There is one thing that all Republicans know: Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster that is destroying the great system that we had before — “The best healthcare in the world!” But their real problem with it is not the policy. As I’ve discussed a lot around here: Obamacare is the most conservative healthcare reform that could work. All the supposed conservative alternatives since have been brainless ideology that would have made the situation worse — things like tort “reform” (not allowing patients to sue when they’ve been harmed) and allowing insurance across state lines (destroying local control and causing a race to the bottom).

The one thing that Republicans have focused on has been the individual mandate. And that has been a winner. The truth is that no one likes it. It’s like how people like Social Security but don’t like payroll taxes. But you can’t have one without the other. The individual mandate is what allows Obamacare to work. Otherwise, people would have an incentive to put off buying insurance until they were sick. This would result in the risk pool being expensive, resulting in high insurance costs. After all this time, you probably know the drill.

But the Republican hatred of Obamacare has no bounds. And there is no rationality to it, so they hate everything in the healthcare law. Of course, if someone mentions pre-existing conditions or coverage of college students, Republicans will always claim that they too will have those things once their replacement comes out — right after America turns into a land of fairies and elves and everyone gets all the cotton candy they want. But one thing Republicans only scoff at are the measures in the law designed to lower healthcare costs. And not surprisingly, no amount of data is going to stop them from thinking that.

A recent study reported in Health Affairs highlights the way that one of those measures is working. Michael Hiltzik has the details, Here’s Another Way Obamacare Is Changing US Healthcare for the Better. One way that healthcare costs more than it should is by not properly treating a patient. If a patient comes in with chest pains, gets released with antacids, and then comes back the next day with a heart attack, it costs a lot more money than if the chest pains had been properly treated in the first place.

Obamacare deals with this issue by cutting back on Medicare reimbursements to hospitals that have too many of these kinds of re-admissions. This is an especially big deal because hospitals are probably the single most dangerous place to be in terms of getting a disease. So there really is a lot that hospitals can do to improve the situation. The authors of the study looked at these re-admission rates and found that Obamacare really was changing behavior and reducing rates. Hooray!

This didn’t stop Paul Ryan — now chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — from saying this week, “The whole law’s a lemon.” But of course he would. For him, like all Republicans, the complete catastrophe of Obamacare is definitional. It’s interesting to contrast this with Medicare Part D. Many Democrats were against it. But after it was in effect and working as it was supposed to, the Democrats changed their position. But such open mindedness is asking far too much from Republicans.

Timothy Taylor wrote an article that answers a question that I’ve wondered about for a while, What Share Work for Large Employers? If we define a large employer as a company that has 500 or more employees, then there has been a shift in recent years toward large employers. In 2003, 49.3% of all American workers were at large employers; in 2012, it was 51.6%. All of the smaller employers have lost market share, but the biggest loser has been the smallest companies — those with fewer than 20 employees. This is very interesting, but hardly surprising.

Americans fetishizes the “small business.” It’s very much like the “family farm.” I’m not sure why this is. Having grown up in a small business family, I can tell you the myth is nothing like the reality. It reminds me of a second season episode of Bob’s Burgers, “Bob Day Afternoon.” In it, Mickey notes that it’s cool that Bob has his kids work at the restaurant, and Bob replies that it’s only because he doesn’t have to pay them. When I saw that, I figured that one of the writers had a childhood like mine.

The other part of this is that I saw my parents treat the actual employees they had fairly badly. And they were not at all exceptional — I’ve seen it countless times with employers I’ve had as well as ones I’ve observed from the outside. They live in constant fear of bankruptcy. They never feel secure, even when things are going really well. And they expect their employees to care as deeply about the business as they do. Sadly, employees often do feel deeply committed to the business. But they are rewarded with bad pay and treatment until they finally have enough.

Taylor presented data that indicates this — at least as regard to pay. The average pay for workers at small employers is $36,912. It goes up the larger the firm. For firms with over 500 employees, the average pay is $52,554. That’s a 42% higher pay rate. Of course, this is average and not median. Also, one might think that companies with more employees are more successful and therefore can pay more. But I suspect it is just that if you have a thousand employees, you need them to stick around. It is costly to replace people. If you have five employees, well, there’s always some guy straight out of prison or rehab or a homeless shelter who is desperate for job.

Over the last couple of days, Paul Krugman and Arindrajit Dube have been discussing this issue of why it is that Walmart is seeing benefits from raising its wages. And what they propose is that rather than increased wages just being a cost, it actually has a feedback. When people are being paid less than the value of their work, giving them a raise will increase productivity. In other words: poor workers will reward their companies for being treated reasonably.

Compare this to the rich. I’m constantly amazed at this ridiculous conservative canard that if we raise taxes on the rich then they will stop working so much. I remember seeing a cartoon that summed this up. There were two corpulent rich guys laying by a swimming pool. One of them said, “I’ll tell you this: if they raise the capital gains tax, this is one coolie who won’t be breaking his back!” The truth is if a CEO is getting paid a million dollars per year, he isn’t going to be better at his job if you pay him ten million. In fact, such outrageous salaries are likely to make people complacent. I know if someone paid me $10 million per year, I’d quit after the first year and start a repertory company.

But it is always the best paid people who are the focus of company larges. And despite recent moves by Walmart and Target, I doubt that this is changing. It would be nice to think that these companies are starting to realize that having a strong middle class is actually good for them. It certainly would be good for the economy as a whole. But there is always money to be made next quarter for the CEO who keeps wages down, even if it is terrible in the long term. So I’m not keen about the economy’s move toward bigger employers. Even if they are better to their employees than the little companies are.

We Democrats all admire Obama. But unlike the stereotype, we don’t worship him. We’ve had a lot of problems with many of his policies. And I do mean “we.” Obviously, as a functional Democrat — I’m a member of the party because it is the more liberal of the two major parties, not because I agree with it — I have even bigger problems with President Obama. But he has never been so clearly outside the current thinking of the Democratic Party as he is on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). So now was a really good time for the Democrats in the House of Representatives to say what needed to be said, “Suck. On. This.”

Here’s what’s happened. There aren’t enough Republicans in the House who are willing to give fast track authority for the TPP. So in order to win over Democrats, the House has tried to pass the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA). This is a program that is supposed to help workers who are displaced by the TPP. Now you have to wonder, if the TPP is going to be so great, why does it need a special program to help workers who will be laid off. What’s more, we’ve seen this same thing in previous trade deals. And as much as it works, it only ends up in allowing workers to find worse jobs. From my perspective, it is just a matter of providing political cover to politicians.

When the House voted on the TAA today, it went down to a stunning defeat: 126-302. The House plans to try voting on it again next week, but clearly Obama has a very big hill to climb. Assuming that the Republicans stay where they are, Obama will have to win over 92 of the 144 Democrats who voted no today. It’s curious because TAA is something that Democrats agree on. In theory, it is a good program. So the vote against it is a vote to stop the TPP. It’s interesting to note the other bill today, the TPA (Trade Promotion Authority — fast track) was passed by a very small minority. The Republicans are eager to screw over the American worker with TPP, but don’t want to provide even the lame TAA to make it slightly less painful.

The TPA still has a very good chance of going through. And a big part of the problem can be found in Greg Sargent’s article on the vote Friday morning, Liberals Plot New Way to Blow Up Obama’s Trade Deal. Apart from the obvious bias in the headline, Sargent consistently refers to proponents of TPP as “pro-trade” — implying that opponents are “anti-trade.” This is absolutely untrue. In fact, an argument can be made that exactly the opposite is true. But this has been the line from The Washington Post all along: nonstop TPP apologetics. It’s sad to see it coming from a reasonable guy like Sargent.

I’m sure that Obama will continue to push the TPP along. Frankly, there doesn’t seem to be anything during his presidency that he’s felt so strongly about. I don’t remember him working so hard on Obamacare or the Public Option. Then it always seemed that whatever would be, would be. He was the zen president. But this, he thinks, will be totally fantastic. And for him it might be. But if he gets it, he may end up with a Johnson legacy: Obamacare was good, but unfortunately, he saddled us with that horrible TPP that Scott Walker eventually tweaked to make even worse.

But I could be wrong! Just because the TPP is being sold with the exact same arguments — often in the exact same words — doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to be totally different than those. If Obama weren’t just the second coming of Bill “we will no longer accept uneven trading relationships” Clinton, I might be inclined to rethink it. But TPP will be the same as all the trade deals that went before. It will be hugely successful at making the rich richer and poor poorer. That will be your legacy Mr President. You must be so proud.

You may remember the 2010 documentary, Inside Job. It was about the 2008 financial crisis. It was a lot of fun. On the other hand, it gave the wrong idea about the crisis. It made it all about bad bankers. While that was true, if it hadn’t been for the bursting of the housing bubble, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. But one thing highlighted in the film was very true: Iceland was pounded by the financial crisis — worse than almost any other country. So why is it that we don’t hear much about Iceland anymore? Well, because they weathered the storm far better than pretty much any other country.

Matt Yglesias wrote about how all this came to be, Iceland Put Bankers in Jail Rather Than Bailing Them Out — and It Worked. Iceland managed to make its crisis relatively mild regarding its workers and then improved very quickly. He provided the classic comparison between Iceland and Ireland. The latter country is held up throughout Europe as an exemplar — as though it were the well behaved child in the kindergarten. Iceland is now almost back to its normal pre-crisis unemployment. Ireland — which did everything the plutocrats said was “right” — still have an unemployment rate that is almost six percent points above its pre-crisis level.

So how did Iceland manage this? Well, to be honest, it didn’t really have much to do with jailing bankers. But let’s not cast that off. Jailing bankers really will help prevent another crisis. In Iceland. In the rest of the advanced world, bankers were coddled and so have every reason to do the same thing again. But that whole thing about not bailing out the banks? That was big. Dean Baker has dealt with this issue, The Myth that Sold the Financial Bailout. But the main this is that the power elite who run our government cared about saving the bankers — not the banking system.

One of the ways that Iceland dealt with the fallout from the banking collapse was to use good old Keynesian style demand side policy. The government racked up loads of debt to get through the crisis. While all over America and Europe, people were shouting about the clearly wrong Reinhart and Rogoff 90% debt cliff, Iceland was calmly pushing its debt to GDP ratio over 100%. And then, as its economy got better, its debt started coming down. This year, it is in the mid-80%.

Iceland also did something that I’ve been screaming about for years: it allowed its inflation rate to go up. This was especially important for them, and inflation went up to a very troubling almost 20% annualized rate one month, and in the mid-teens for about a year. But it is back to about what ours is: 2%. The difference is that we’ve been laser focused on inflation. It has never been even as high as 4% annualized rate for a month since the crisis. And most of the time, it’s been less than 2%. This, of course, has been great for the rich. It’s been a catastrophe for workers.

Iceland also imposed capital controls: restricting the movement of money from the country. In fact, that’s the big news: Iceland is in the process of lifting its capital controls, which ought to give the economy another boost. I don’t think that capital controls were much of an option in the United States. But the takeaway from all this is that there were lots of options for how we dealt with the bursting of the housing bubble. We chose to do those things that kept the rich rich and did as little as possible for working Americans. Democracy in America!