Get well soon ... or else

Got a cold? If you live in North Carolina, you might just receive a "get well soon ... or else" card from the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI).

The North Carolina General Assembly is poised to pass HB 12, a bill that would require drug stores to

before completing a sale of a product containing a pseudoephedrine product, electronically submit the required information to the National Precursor Log Exchange (NPLEx) administered by the National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators (NADDI)... The seller shall not complete the sale if the system generates a stop alert.

The bill further requires that the information retailers provide to the NADDI on North Carolina residents be forwarded on a weekly basis to the SBI.

All that state cold sufferers need to do to make it into the NADDI and SBI databases and be treated as criminal suspects is purchase medicine with pseudoephedrine (e.g., Sudfed).

So much for the NC GOP wanting to reduce regulations for businesses and get "big government" off our backs. Democrats can share the blame as well.

Senate votes to continue throwing $6 billion a year down the ethanol rabbit hole

There are precious few occasions where I find myself in agreement with both Tom Coburn and Richard Burr, but today's Senate vote on ending ethanol subsidies was one of those occasions. Sadly, their amendment went down in flames due mostly to overwhelming support by Democrats, including Kay Hagan.

Shame on Kay for supporting this wasteful, budget-busting measure.

Kudos to Coburn, Burr and 33 other GOP senators who showed courage by not only rejecting this tax break but also by breaking with the Americans for Tax Reform and not requiring an offsetting tax break.

I hope that we can agree again under more successful circumstances.

Republicans agree that some state workers are underpaid--their own staff!

Most state workers in North Carolina have gone three years without a raise, have been hit with higher contributions, deductibles and co-payments on their health insurance, and have even had a short furlough. However, the News & Observer reports that some state workers have done much, much better.

House Speaker Thom Tillis in the last few months handed out raises as high as 27 percent to half his staff after vowing in January to set an example for others in state government by cutting his office payroll.

Tillis' general counsel Jason Kay got a 27 percent raise, from $110,000 a year to $140,000.

Chief of staff Charles Thomas got a 25 percent, $30,000-a-year increase, from $120,000 to $150,000.

Policy advisers Christopher Hayes and Amy Hobbs received $12,000 raises, both going from salaries of $70,000 to $82,000 a year. Kay, Hayes and Hobbs are all new hires who joined the state payroll for the first time in January. Thomas is a former state House member from Asheville.

In all, Tillis gave raises to seven members of the 14-person staff he had before April. He hired an additional employee in May, paying him $70,000 annually.

Far from cutting his own office payroll, the News & Observer found that Rep. Tillis' was at least 10 percent higher than his Democratic predecessor.

So much for shared sacrifice.

Bitterness & division

A story linked from CNN's main page asks "After 50 years of racial strife: Why is Greensboro still so tense?"

The story plumbs the depths of nearly every bit of nastiness over the years, from the KKK shootings 32 years ago to the current controversies over reopening the White Street landfill and moving city council boundaries. Only the Wray fray seems to be left out.

The story misleadingly depicts a mostly seamless pattern of tension. Milestones such as the election of a black mayor and appointment of a black police chief are ignored other black city leaders are mentioned but not examined closely.

Sadly, the central premise of the story is spot on. The question is what to do about it?

Correction (June 8, 2011): The second paragraph of the CNN states that "African Americans have won unprecedented positions of political power in Greensboro in the past four years, including mayor and city manager." (Thanks to Jeff Sykes for alerting me to my poor reading skills.)

Real job-killing government policies

Add sharp cuts in state and local employment to the list of economic headwinds. CNNMoney reports

Don't look to state and local governments to prop up the job market.

To the contrary, this cash-strapped sector is set to go on a record-breaking layoff binge when the new fiscal year starts on July 1.

State and local governments are forecast to shed up to 110,000 jobs in the third quarter, the first time the blood-letting has risen into the triple digits, according to IHS Global Insight.

Nationally, the number of state employees peaked at 5.2 million in August 2008, and the number of local government employees peaked at 14.6 million in September 2008. Since then, state governments have shed 100,000 jobs, while local governments have shed 450,000.

Parents and students will feel the cuts in terms of more-crowded classrooms, fewer class choices, and reduced school services (who needs those pesky nurses, librarians or guidance counselors). Other taxpayers will notice the cuts in terms of longer lines at the DMV and longer waits for tax refunds.

Less noticeable but as important will be the overall drag on local economies.

Slashing jobs doesn't make much sense in a weak employment market.

Less dynamism in the U.S. job market

Last week the Washington Post's Steve Pearlstein had an interesting column on the decline in dynamism in the U.S. job market. The column describes the research of John Haltiwanger from the University of Maryland and his colleagues on job flows. By coincidence, I had an opportunity to see one of Haltiwanger's co-authors, Javier Miranda from the U.S. Census Bureau, present some of their research while I was in Denmark.

"Job flows" are technique for breaking net employment growth down into four components:

• Jobs added by brand new employers (establishment births),
  
• Jobs added by existing employers (establishment expansions),
  
• Jobs lost because of employers shutting down (establishment deaths), and
• Jobs lost because of employers contracting (establishment contractions).

By simple arithmetic, if you add the jobs created by new and expanding employers and subtract the jobs by "dying" and contracting employers, you get the net change in the number of jobs. While much attention is paid to the net employment change (e.g., the paltry 54,000 jobs added last month), we actually learn quite a bit by examining changes in the separate components. The latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which extend through the third quarter of 2010, are shown below.


The figures show that there is tremendous dynamism in the labor market. While the overall number of jobs might change by a few hundred thousand in a given quarter, there are actually several million jobs being created and lost. Also, though we tend to think about jobs changing from businesses opening or shutting down, far and away the lion's share of job changes occur among continuing employers.

The decrease in dynamism that Pearlstein and Haltiwanger refer to is the overall downward trend in all four job flow components. The downward trend is even more pronounced when you consider that the U.S. population has grown and when the flows are expressed in per capita terms.

Employer "births" and "deaths" have trended steadily downward. However, employer expansions and contractions have also trended downward.

Some of this is a new phenomenon. Prior to the Great Recession, expansions were not viewed as being especially cyclically sensitive. However, during the Great Recession, employment growth associated with expansions fell by more than one million and has yet to recover. The credit crisis offers one explanation for the plunge and the incomplete recovery. Many firms have had a difficult time borrowing and issuing commercial paper, and firms that have had funds have either built up cash reserves or used their funds to buy back stock and to buy out competitors.

More interesting, though, is that the downward trend in dynamism pre-dated the recession. During the 2000s, taxes were cut, and the government followed an unabashed pro-business policy. These advantages for businesses and entrepreneurs, however, did not translate into increased job creation.

Haltiwanger offers a novel "too big to grow" explanation. His research shows that "young" firms contribute disproportionately to job growth. As older behemoths, like Walmart, come to dominate local markets, they take the air out of other newer but potentially faster-growing firms. More generally, the abandonment of anti-trust policy may be keeping new entrepreneurs from entering markets and may be robbing the economy of a prime source of job creators.

If Haltiwanger's hypothesis is correct, you can add "too big to grow" to a host of other problems associated with businesses being "too big," including moral hazard ("too big to fail"), undue political influence ("too big to play nice in elections"), and undue influence in markets ("too big to pay fair wages or prices").

Did something other than sight-see in Denmark

I was lucky to spend today attending a workshop on “Health, Work and the Workplace” at the Aarhus School of Business (academic economists use an odd definition of "lucky").

Besides the opportunity to interact with lots of researchers with similar interests, there was an opportunity to hear about some fantastic data that are available to Danish researchers. In particular, social scientists are Aarhus University have access to survey data sets with personal identifiers that can be linked to social registry data on jobs, social insurance, and even health care utilization.

The conference featured several studies that linked survey data on perceptions of work conditions, such as exposure to physical and health hazards, workplace policies, work schedules, job satisfaction, supervisor practices, and the like, with more objective information on earnings and job turnover as well as long-term information on these outcomes. Several papers showed how bad work conditions and practices were associated with worse health outcomes for employees. Another paper showed how some of those policies hurt companies by increasing turnover. Although the emphasis was on how health worked through and was affected by these workplace conditions, it’s easy to imagine lots of additional research that could be done.

All of the research focused on outcomes in developed economies in Europe and the U.S. These countries all feature relatively strong protections for workers’ health. In the case of the European countries, workers also had fairly uniform access to quality health care. Despite these protections and supports, there was still consistent evidence throughout many of the papers that certain types of working conditions, such as holding a job with high physical demands, being exposed to job insecurity, and even having to work for a “toxic” boss, takes its toll on people’s physical and psychological health.

At this point, the research seems best poised to help us refine our understanding of how health and work outcomes are determined, borrowing insights from two related fields. It is also likely to help us understand the possible consequences of work intensification at jobs as employers downsize, “rightsize,” and shift more risks to workers. These policies may have immediate benefits for employers’ bottom lines, but the research at the conference suggests that they may be costly in the long run. Worse, these costs may be external to firms and may appear years after firms take certain actions, giving the firms few incentives to mitigate them.

We already know that economic outcomes for many workers have deteriorated over the last decade and especially through the Great Recession. Regrettably, the results from the workshop suggest an additional mechanism by which workers may have been made worse off by employer restructuring.

Dave's descent into Danish darkness

Fate (and an invitation to talk about some research on the health of workers in different occupations) has brought me to Denmark, a verdant land of wind turbines, excellent rail service, universal health care, tradable carbon permits, labor protections, restricted store hours, and one of the highest tax burdens on the planet -- in other words the nightmare vision of the Republicans/Tea Party.

According to their fevered prognostications, this country should be a hollowed-out, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Then again, according to some other fevered prognostications, yesterday was the day to cash in those Groupons for the Rapture.

A job-killing, death-panel-induced, government-hands-all-over-my-Medicare, theft-posing-as-taxation calamity may yet befall the Danish economy. For now, however, there's little that's rotten here. Despite the recent global recession, the country remains prosperous with an unemployment rate of 5.9 percent and a per-capita gross national income that is only slightly less than that of the US on a PPI-adjusted basis (and 25% higher than that of the US on an exchange-rate basis).

Aside from a couple of cranky infants in a coffee shop, the Danes that I have encountered have been happy and smiling. Maybe they're just getting the last laugh.

My two cents on NC Republicans' efforts to curtail early voting

Given the enormous shortfall in North Carolina's state and local government budgets, some very tough decisions need to be made. Republicans in the General Assembly are arguing that one of these decisions may involve the availability of early voting.

The Charlotte Observer reports about a contentious vote in the General Assembly to reduce early voting.

On a largely party line vote Thursday, the N.C. House tentatively passed a bill that would cut North Carolina's early voting period almost in half.

Republican supporters said cutting the 2 1/2-week period by a week would save money for local governments and for candidates.

Critics said it would reduce turnout, particularly among African-Americans.

"Whether intentional or not, the effect of this measure will be disenfranchisement," state Rep. Kelly Alexander, a Charlotte Democrat, said during the debate. "It will suppress the vote."

Calling this disenfranchisement is far too strong. However, the shorter voting period will almost certainly reduce turnout and have the largest effect on poor, and especially working poor, households.

The expected reduction in voting follows from a simple economic model of the "demand" for voting. In the economic model, people value voting but also value all the other goods that they can possibly consume. People face trade-offs between voting and the consumption of other goods, as the time and effort required to vote reduces the resources available for other things. Thus, voting has a cost, or price. The predictions from the model are the same as those from a standard demand equation. Increases in the price of the good (voting) and decreases in people's resources cause the demand for the good (voting) to fall.

A shorter early voting period makes voting less convenient, effectively raising the price of this good. Lower incomes mean that poor people would already be close to the margin of not voting, so the change in availability/price would be expected to affect them more. Inflexible work schedules and limited transportation options might also mean that the poor would also face higher initial costs voting, again putting them closer to the margin of not voting.

Republicans argue that the effects won't be large. Polls would still be open on election day; mail-in ballots could still be cast, and 11 days of early voting would still be available. Thus, it's an open question as to how much voting would be reduced--that is, how much benefit there is from early voting.

We do know, however, that the costs of offering early voting are extraordinarily low.

In 2010, North Carolina's 100 counties operated 297 one-stop early voting sites, with every county operating at least one site but with many operating multiple sites. Not every site operated through the entire early voting period. Counties tended to operate more sites closer to the election.

A review of the schedules shows that counties offered a total of 1,104 "site days" during the first week of voting in 2010. The NCGA Fiscal Research Division (FRD) estimates that each site cost $389 per day to operate. Using this figure, the average county spent just $4,295 (or $429,500 across the entire state) to accommodate the first week of early voting. Divided among the state's 9.6 million residents, the cost of operating the sites was less than a nickel per person--literally pennies.

It should be further noted that the counties themselves didn't bear all of this cost. Local boards of election can obtain reimbursement from the federal government for the costs of operating these sites. The FRD reports that 59 counties had their costs reimbursed.

Voting is a fundamental right. While it's hard to place an exact value on how much early voting contributes toward extending this right, it seems that it would be worth at least a nickel.

Callous gamesmanship from NC Republicans continues

North Carolinians old enough to remember the National Lampoon and its iconic 1973 "if you don't buy this magazine; we'll kill this dog" cover are getting a chance to watch a real-life replay, involving Republicans holding long-term jobless benefits hostage to unrelated budget demands.

The News & Record reports,

No end appears in sight for a stalemate that's held hostage extended unemployment benefits for North Carolina's long-term jobless for nearly a month, state legislative leaders said today.

Senate leader Phil Berger, an Eden Republican, said the General Assembly's Republican leaders are waiting for Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue to propose a compromise.

Perdue vetoed the GOP proposal to extend the benefits only if the governor accepts double-digit cuts before budget negotiations begin in earnest. Perdue called the linkage "extortion." Republican leaders said they wanted to ease questions about continued state funding in case a budget deal isn't reached by the time the next fiscal year starts in July.

..."What I am telling people is the Senate and the House have passed a bill that extends those benefits. We think the question is: what has the governor done other than say, 'Do it my way. That's the only way that I'll accept.'" Berger said. "I would hope that either the governor would modify her position or tell us what it would take to modify her position."

In other words, "Governor, if the budget isn't an acceptable ransom for jobless benefits, what is?"

The appropriate response is "nothing."

The extension of unemployment benefits has nothing whatsoever to do with North Carolina's budget situation. Extended benefits require a minor legislative fix so that federal dollars--approximately $11 million per week--can be spent to help 37,000 long-term unemployed.

The National Lampoon magazine cover was ridiculous but ultimately harmless satire. The Republican gamesmanship is equally ridiculous but ultimately harmful and cruel.

NC Republicans callous inaction on jobless benefits

Republicans in the NC General Assembly still have not gotten around to passing legislation necessary for 37,000 long-term out-of-work North Carolinians to collect an extra 20 weeks of federally-funded unemployment benefits.

Last month, the Republicans tried to use the extension to extort Governor Perdue into committing to double-digit percentage budget cuts for the coming fiscal year. The governor, rightly, vetoed the legislation and asked for a clean bill. The extension has subsequently languished.

Regrettably, Republicans' general callousness towards the poor isn't new or surprising. However, once upon a time, Republicans did at least try to show support for workers who lost their jobs, a group they included among "deserving poor." No more.

As the Republican Senate Leader, Phil Berger said, "We need to remember that we're talking about the extension for folks who have already received benefits" for a year and a half.

Moral and humanitarian concerns notwithstanding, Republicans should be able to grasp the practical, economic benefits of hundreds of thousands of federal dollars flowing into a state that still suffers from 9.7 percent unemployment. But again, no.

Since benefits ran out, Republicans have found the time to adopt resolutions recognizing the 100th anniversary of North Carolina Family and Consumer Sciences, a former representative, and Cinco de Mayo.

These are priorities, but legislation that would help the long-term jobless and bolster our economy, all without costing our state budget a dime is not.

Shhh, don't say 'gay'

Teaching about Oscar Wilde, discussing civil rights, and reprimanding children for anti-gay taunting could all get a lot tougher in Tennessee where a state Senate committee approved a bill that would prohibit elementary and secondary schools from providing "any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality."

If we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist, right?

A follow-on bill will prohibit Will and Grace re-runs and Ted Haggard sermons from being shown on Tennessee televisions before 10 p.m.

Boehner supports Obamacare for the elderly

What a long strange trip it's been.

During the floor debate on the Affordable Care Act (which Republicans affectionately refer to as "Obamacare") in March 2010, then Republican minority leader, Rep. John Boehner, described the Democrats' reforms thusly

...today we’re standing here looking at a health care bill that no one in this body believes is satisfactory.

...Can you go home and tell your senior citizens that these cuts in Medicare will not limit their access to doctors or further weaken the program instead of strengthening it? No, you cannot.

...Shame on us. Shame on this body. Shame on each and every one of you who substitutes your will and your desires above those of your fellow countrymen.

In January of this year, Republicans made the repeal of the ACA their first substantive (though ultimately unsuccessful) piece of legislation.

Yesterday, however, Speaker Boehner was singing a different tune. When asked about the Republicans' plans to cut and privatize Medicare, Speaker Boehner said

It transforms Medicare into a plan that's very similar to the President's own healthcare bill.

He went on to praise the proposed program's efficiency and to state several times that he supported it.

So a short time ago, the President's proposals were shameful and unsatisfactory, but now, changes that are "very similar to the President's own healthcare bill" are laudable.

Throw Grandma from the nursing home

In yet another fine display of their "what's good for bidness, is good for the commonwealth" philosophy, North Carolina Republicans are now proposing that nursing homes should be allowed foist hard-to-care-for charges onto the county governments.

When a North Carolina assisted-living facility accepts a resident, the home has the legal responsibility to look after the person or to find a safe alternative placement.

But a bill making its way through the state House would shift that responsibility to county social services departments, which don't want the responsibility of dealing with early-morning phone calls demanding the care of a person with a disability such as dementia.

The bill also would allow facilities to escape state sanctions after making an unsuccessful attempt to find a new place for a resident.

Some advocates for older people say the bill could result in some of the most dependent residents being released to homelessness.

It's hard to come up with a more cruel and mean-spirited policy (though we shouldn't put this bunch to the challenge). The proposed change would put the most vulnerable patients at risk while also increasing responsibilities for county health agencies that the Republicans' are already targeting for cuts.

We didn't cover this in labor class

This semester's labor economics class is winding down. Somehow, I neglected to cover this novel workforce development strategy.

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's just an unemployed guy in a red cape.

A Florida unemployment agency is under investigation for spending $14,000 in public funds on red superhero capes as part or broader campaign that frames joblessness as a battle between good and evil. The agency, Workforce Central Florida, even created a fictional villain, Dr. Evil Unemployment, whose superpower is apparently handing out pink slips in a bid to somehow take over the world.

The campaign has now been withdrawn, but you have to wonder what they were thinking.

About the only positive thing that you can say about this is that it beats the agency's careereoki campaign from two years ago.

Floridians must be so glad that they contract these services out to private agencies instead of letting the government handle social services.

Houston, we have some whiners

Is there anything that Republicans won't whine about? The latest is Texas Republicans moaning and groaning over Houston not getting a space shuttle. Reps. Ted Poe and Pete Olson write

Now that the space shuttle program is ending, no other place in the world deserves a retired shuttle more than Houston, Texas. Put simply, this decision should be a no-brainer.

But Houston has been overlooked. Shuttles are going to Los Angeles, Florida, and Washington. The prototype Enterprise is headed to New York City. "We were tremendously surprised," said Susan Marenoff-Zausner, president of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York after NASA made the announcement. No kidding.

Sadly, it seems partisan politics permeates this announcement. And we are demanding answers.

...Here's our justification for Houston: Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States, visited by nearly 7 million international visitors every year. More than 750,000 people a year visit the Johnson Space Center in Houston to glimpse the history of space exploration. Houston doesn't seek an orbiter because it wants to add a relic to a museum to highlight a marvel of modern engineering. It is more profound than that. To Houston and the men and women of Mission Control, who dedicated their careers to human space flight; it represents a life's work.

We can find no logical explanation for this mind-boggling decision.

No logical explanation?

New York, our largest city, has averaged more than 45 million visitors per year since 2006. Los Angeles, our second largest city, welcomed about 24 million per year over the same period. Washington, DC, our Nation's capital, welcomed more than 15 million per year and hosts an extraordinary Air & Space Museum. And central Florida has not only been home to the shuttle program but is a major tourist destination. Orlando welcomes more than 45 million visitors per year, and the Kennedy Space Center alone draws 1.5 million visitors per year (twice as many as the Johnson Space Center).

Under other circumstances (i.e., when it doesn't benefit them), Reps. Poe and Olson are foes of government entitlements. Consider Rep. Poe in February

We are long overdue to stop subsidizing the government’s special projects for its special people with money that doesn’t exist.

and Rep. Olson in March

We can all find a way to do more with less.

What changed in the meantime? The availability of a big fat government goody.

And when they didn't that goody, what did they do? Cast unfounded aspersions and cry politics. Talk about an entitlement mentality.

Sadly, the only "partisan politics" on display here are from these two hypocritical whiners.

Compound errors

The local conservative weekly, the Rhinoceros Times, has an article about runaway public spending in Guilford County.

Now that the 2011-2012 Guilford County budget process is in full swing, with the county manager's proposed budget on the table and the budget ball in the county commissioners' court, it's interesting, and even kind of fun and nostalgic, to look back 10 years and see how things compare.

One look at Guilford County's budget for fiscal 2000-2001 and it quickly becomes evident that, while 10 years wasn't that long ago in some respects, when it comes to county budgets it was light years ago and a galaxy far, far away.

One way the 2000-2001 budget seems very distant from today is in the number of dollars shelled out. Just a decade ago, Guilford County was being run on a much smaller budget: The 2000-2001 budget totaled $397.5 million. That compares with a proposed county budget of $582.3 for 2011-2012 – a 46 percent increase in the county's budget in just 10 years.

The population of the county only went up 16 percent from 2000 to 2010, from 421,048 to 488,406.

Joe Guarino piles on

Spending increases in these areas outpaced population growth and inflation combined.

When county commissioners wring their hands and represent that they cannot conceive of ways to achieve spending cuts sufficient to avoid a tax increase, they are not being honest with us.

The fact is that we have had solid liberal Democratic leadership of the county for a long time, with all the fiscal profligacy that entails.

The figures that the Rhino and Joe put forward look like a big increase, but they aren't when you also account general price growth.

Over the last 10 years (from March 2001 to March 2011), overall price inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index went up by 26.9 percent.

The combination more than accounts for the growth in spending.

In 2000-1, the county was spending $944 per resident. In 2011-12, it is proposing to spend the equivalent of $939 per resident, based on 2000-1 dollars.

Far from letting spending run away, the county has kept its spending slightly below the combined rates of population and price growth.

Guilford County is facing a tough budget situation. However, the crunch has been caused by falling revenues, not exploding costs. Property values have fallen, depleting the county's largest source of revenue. The state and federal governments will also be transferring less money to the county next year.

In inflation- and population-adjusted terms, Guilford County has kept its expenditures frozen.

Republican's budget rhetoric and reality

People with a memory for such things might recall that in their "Pledge to America," Republicans promised (underline added)

With common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops, we will roll back government spending to prestimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone and putting us on a path to begin paying down the debt, balancing the budget, and ending the spending spree in Washington that threatens our children’s future.

To this end, Republicans passed pointless, go-nowhere legislation. They then fulminated and threatened to shut the government down if they didn't get their way. With a shut down looming, their leader, Rep. John Boehner bargained tenaciously for spending cuts.

Today, those negotiated "spending cuts" were approved by a large majority of House Republicans (and with substantial support--81 votes--from Democrats).

The effect on this year's budget?

Total spending this year will be $3.3 billion higher than last year.

The Washington Post reports

The Congressional Budget Office estimate shows that compared with current spending rates the spending bill due for a House vote Thursday would cut federal outlays from non-war accounts by just $352 million through Sept. 30. About $8 billion in immediate cuts to domestic programs and foreign aid are offset by nearly equal increases in defense spending.

When war funding is factored in the legislation would actually increase total federal outlays by $3.3 billion relative to current levels.

So, far from reducing this year's budget, the Republican House just approved a $3.3 billion spending increase for FY 2011.

To quote Sarah Palin's question to the National Tea Party Convention, "how's that hopey changey thing working out for ya?"

NCBCBS asks not to be blamed for misdirecting premium dollars

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (NCBCBS) is starting a new marketing campaign to spark a discussion on reining in health care costs. The News & Observer reports

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina is tired of playing the scapegoat.

The state's largest health insurer will announce this morning that it's beginning a major marketing campaign to emphasize that many parties share the blame for rising health costs. The message is that those groups, including insurers, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, lawyers and consumers, must work together to reduce medical costs.

The effort will include TV commercials and other advertising with goats portraying the various groups. The Chapel Hill company also is starting a website, www.letstalkcost.com to spur more discussion about how to control medical costs.

At the risk of scapegoating the state's largest insurance oligopoly, let me suggest that NCBCBS first consider the cost implications of misdirecting its hostages' customers' premium dollars toward self-serving marketing and lobbying campaigns.

Congressional taunting

A new study of the communication patterns of Congress members finds that 27 percent of Congress' time is spent taunting.

On Wednesday morning, the Senate had been in session only a few minutes before the first exchange of barbed words.

“Democrats are more concerned about the politics of the debate than keeping the government running,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a floor speech. “They can’t blame anyone but themselves if a shutdown does occur.”

A while later, Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) came out to speak. He had a few choice things to say about Republicans’ plans for cuts to the federal budget.

“The more the American people take a hard look at where [Republicans] want this country to go, the more outraged will be millions and millions of citizens,” Sanders said.

To which, McConnell later presumably replied, "The good gentleman's mother was a hamster and his father smelled of elderberries!"