The New York Times had an interesting piece that reported on the ways in which Uber uses techniques learned from behaviorial economics to get drivers to work longer hours than they might want. The article concludes by saying that with changes in the economy, many workers may have no choice but to rely on Uber jobs.

In this context, it is worth mentioning the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve Board has raised interest rates twice in the last four months because it is concerned that the economy is creating too many jobs. It is expected to raise interest rates three more times this year.

If people consider it bad that workers have few options other than working for Uber, they should be very upset that the Fed is raising interest rates. These interest rates are helping to ensure that millions of workers have limited job opportunities.

–Dean Baker
Uber and the Federal Reserve Board

After Antonin Scalia died, in February of 2016, Mitch McConnell justified his decision to blockade the vacancy on the grounds that neither party would approve a Supreme Court justice during an election year. (The truth is that there was simply little precedent for this either way.) McConnell was simply acting on a “principle” that, he explained, had been understood by all sides but never ratified in a formal way. …

A good test of any principle is whether the person claiming it is willing to make it apply to all circumstances going forward. If McConnell were willing to make “fill no election-year vacancies” a formal rule, it would hardly prove his good faith — he might have embraced the rule as a post hoc rationale for his power play — but it would be at least consistent with the idea McConnell was acting in good faith. And he would be binding himself, and his party, to the “rule” he forced Obama to follow, that a president may fill only those Supreme Court vacancies that occur during the first three years of a four-year term.

But instead McConnell simply brushed off the idea of making it a rule… …

So, no rule. McConnell blockaded the Supreme Court vacancy because he had the votes to do it. There’s no principle guiding Supreme Court nominations other than: “Does the president have 50 Senate votes?”

Instead of trying to understand the Calvinball rules, Democrats should work within the order that exists. Which means they have to filibuster Neil Gorsuch, and let McConnell formally eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, so that they can confirm their nominees with 50 votes, too.

–Jonathan Chait
Mitch McConnell Admits the “Rule” That Blocked Merrick Garland Is Not Actually a Rule

The health bill, the travel ban, and the border wall are all either defeated or in deep trouble. As veteran Washington consultant David Gergen put it, Trump is “flailing because he doesn’t know where to find his natural allies.”

But if this is so, surely it is partly because the policies are so unpopular. Take health care: Many blame House conservatives for tanking the GOP bill. But more pragmatic GOP lawmakers also played a big role. They opposed it in large part because the policy was so regressive that even they could not abide by it. The plan would have cut over $800 billion in Medicaid spending — which would have left 14 million fewer on Medicaid, according to the Congressional Budget Office — while delivering an enormous tax cut for the rich.

A number of moderate House Republicans opposed the plan precisely because it would have taken coverage away from many of their poorer constituents. Moderates were also alienated in part because the plan was broadly unpopular: A recent poll found that only 17 percent of voters backed the plan, and core Trump voter groups opposed it. The Medicaid cuts were a key reason for that: 74 percent of voters, including 54 percent of Republicans, opposed its Medicaid cuts — revealing broad opposition to its most prominent mechanism for massively rolling back spending to cover poor people. …

Something similar is happening on the travel ban and border wall. The original travel ban, which was blocked by the courts, was the result of a laughably slapdash process that could not conceal its anti-Muslim animus. The new version was also put on hold, in part because Trump and his advisers themselves revealed that its true rationale and goals were very similar, thus making it just as vulnerable to legal challenges, even as its stated rationale has been undercut by Homeland Security’s own analysts. (The fact that there’s no serious rationale for it may help explain why it’s unpopular.) Meanwhile, the wall on the Mexican border may also stumble over one of Trump’s big lies. He claimed Mexico will pay for it, but now that Congress actually has to do so, Republicans are privately saying they don’t really want to fight for that spending. The fact that the wall is also very unpopular probably makes this easier for them. …

Why is Trump tanking? The bottom line is that the ongoing translation of Trump’s agenda into policy specifics is showing that major elements of it are unpopular, or unworkable because they are premised on lies, or both.

–Greg Sargent
Why Is Trump Flailing? Because Americans Hate His Agenda, and It’s Based on Lies.

Last week, we published documents that definitively debunked and disproved a claim that numerous media outlets had circulated and affirmed for years: that Edward Snowden lied about where he was during his first 11 days in Hong Kong. Contrary to the fable these outlets dispensed to their readers — that Snowden did not check in to the Mira Hotel on May 21 as he claimed but only did so on June 1, 11 days later — these new documents, obtained from the Mira, prove that Snowden arrived there exactly when he always said, rendering their published stories factually false. …

Even the best and most careful journalists get things wrong sometimes. But the minimal requirement for journalistic credibility and integrity is acknowledging and fixing mistakes. When the debate over Fake News first emerged, advocates of the term insisted that it was this attribute — a willingness to admit and correct errors — that distinguishes credible news outlets that sometimes err from fakes and frauds.

Yet in this case, only one of the media outlets that published what is now a significant and documented falsehood — Brazil’s Folha — has even acknowledged these new documents. In Folha‘s case, they did so lamely and grudgingly: Rather than add an editor’s note or correction to their original story by reporter Igor Gielow (which still stands uncorrected), they published a short news article about these new hotel documents, which merely noted that I claim that these new documents “resolve a mystery” about Snowden. The Folha article also neglects to note that they were one of the outlets originally publishing the false story. But at least they said something.

That stands in stark contrast to all the US outlets that published this falsehood and yet, 10 days later, have said literally nothing, continuing to allow what they now know is a factually false story to remain online uncorrected. They have simply refused even to address or acknowledge this new evidence. That includes the newspaper that first printed this falsehood and then re-published it most frequently — The Wall Street Journal — but also outlets such as Business Insider, Yahoo! News, and Slate… …

If you publish serious claims without any basis that mislead readers, and then refuse to acknowledge new evidence that disproves your original claims — all because you dislike the people you originally smeared with falsehoods too much to correct your error or because you hope the embarrassment will disappear faster if just you ignore it — why should anyone view you as being different than Macedonian teenagers or “alt-right” conspiracy sites? What are the cognizable differences?

A vibrant and powerful fact-checking media is supposed to be one of the great safeguards against demagoguing authoritarians and assaults on democratic institutions. That only works if they earn the trust that they need to fulfill that function.

–Glenn Greenwald
Why Has Trust in Media Collapsed? Look at Actions of WSJ, Yahoo, Business Insider and Slate.

Afterword

Greenwald noted in an update that the media outlets Slate and Business Insider have added corrections. I don’t think the Slate correction is nearly good enough. Business Insider did it right: in bold at the beginning of the article. But apparently, they haven’t done it on all the articles.

Now that repealing and replacing Obamacare has failed, Republicans in Congress say they are moving on to something different: tax reform. They are actually moving on to the same thing all over again. The American Health Care Act was a plan to give high-income Americans a big tax cut that would be financed with cuts to health-care subsidies for low- and middle-income people. Tax reform, at least as Paul Ryan and his allies envision it, is a plan to give high-income Americans an even bigger tax cut, financed by tax increases on lower- and middle-income Americans. Both plans are deeply unpopular (a poll found Americans opposing tax cuts for the wealthy by a three-to-one margin) and also have drawn opposition from powerful lobbies (in the case of tax reform, retailers violently oppose the border-adjustment tax that would offset much of the lost revenue).

Republican debates about tax policy are shrouded in a mist of obfuscation, since the party’s central goal, reducing taxes for the rich, is too unpopular to be described frankly. Instead, the intra-party strategy has been hashed out euphemistically, which has made the media coverage difficult to decipher. The terms “tax reform” and “tax cuts” have been thrown around almost interchangeably to describe the Republican plans. They’re very different. Tax reform is what Ryan and many of his allies say they’ll do, and possibly want to do. Tax cuts are what they will do.

Tax reform means a revenue-neutral adjustment of the tax code, which cleans out tax deductions and other preferences, and uses the revenue gained by this to reduce tax rates. The attraction of tax reform is that it avoids a drawback in Senate rules. The only kind of legislation that can pass the Senate by a majority vote, without being filibustered, is a budget-reconciliation bill. But these budget-reconciliation bills can’t increase the budget deficit after ten years. That requirement forced the Bush tax cuts to phase out after a decade. Republicans hope to avoid this fate by writing a bill that does not increase the long-run deficit. Hence their stated desire to pass tax reform rather than tax cuts. …

Why would Ryan attempt to shepherd into law a bill so dangerous, creating many times more losers than winners? Because Ryan does not want to settle for ten years of lower taxes that will expire automatically when he could have a permanent decrease. (Leave aside the fact that a “permanent” tax reform could be rewritten the next time Democrats win full control of government.) Ryan has repeatedly described the current government as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity.” Remember, the 1986 Tax Reform Act passed with bipartisan support. If Ryan wanted a 1986-type bill, the current all-Republican government wouldn’t be such a unique chance. Opportunities to pass bipartisan legislation arise all the time. In 2014, Dave Camp, the retiring chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, produced a plan that reformed the tax code without lessening the burden on rich people. The Republican Party pretended it never happened. That’s because tax reform is not their goal. Tax redistribution is.

–Jonathan Chait
Tax Reform Is Hard. Tax Cuts Are Easy.

Congress sent proposed legislation to President Trump on Tuesday that wipes away landmark online privacy protections, the first salvo in what is likely to become a significant reworking of the rules governing Internet access in an era of Republican dominance.

In a party-line vote, House Republicans freed Internet service providers such as Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast of protections approved just last year that had sought to limit what companies could do with information such as customer browsing habits, app usage history, location data and Social Security numbers. The rules also had required providers to strengthen safeguards for customer data against hackers and thieves.

The Senate has voted to nullify those measures, which were set to take effect at the end of this year. If Trump signs the legislation as expected, providers will be able to monitor their customers’ behavior online and, without their permission, use their personal and financial information to sell highly targeted ads — making them rivals to Google and Facebook in the $83 billion online advertising market.

The providers could also sell their users’ information directly to marketers, financial firms and other companies that mine personal data — all of whom could use the data without consumers’ consent. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission, which initially drafted the protections, would be forbidden from issuing similar rules in the future.

–Brian Fung
The House Just Voted to Wipe Away the FCC’s Landmark Internet Privacy Protections