OK, I just created an Obamacare account for myself (if I broke any laws, please, it was just investigative journalism). I went all the way through the process at healthcare.gov, stopping before the final step of actually applying (I don’t qualify, of course, because Princeton provides insurance), just to see how hard it was. And the answer is that it was no problem at all, with no delays.

I also used the information only feature to get a listing of plans in my area. Again, no problem. And healthcare.gov directs you to Kaiser for an estimate of subsidies and final cost.

Now, I know that this is only part of the story, and we’re still not getting clear answers on how well the 834 transmissions — which send the information to insurers — are working. But the visible parts of the process bear no resemblance to the horror stories of a few weeks ago.

Why did I carry out this little exercise? Well, I scanned the comments on today’s column and noticed a lot of people reporting having successfully enrolled in Obamacare — not at one of the well-functioning state exchanges, but at the supposedly disastrous healthcare.gov. Just anecdotes, I know — but anecdotes suggesting that the system is no longer the black hole of yore.

In short, it’s looking increasingly likely that the story from here on is going to be one of steadily better news — of growing enrollment in the federal as well as state exchanges, of people discovering either that their insurance has gotten better and cheaper or that they can afford insurance for the first time. Bit by bit these stories will percolate into the news media, replacing the sob stories about cancelled policies.

And I find myself wondering what Republicans will do. Or actually, not so much. As Martin Longman noted over the weekend, Obamacare already looks like one of those Republican obsessions — like Benghazi — where the party has convinced itself that there must be a pony winning issue hidden in there somewhere, and that if only it keeps flogging the thing, long after the public has moved on, it will eventually score big.

I’m not saying that the botched rollout is irrelevant: it has badly hurt Obama, and may do damage that lasts into the midterms. But the facts on the ground are changing, and my very strong guess is that the GOP will undo a lot of its gains by refusing to acknowledge that change.

Terrific piece in the WaPo on how Kentucky’s rural poor are being helped by Kynect, the state’s version of Obamacare, which has had a picture-perfect rollout.

This is why we need health reform.

To my misfortune, I accidentally read some of the comments, which which full of scorn verging on hatred for the “moochers” getting access to decent medical care for the first time. What can you say? I assume that these people root for President Snow against Katniss, too.

Anyway, this is what it is all about. And it’s ready to happen. It’s well underway in California, Connecticut, moving along in New York, and is just a technical fix — a tough fix, but obviously doable — away for the nation as a whole.

Stay with it.

Dean Baker is annoyed with Greg Mankiw — not for the first time — for suggesting that the time for a Fed exit strategy may be drawing near. Dean focuses mainly on Greg’s use of what he considers a misleading wage number, but the problem runs deeper.

So, about that number. We have multiple measures of wage developments, and while they tend to move together in big changes, they can tell somewhat different short-run stories. Here are three of them:

One of these numbers, wages of production and nonsupervisory workers, shows a modest uptick, the others not. All three remain well below their pre-crisis rates of increase. Is this the kind of evidence on which you want to base a major policy change? Not in my world.

Let me add two further points.

First, with all the talk of negative natural rates of interest, secular stagnation, and so on, there is a strong case for setting inflation targets at least somewhat higher than they were in the past. All sorts of people have, in fact, called for higher inflation. Meanwhile, however, wage growth — by any measure — is far below its pre-crisis level, which in retrospect was too low. So it makes no sense at all to tighten until we see wage inflation rise, not just from its current level, but several points higher.

Second,hysteresis: Arguments that the full-employment rate of unemployment has risen tend to rely on the claim that sustained high unemployment, even if it starts out cyclical, eventually becomes structural. But if that’s true, there are very high costs to premature policy tightening, which can raise unemployment in the long as well as the short run. Since we don’t really know where full employment is — and since there’s a case for a higher inflation target anyway — this adds up to a strong argument for waiting to see overwhelmingly clear evidence of an overheated economy before beginning any kind of policy exit.

So Janet Yellen should keep her petal peddle pedal to the medal mettle metal for a long time.

I see that some commentators were wondering why, in an earlier post, I wrote “pedal to the medal” instead of “pedal to the metal”. The answer is, typing fast, and writing what I heard in my head. The truth is that sometimes, usually when I’m tired, I do hear myself referring to a bottle of water as a boddle of oo-waugh-duh — gotta get the three-syllable pronunciation there.

I’ve never made a conscious effort to change my accent, and I know from recordings that a bit of the Noo Yawk is still there, but four decades in academia have, I believe, flattened it out into Mid-Atlantic neutral most of the time. But not always, and sometimes not even when I write.

Via Josh Marshall: While John Boehner was staging his publicity stunt, supposedly demonstrating that it was impossible to sign up for Obamacare, a representative of the DC health exchange was trying to reach his office to complete the transaction. After 35 minutes on hold, listening to “patriotic hold music“, the representative gave up.

How do you know that monetary policy is too loose? The textbook answer is that excessively expansionary monetary policy shows up in rising inflation; stable inflation means money is neither too loose nor too tight. This answer has, however, come under challenge from both sides. One side — the side I’m on, and I’m pretty sure the side Janet Yellen is on, says that at low inflation rates this rule breaks down: the Phillips curve isn’t vertical, even in the long run, at low inflation (perhaps thanks to downward nominal wage rigidity), so stable inflation at a low level is consistent with an economy operating well below potential.

But there’s a critique from the other side that seems to be gaining a lot of traction with central bankers not named Janet Yellen — namely, the notion that if asset prices are rising, and that this might signal a bubble, it’s time to tighten, even if inflation is low or falling.

As Simon Wren-Lewis points out, the Swedish Riksbank has gone all in on this doctrine — a decision that isolated my former colleague Lars Svensson (one of the people who warned long ago about the dangers of a liquidity trap), and led to his departure. The picture is really quite amazing:

Eurostat

The Riksbank raised rates sharply even though inflation was below target and falling, and has only partially reversed the move even though the country is now flirting with Japanese-style deflation. Why? Because it fears a housing bubble.

This kind of fits the H.L. Mencken definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” But here’s the thing: if we really are in the Summers/Krugman/Hansen world of secular stagnation, things like this are going to happen all the time. The underlying deficiency of demand will call for pedal-to-the-medal monetary policy as a norm. But bubbles will happen — and central bankers, always looking for reasons to snatch away punch bowls, will use them as excuses to tighten.

One last point: Isn’t Sweden a sort of liberal’s ideal? Not on monetary policy. In America, right-wingers get their ideas about both aid to the poor (end it) and monetary policy (gold!) from Ayn Rand, so hard money and hatred of the welfare state go hand in hand. In Europe, the connection is less clear-cut.

Somehow, thinking about the ongoing struggle to fix the Obamacare bugs made me think of this:

Just so I don’t forget, an important anniversary this weekend. The Food Network is 20 years old!

But aside from that, another Grant victory: the three-day Battle of Chattanooga, culminating with the storming of Missionary Ridge.

Like many of Grant’s campaigns, this ended up seeming ahead of its time (as, I’ve always felt, was Grant — I think I’ve written before about how much I love the notion of the aristocratic, romantic Lee surrendering to the prosaic, scruffy, but devastatingly effective Grant.) The assault on Missionary Ridge wasn’t planned — and that is part of why it worked, as the men worked forward in small groups, taking cover as they went, instead of moving forward in neatly dressed lines.

Anyway, in its way this battle was almost as crucial as Gettysburg, and should be remembered more.

And got a great deal.

Oh, and enrollment is surging on the state exchanges.

What we have here is a problem of communication.

Actually, mostly that’s not true. Most of the arguments we have over economic policy involve real disputes about how the world works. Sometimes these are smart disputes, like the argument over the effectiveness of quantitative easing, sometimes they’re stupid disputes, like the one over whether the Fed is debasing the currency, but anyway they are about something real.

But to such real arguments one must add an extra layer of confusion arising from the way economists use words. Fairly often, we have a term of art that is pretty deeply embedded in the professional discourse, but which either sounds strange to outsiders or can be misinterpreted.

An example of the first is the term “secular stagnation”. I know many of my readers dislike it. It relies on definition 3(c) of “secular” in Merriam-Webster: “of or relating to a long term of indefinite duration” — not exactly what comes to most people’s minds. Unfortunately, that is the term economists have used for the concept since Alvin Hansen popularized it in the 30s and 40s, and it’s very hard to change.

I suppose I could try to get a catchy alternative into circulation. I did, after all, get the confidence fairy out there. Maybe Sustained NEgative Equilibirum Rates of interest, or SNEER? I don’t know — it’s really hard to change something like this once established.*

Another example, which the same discussion has brought home, is the use of the term “structural”, as in “structural unemployment.”

Now, one aspect of this meaning is “hard to change”. But I’ve been getting a fair number of people thinking they have a gotcha: I’ve been denying that we have a big problem with structural unemployment, and now I’m saying that we may have a sustained problem of economic stagnation. Contradiction!

Well, no.

Structural unemployment has a much more specific meaning than that. It means unemployment that can’t be eliminated just by increasing aggregate demand. It’s closely tied to the notion of a Phillips curve, a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation, which in the long run looks something like this:

It’s almost but not quite the NAIRU, the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment — not quite because I am now convinced that the long-run Phillips curve flattens out at low inflation. So it’s more like the minimum unemployment rate consistent with (fairly) low and stable inflation.

The crucial point, however, is that’s a supply-side concept. It’s about the limits of what you can achieve by increasing aggregate demand. It has nothing at all to do with secular stagnation, which is about reasons you might have trouble increasing aggregate demand in the first place.

One moral of the story is to beware: economese may sound like English, but it sometimes has crucial differences. The bigger moral of the story, however, is that it’s ultimately not about the words — it’s about the model.

*Brief anecdote: For historical reasons, economists doing international macro usually measure the exchange rate as the price of foreign currency, e.g., for Mexico it’s pesos per dollar. As a result, on your diagrams, when your currency goes down, the exchange rate goes up. Everyone else, including other economists, hates this convention. Yet it’s nearly impossible to change it in the textbooks without upsetting thousands of course instructors.

No, John Maynard Keynes didn’t think that burying bottles full of cash in coalmines was the best way to end the Great Depression.

No, I am not actually proposing that we fake an alien invasion.

No, Larry Summers isn’t suggesting that we create lots of bubbles. (Nor, by the way, was I actually calling for a housing bubble in 2002. I was, instead, trying to highlight the problems of getting monetary traction in an economy that “wants” a negative interest rate — which is exactly what everyone is talking about now.)

I’m always amazed at how many people doing economics — or lots of other things — are so rigid and humorless that they apparently can’t grasp the point or usefulness of slightly whimsical thought experiments.

Bonus blogging: Ashok Rao reminds us of something I’d forgotten: two years ago Larry and I had a staged debate over the economy’s future, in which I took … the same position Larry is also taking now, and he argued against. This is NOT a gotcha: it’s totally to Larry’s credit that he is willing to change his views as new evidence and ideas come in.

Bonus bonus blogging: I finally saw Ender’s Game the other day, and enjoyed it. But it was a bit of a letdown compared with the book (yes, Orson Scott Card — look, sometimes something goes very wrong with people). And I think I know why. The core of the book is Ender’s progress through battle school — the steady progression of games, the evolution of his tactics, the development of his team. In the movie this stuff was compressed into a couple of games, with nothing to give you a sense of what makes him special. I don’t know if there was any way to do this without turning the thing into a miniseries. But it’s why the movie felt ever so slightly flat.

Today’s big event was the filibuster busted, and I have absolutely nothing original to say. So instead let me say something about the GOP planned attack on Obamacare — also not original, but maybe blunter than you’ll read elsewhere.

Here it is: They’re fools.

Consider two states of the world. In one, the technical disaster of healthcare.gov proves so intractable that by March 31, when open enrollment ends, the program has just failed to launch. In that case, Democrats have suffered a crushing defeat no matter what Republicans do.

In the other, which looks more likely, the enrollment process becomes sufficiently workable that by March 31 millions of people who previously lacked insurance or had more or less worthless policies have acquired real coverage. In that case reform is irreversible, Republican scorched-earth opposition turns into a political liability, and it’s a political win for Democrats — not as big a win as if the thing had worked well from the start, but still a win.

Nothing else matters. Republicans can win every news cycle for the next month and nobody will remember it come November.

The only thing the GOP could do with any real impact would be to sabotage the law. And they’re doing that as best they can by blocking the Medicaid expansion. But if the exchanges begin to work even passably well, that won’t be enough — when people, including the young, realize that real insurance is available at affordable prices, political propaganda won’t keep them away.

So it’s really all about the substance, mainly on IT. And when I read Sarah Kliff’s updates I get a picture of people finally doing what they should have been doing many months ago: finding the bugs, fixing them in a logical sequence, and gradually making the thing work better. There probably won’t be a “Ta da!” moment; it’s just that at some point next month we’ll realize that a lot of people are in fact managing to sign up, and that by March the whole failed Obamacare shtick will seem hopelessly out of date.

I could of course be wrong. Maybe the IT fix will be much harder than us nongeeks imagine. But one thing’s for sure: the GOP’s spin offensive will matter not at all.

Remember all the pundits who stroked their chins, pretended to deliberate, then — completely predictably — came out against health care reform because, they said, it wouldn’t control health care costs? Remember all the demands that Obama do something real, like raising the Medicare age (which turns out not to make any significant difference to the deficit)?

Now, from the CEA, we have this:

The CEA is careful not to claim too much — there’s pretty good evidence that the ACA has played an important role in the cost slowdown, but they don’t assign any particular number. Still, it looks as if the biggest complaint against Obamacare was completely wrong: cost control is one of the things that is really, really working, with huge positive fiscal implications.

If they get the enrollment process working — it’s getting better, but we still don’t know if it’s moving fast enough — this is still going to go down in the long run as a policy triumph.

Many years ago my colleague Alan Blinder wrote a very good book with, it seemed to me, a slightly unfortunate title. It was way too easy to slip from “Hard heads, soft hearts” to the reverse.

On the other hand, maybe that’s a book that needs to be written about today’s austerians, both on our side of the Atlantic and in Europe.

What set me off this morning was an interview by Jens Weidmann, head of the Bundesbank:

“We have lowered interest rates and are offering banks unlimited liquidity. But there are no easy and quick ways out of this crisis,” he told German weekly Die Zeit in an interview to be published on Thursday.

“The money printer is definitely not the way to solve it. It will still take years until the causes of the crisis are eliminated.”

What could possibly justify this remark, other than sheer faith in the redemptive power of (other peoples’) pain for its own sake?

Let’s think about the current problems of the euro are in terms of perfectly ordinary, textbook macroeconomics.

First, take the aggregate view. The euro area as a whole has record high unemployment and record low inflation. By any normal standards, this says that monetary policy is too tight. Yes, there’s a problem getting traction, because the ECB is close to the zero lower bound — but that’s a problem of implementation. On what possible grounds could you argue that printing money is not at least a partial solution to the crisis?

Next, look at the internal adjustment problem. The big capital flows from north to south during europhoria have left Spain etc. overvalued , and in need of “internal devaluation”. But there is now completely overwhelming evidence for downward nominal wage rigidity: it’s much easier to get Spanish wages relative to German wages in line through rising German wages than falling Spanish wages. Germany’s own internal devaluation from 2001 to 2007 was accomplished through inflation abroad, not deflation at home. But a too-low overall euro inflation rate pushes the burden onto deflation in debtor countries. Again, on what possible grounds could you argue that a somewhat higher inflation rate — remember, it’s now running at just 0.8 percent — would do nothing to help solve the crisis?

Finally, to the extent that debt levels are a problem, low inflation makes this problem much worse, for all the usual reasons.

Now maybe, maybe, there would still be a euro crisis even if Europe had strong internal demand and 2-plus percent inflation. But we don’t know that — and it’s bizarre to dismiss any effort to move in that direction presumptively.

What it comes down to is that Weidmann — like, I’m afraid, much conventional opinion in Europe — has thrown analysis out the window in favor of a peculiar form of wishful thinking. What’s peculiar about this wishful thinking is that it doesn’t consist of fantasies about the existence of easy, painless solutions; it consists of fantasies about the absence of easy solutions, even when the evidence says very clearly that such solutions exist. Instead of a weak-minded search for pleasure without pain, it’s a search for reasons to inflict pain regardless of the actual economic situation.

Yes, it fits the definition of sadomonetarism.

What’s awesome is that this grim fantasy passes for wisdom, and dictates policy.