Even if you buy Eitan Hersh’s “gosh this is counter-intuitive!” Freakonomics argument here that low-turnout off-year local races favor Democrats (and not something far more reasonable like “larger urban centers tend to have more Democrats”), the act of comparing what Republicans are doing with actual voter suppression tactics now and over the last several decades to states that allow cities to vote in off-year races as equivalent to the point of making Democrats hypocrites over voter access is complete and utter nonsense.

This is because:

1) Democrats don’t pass laws specifically making it more difficult for people to vote by adding additional hurdles to make it more expensive for the voter to vote by imposing a photo ID requirement and then closing a bunch of DMV offices so those photo IDs are far more difficult to get.

2) “Having an election in an odd-numbered year” is not suppression. at most it’s an additional cost to a county elections board that is shared by all taxpayers and not just Republicans.

3) The Republican argument as to why photo ID voter laws are needed are based on junk science and are terrible because photo ID requirements wouldn’t have prevented the voter fraud Republicans keep complaining about that fuel these laws and…

4) Low-turnout elections favor Republicans and there’s reams and reams of data supporting that, which is why Republicans are trying to actively suppress urban Democratic party voters in the first goddamn place.

This whole idea is stupid on its face and serves only as High Broderism that hides the very real issue of Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters across the country.

Jesus hell, what an asshole.

PS, GO VOTE.  Frowny Bee wants you to vote.

 

Correlation Is Apparently In The Opposite Galactic Quadrant From CausationPost + Comments (43)