Kevin Drum

Sigh. Matt Yglesias draws my attention to this week's cover of Time, a Trump-friendly warning that we're all doomed thanks to the national debt. Matt takes apart this inane argument just fine, but I'll do it more quickly: You will never have to pay down this debt. Nor will your children. Or your grandchildren. Just forget about it.

And if we ever do have to pay some of it down? We'll get to pay it off over decades, just like any other debt. And the rich will pay a bigger share than you. But I guess "You might someday owe $145 per year" doesn't make a very good magazine cover.

I know the doomsayers don't care, but at the moment we're paying about 2 percent of GDP to service the national debt. The chart below shows how that's skyrocketed since—um, I mean, declined steadily since its height during the Reagan era. Pretty scary, isn't it?

The tyranny of President Obama's reign of terror knows no bounds. Now it extends to shaking down the creators of Game of Thrones:

During HBO's Sunday red carpet for the premiere of Season 6's first episode, the showrunners confirmed that the president will receive advance episodes of the show. "When the commander in chief says, 'I want to see advanced episodes,' what are you gonna do?" Benioff said.

Did he threaten them with an IRS audit? Drop hints that the FCC might want to look into HBO's business practices? "Suggest" that his union pals might be upset if he didn't get the screeners? Truly the man has no conscience.

The Department of Health and Human Services has issued a report on 2016 premium increases under Obamacare. This is useful information if you want to answer the following question:

How much do actual Obamacare users have to pay for coverage?

Of course, if this is the question you're interested in then you have to take into account all the data. You can't cherry pick just one or two providers; you can't focus on just the states with the highest increases; you can't ignore the fact that lots of people shop around for the best price each year; and you can't pretend the federal subsidies don't exist. You have to take a look at the nationwide average of what users actually paid. When you do, it turns out that premiums increased about 4 percent this year in the federal marketplace.

But that's not the only question you might want to ask. There's also this one:

How has Obamacare affected the cost of health coverage more generally?

You can't answer this by looking only at Obamacare because there's nothing to compare it to. You can't compare Obamacare premiums to premiums in the individual market prior to 2013, because the individual market excluded sick people. Naturally premiums used to be lower. Nor can you compare Obamacare premiums to premiums for employer health care. The coverage is completely different. It's apples to oranges.

But there are other things you can look at. For example, you can look at the cost of employer coverage over the past decade or so. If Obamacare has devastated the insurance market or jacked up the cost of health care, it will show up here. And this is a nice, clean series for the entire period that provides an apples-to-apples comparison. You can see it on the right.

Long story short, nothing much has happened. The annual increase in premiums declined to about 5 percent in the mid-aughts, and since Obamacare passed it's been about 3 percent. Nothing to see here.

Now, we only have two years of data since Obamacare passed, so this is still pretty tentative. And you might also be interested in how coverage has changed and what kind of out-of-pocket costs workers are bearing these days. Those are all worthwhile things to look at depending on what questions you're asking.

But if you want to know about the cost of health care coverage, the answer is pretty simple. Since Obamacare has gone into effect, its users have seen modest premium increases. This year it's around 4 percent in the federal marketplace. And employer premiums have stayed steady too. Over the past couple of years, they've increased about 3 percent annually.

Maybe this will change as time goes by. But for now, Obamacare doesn't look like it's done any damage at all to the price of health insurance. In fact, it might have helped. That's what you see if you take a fair look at all the data.

In a speech on environmental justice today, Hillary Clinton made a bold proposal:

Clinton proposes goal of ending lead exposure in 5 years

— Ben Adler (@badler) April 13, 2016

Be still my heart! Hillary's plan has eight parts, and the first one is all about lead poisoning:

Eliminate lead as a major public health threat within five years....For every dollar invested in preventing childhood exposure to lead, between $17 and $200 is saved in reduced educational, health, and criminal justice expenses and improved health and economic outcomes—but the few federal programs that exist are inadequate to address the scope of the problem and have seen significant budget cuts and volatility in recent years.

....Eliminating lead as a major public health threat to our children is a goal we can and must meet as a nation. Clinton will establish a Presidential Commission on Childhood Lead Exposure and charge it with writing a national plan to eliminate the risk of lead exposure from paint, pipes, and soil within five years; align state, local and philanthropic resources with federal initiatives; implement best prevention practices based on current science; and leverage new financial resources such as lead safe tax credits. Clinton will direct every federal agency to adopt the Commission’s recommendations, make sure our public water systems are following appropriate lead safety guidelines, and leverage federal, state, local, and philanthropic resources, including up to $5 billion in federal dollars, to replace lead paint, windows, and doors in homes, schools, and child care centers and remediate lead-contaminated soil.

I don't think five years is anywhere near feasible—it's more like a 10-20 year project—but that's a nit. I'm especially happy to see Hillary acknowledge the importance of remediating lead in soil, which usually doesn't get much attention. But that's where all the lead from automobile emissions settled, and it's worst in low-income urban neighborhoods that are dense with traffic.

Unfortunately, it's also the most difficult to address. Replacing lead water pipes is expensive, but we know how to do it. Getting rid of lead paint in old houses is a little less expensive, especially if we concentrate on doors and window sills, but we know how to do that too. That leaves lead in soil, which is tough because there's so damn much of it. The first step is to map the highest concentrations of lead in soil around the country, and we haven't even done that yet. Next we have to figure out the best way to get rid of it. There are lots of different methods, and they differ a lot in cost. You can, for example, simply haul away the top few inches of soil. That's expensive. Alternatively, there's a lot of buzz around the idea of seeding contaminated soil with phosphates, which combine with lead to produce harmless pyromorphite. This can be done using fish bones, which contain calcium phosphates. And fish bones are cheap.

But does this really work? It looks like a promising approach, but it still needs more research. Either way, though, it's nice to see a presidential candidate take lead seriously. We've been making progress on lead contamination for decades, but we've never truly made it a consistent priority. It's time to do that.