But for all the pomp and circumstance, what truly amazed was the policy. Even in my relatively small office, the breadth and depth of policy-making was breathtaking. The issues that passed through were varied, meticulous, and eye-opening. The far-reaching policies get the front page of the New York Times, whether healthcare reform or Dodd-Frank, but what often goes unmentioned or under-examined is just as important, if not more.

From electric infrastructure grants to rules on federal loans for for-profit universities, these policies rarely rile up activists, or, for that matter, anyone really. But these are the countless policies that cross the desks of policy-makers at every level of government every day—and shape our daily lives.

Few know or care about the Department of Labor’s new rulemaking on whether retiree investment advisors should be held to higher “fiduciary” standards. But for our parents and grandparents, this rule could be worth thousands of dollars. Has your bank started charging you for debit card use? You can thank the Durbin Amendment of the Dodd-Frank Act and new rules from the Federal Reserve. Perhaps your doctor is keeping electronic health records or even using an iPad. That is the Department of Health and Human Services and their new incentives for using IT in healthcare.

By DC standards, these are, in fact, wide-ranging and weighty rules. Far from minutia, they are worthy of hearing upon hearing and heavy lobbying from interest groups. Outside that realm, however, most of us would rather bury our heads in a problem set than learn more about the Appalachian Regional Development Initiative. Yet this “small stuff” is the stuff of everyday governance; it affects our lives in tangible and meaningful ways.

There is a propensity for all of us who fashion ourselves policy-minded or political to emphasize the big picture. Where has Obama left liberalism? How does the Paul Ryan budget refashion the American social contract? What does Occupy Wall Street say about Rawlsian fairness? Is American drone policy constitutional?

These are important questions of equality, history, and justice. But, we should not lose sight of what government actually does each and every day. Government is neither a theory nor an ideology. It exists to improve citizens’ lives, and much of that mission occurs in the details and the small bore. It is not particularly glamorous or exciting, but it is fundamental.

This focus on the particulars is sometimes mistaken for an argument of pragmatism over principle. President Clinton’s second term “triangulation” may have been the epitome of political pragmatism in its small uncontroversial initiatives, child gun trigger locks and school uniforms. But, if anything, the everyday consequences of policy minutia demand nothing less than principled debate. Indeed, we should encourage and expect ferocious wrangling over the details of government.

The fight to cap debit card fees charged to merchants, the Durbin Amendment, had been raging for almost a year, and finalized after a storm of comment and lobbying from Wall Street, credit unions, and retailers—the National Grocers Association included—over every last cent banks could charge per swipe. Though on a significantly smaller scale, these battles are waged month after month across the policy map. Added together, these increments change things.

These are the trenches where government—and ideology—matter and affect our daily lives. It is in the post-legislation regulation and the seemingly minor announcements where policy shines and governing is done. It is not grand strategy, and it will not change the world, but it is the foundational work of government. And it affects citizens’ lives. So while we strive to tackle the big issues and big questions, as we well should, let us not forget the small ones percolating in government offices that push policy forward every day.

Jonathan Yip ‘13 is the World Editor Emeritus.

Last October, a Bloomberg poll found that 43 percent of Americans felt that TARP had weakened the economy, while only 24 percent felt it had strengthened the economy. Despite being conceived by a Republican administration and continued by a Democratic one, TARP is likely one of the most hated programs ever implemented. Nonetheless, TARP undoubtedly averted greater economic catastrophe and ultimately cost far less than expected.

But voters’ instincts are not wrong. For all its achievements, TARP cannot be called a great success; it failed to stem the foreclosure crisis, increase lending, hold bankers accountable, and stop rocketing unemployment. It also sparked a still simmering distrust of policymakers and government.

The Road to TARP

The US housing bubble  collapsed at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, devaluing mortgage-related securities and the banks that held them. The stock market plunged in the wake of major bank liquidity crises and insolvency. Ad-hoc government-brokered sales of Merrill Lynch and Bear Sterns only created more uncertainty.

In September 2008, over an extraordinary 19 days, the US financial system moved toward catastrophe. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) moved Washington Mutual through the largest bank failure in US history, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed in conservatorship, Lehman Brothers suddenly filed for bankruptcy, the Federal Reserve began an $85 billion rescue of the American International Group (AIG), and the Treasury guaranteed $3.7 trillion worth of money market funds. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke later claimed that the growing crisis was “a cataclysm that could have rivaled or surpassed the Great Depression.”

Convinced that a more comprehensive plan was needed to reassure markets, Bernanke and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson conceived of TARP, an unprecedented $700 billion authorization to allow the Treasury to purchase toxic assets from banks. Congress recoiled at the price amidst growing public outrage, rejecting the first iteration of the bill. But as the markets convulsed, Congress passed a marginally amended version of the bill.

Given the delay, Secretary Paulson decided that purchasing toxic assets was no longer practical and instead elected to spend the first $350 billion by directly injecting capital into banks. The nine largest banks, representing 75 percent of all American banking assets, were given $25 billion each in exchange for stock. This initial round of funding bolstered the banks’ capital reserves, but without any preconditions attached, failed to increase lending.

As President Bush’s term drew to a close, some $17 billion in TARP funds were loaned to General Motors (GM) and Chrysler to avoid bankruptcy. Together, in January 2009, President Bush and President-elect Obama requested that Congress release the remaining $350 billion in TARP as further capital infusions seemed likely. By the end of the month, TARP had disbursed $301 billion in total.

Shortly after, the new Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner ordered the TARP banks to undergo stress tests to gauge their financial resilience. Expecting poor results, he further laid out a new rescue plan that would have created a private- public bank to purchase and hold up to $500 billion in toxic assets. This plan, however, was soon abandoned after banks refused to sell their assets at large losses in spite of generous government financing.

Simultaneously, Chrysler and GM, beginning to exhaust their existing federal loans, returned to seek more funds. The President’s auto task force, after guiding both GM and Chrysler through bankruptcy and significant restructuring, granted the automakers $25 billion in TARP loans.

In June, under heavy lobbying and with better-than-expected stress tests, the administration began to allow banks to repay their TARP funds. To date, the Treasury has recouped $313 billion of the $412 billion it dispersed. Both GM and Chrysler paid back their TARP loans several years ahead of schedule. While the bank bailout itself was profitable, the administration estimates that the total cost of TARP, including assistance to insurers like AIG, will be $48 billion.

What Went Right

In the broadest sense, TARP was a success. It halted the collapse of the US banking system and may have prevented a second Great Depression. The Congressional Oversight Panel wrote in its final report that TARP “provided critical support to markets at a moment of profound uncertainty.”

In September 2008, as the market was making three digit swings, TARP not only provided a mechanism for resolving the core of the crisis, but also served as a strong statement that the government would take extraordinary measures to ensure the survival of the financial system. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s, wrote that “the capital purchase program was ultimately the one key thing that was necessary for stabilizing the financial system and the economy.”

TARP also prevented an even deeper recession. A study done by Zandi and Alan Blinder of Princeton determined that without TARP and the Federal Reserve’s monetary easing, GDP growth would have been 4.7 percentage points lower and unemployment would have been 4.0 percentage points higher in 2010.

And, from a cost standpoint, TARP was a greater accomplishment than anyone had possibly imagined. At its onset, estimates ranged in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The Congressional Budget Office initially determined that the program would cost $356 billion.

This significantly reduced cost stemmed not only from stronger-than-expected bank performance, but also from effective Treasury management. The Congressional Oversight Panel reported that the “Treasury deserves credit for lowering costs through its diligent management of TARP assets and, in particular, its careful restructuring of AIG, Chrysler, and GM.”

TARP, then, also allowed for the orderly bankruptcy of Chrysler and GM. Without the TARP funds, the carmakers would have exhausted their funds and been liquidated to pay creditors. Such a shutdown would have been devastating, wiping out over one million jobs in the motor vehicle industry and likely taking Ford down as well. Today, Chrysler and GM have restructured, paid back their funds ahead of schedule, and appear to be on the road to recovery.

What Went Wrong

In the final analysis, TARP must be faulted for accomplishing less than originally anticipated and for the significant financial and cultural distortions it created. TARP may have prevented the worst of the financial crisis, but it ultimately failed in its other stated goals—preventing the foreclosure crisis and increasing lending.

In fact, part of TARP’s low cost can be attributed to the failure of the Treasury’s foreclosure prevention programs. Expected to cost $50 billion, the TARP-created Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was supposed to restructure mortgages and prevent 3 to 4 million foreclosures. Instead, this goal has been lowered over time, and today only 1.5 million trial modifications and 500,000 permanent modifications have been made. Since TARP’s authorization, 7.1 million homeowners have received foreclosure notices.

HAMP attempted to save mortgages through temporary reductions in interest rates and monthly payments. But even with these lower payments, many homeowners were still underwater at high risk of default. The Congressional Oversight Panel recognized that HAMP was flawed: “moderate, long term payment relief did not provide the deep, short term relief necessary to keep unemployed borrowers temporarily without income in their homes.”

Many of TARP’s greatest costs, however, cannot be strictly measured in dollar amounts. Though TARP rescued large banks and the motor vehicle industry, Americans perceived it as a massive bailout of undeserving bankers, underscoring the nexus between Wall Street and Washington and undermining public confidence in policymakers and regulators.

TARP may have done too well in rescuing banks and too poorly in addressing the broader economy, allowing bankers to rebound and pay bonuses even as unemployment remains high. Felix Salmon of Reuters summed up the sentiment: “The little guy was hurt hard; the fat-cat bankers are smiling, unremorseful, and back to their old ways already.”

This attitude is undoubtedly simplistic, but TARP’s rushed execution and failure to provide accountability is seriously twisted policymaking. Anil Kayshyap, Professor of Finance at the Chicago Booth School of Business, said, “The public’s frustration has led to a general rise in populist political rhetoric and has polluted the policy discussion in many other areas.” The significant backlash has frustrated further government efforts to stabilize the economy and prevent a double-dip recession.

Closing the Book on TARP

TARP was a hastily executed effort of unprecedented size to rescue the US financial system from collapse. In that regard, TARP succeeded; without the immense government intervention, the recession would have been deeper, longer-lasting, and far more serious.

But as TARP comes to a close, it is clear that the program failed in several serious ways. Its foreclosure efforts were poorly designed and will not provide the mortgage relief needed. Toxic assets were not ultimately purchased, and banks did not use TARP funds to restart lending. The program’s greatest claim, then, is also its downfall. TARP saved the economy by saving the banks. And while its creators and promoters had hoped TARP would do far more, it failed to deliver. The American people, facing a 9.1 percent unemployment rate (as of September 2011), have a right to despise it.

Design by Andrew Seo

Unfortunately, on examination, both plans fail to pass muster for typical Washington reasons. President Obama’s proposal is disappointingly vague and does not provide any necessary details that could be scored by the Congressional Budget Office. The Ryan plan is comparatively detailed, but his grand scheme fails to address rapidly rising healthcare costs.

Despite representing a significant rewriting of America’s contemporary social contract, the Ryan proposal, “The Path to Prosperity”, takes initiative in aggressively facing the deficit and debt reduction. Over 10 years, Ryan’s plan would save $3.9 trillion more than Obama’s budget. By 2050, government spending would be 20 percent of GDP, a smaller proportion than any time since Herbert Hoover. In the Reagan era, federal spending averaged 22 percent of GDP, when medical costs and entitlement rolls were significantly lower. This two percentage point cut, then, shrinks government to a size unparalleled in recent history.

At Your Discretion

To achieve this reduction, Ryan would cut some $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending over the next decade, including defense spending. From 1962-2008, discretionary spending averaged 3.3 percent of GDP. By 2021, the Ryan budget would lower spending to 1.5 percent with unspecified cuts to education, agriculture, infrastructure, and housing.

President Obama proposed cutting discretionary spending by $600 billion over 10 years, resulting in a still historically low 2.2 percent of GDP. The reductions in both plans are drastic, potentially undermining vital long-term investments in roads, teachers, medical research, and other national priorities. Furthermore, these cuts are paired with significant increases in Medicare and Social Security funding, skewing already unbalanced spending even more greatly towards the elderly.

Surgical Cuts

These medical entitlements are at the heart of America’s fiscal crisis, and yet neither plan addresses them fully. Healthcare spending has increased from seven percent of GDP in 1970 to 17 percent in 2009. The Office of Management and Budget estimated that Medicare and Medicaid alone would cost 20 percent of GDP—almost the entire current proportion of federal spending—by 2050.

The Ryan plan successfully cuts Medicare and Medicaid spending in half by 2040 and restrains its rapid growth. It would also repeal President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), more affectionately known as Obamacare. Undoing the healthcare law would result in lower taxes and a lower government healthcare burden. But 32 million individuals would be once again be uninsured.

Ryan achieves these cost reductions by essentially shifting the healthcare burden to beneficiaries. Medicare would become a voucher system, giving the elderly a lump sum to purchase healthcare in exchanges—ironically a policy proposed by the possibly-to-be-repealed ACA.

Henry Aaron Jr., a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained to ARUSA that these vouchers would quickly become inadequate for covering medical care. Instead of being indexed to the faster rising costs of healthcare, the vouchers increase at the speed of inflation. Compounded over time, that difference of several percentage points becomes very large. The CBO estimated that a beneficiary’s out-of-pocket share of healthcare costs would increase from 25 percent today to over 68 percent by 2030. Furthermore, without the purchasing power of Medicare, these private plans are estimated to cost 44 percent to 67 percent more than traditional Medicare.

The Ryan plan similarly shifts the Medicaid burden to the states. The federal government would make lump-sum grants to states. But again, these grants would be indexed to inflation and not cost of medical care, slowly eroding federal support for the program and leaving states to cut care or other services. Ryan’s plan is daring in its effort to cut entitlement but does not have a true solution to tackle uncontrolled healthcare costs.

The Obama plan, on the other hand, is far more incremental and builds off the President’s healthcare law. Aaron noted that in the realm of serious efforts to lower health spending, the ACA was “the only game in town.” He specifically pointed to its pilot programs designed to lower costs, including the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board, health IT incentives, pay-for-quality programs, hospital readmission penalties, and medicine comparative effectiveness research. These pilots, of course, may amount to nothing, and the CBO has appropriately been conservative in scoring their fiscal benefits.

Take Your Pick

The Obama and Ryan plans, then, are flawed in their own ways. Obama, through the ACA, provides a series of speculative programs, which may fundamentally bend the cost curve of medical care and halt the looming fiscal crisis. On the other hand, if cost savings do not emerge, the addition of 32 million covered individuals will only further worsen the deficit and debt. Ryan offers guaranteed cuts to federal expenditures and entitlements, but at the cost of increasing the burden on states, elderly, and poor.

Neither plan, however, provides a sustainable vision for America’s future. The discretionary spending cuts are too facile a political tool, penny wise and pound foolish. Both President Obama and Representative Ryan would bring this long-term investment to historic lows, re-envisioning how education, infrastructure, and research spending drives the American economy. Real solutions may emerge from the Gang of Six or the debt ceiling supercommittee, but for Washington, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Design by Andrew Seo

A week out, Jobs’ death has begun to recede, and with time, it’s worth reflecting. Many individuals have shaped America and the world, but few of their deaths have received the visceral reaction that Jobs’ did. What is it about Steve Jobs that is so compelling, personal, and lamentable? He was an embodiment of the American Dream, and he died far too young. But Jobs’ death was culturally impactful for other reasons too. Jobs strikes a chord, I believe, because of his brilliant design, technological optimism, and uncommon leadership.

Design, not Invention

President Obama called him one of “the greatest of American innovators.” Others, a “genius.” An “historical figure on the scale of Thomas Edison.” “The crazy one,” a riff on Apple’s legendary ad.

But, Steve Jobs was not an inventor in the spirit of Edison. As a proud member of the iPhone generation, on a campus where the vast majority of computers are Macs, I have no doubt that Steve Jobs’ products have changed our lives and reshaped industries—music, movies, mobile computing. But, Steve Jobs was not an inventor in the traditional sense; he wasn’t an engineer, and he didn’t write software; he didn’t make any stunning discoveries. But, he was a virtuoso designer. Steve said in a 2004 interview:

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

I echoed that sentiment in a piece I wrote just over a year ago: “Steve Jobs truly cares about only one thing: creating amazing experiences. It’s not about this feature or that feature. It’s about creating something that people want and feel an emotional bond with.” Having individuals who understand users and the centrality of design is unusual, especially in the technology industry—Steve Jobs once bashed Microsoft for having “no taste.” He followed up with “and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way.”

Jobs believed in taste in a big way, the ultimate expression of quality over quantity. He knew he had taste and vision, and he (often dictatorially) imposed them on Apple and its products. There’s only one version of the iPhone you can buy, the iPhone Steve thought was most elegant and most beautiful, the best. It doesn’t have Flash. Its App Store is tightly curated (or even censored). At the end of the day, that’s design. Take it or leave it. But, people took it—and loved it, almost every single time. That was Jobs’ genius.

The End of the Future

Jobs lived the quintessential American Dream: adopted, college drop-out, comeback kid, and successful entrepreneur. That is worth celebrating. But Jobs was unique for another reason. He was one of our greatest and most prominent techno-optimists. He never stopped believing in and delivering on technology’s promise, and his life’s work exuded a constant belief in the future. His death, then, forces us to grapple with a lurking and unsettling uncertainty about America’s economic and technological progress.

Today, only 35% of Americans today believe America’s best days are yet to come. Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal and early Facebook investor, has labeled our era the “End of the Future.” He notes that little technological progress, outside the internet, has been made in the last half century. The dream of clean energy is dead in its tracks; Warren Buffett’s largest investment ever, $44 billion in BNSF Railways is a bet on coal shipping. The Green Revolution is “fading,” we travel no faster than we did 30 years ago, and the War on Cancer started in 1970. What happened to the future?

With Steve, every year like clockwork, there was a new device to delight us and make our lives easier. It was highly visible and unrelenting: every year, battery life increased, storage got bigger, the device slimmer and more beautiful. That Jobs was a good showman certainly mattered, but, more importantly, he believed in the world-changing possibilities of technology to his core.

Even better, he tried to convince us that technology could be human-scale and usable. His vision for the future was a remarkably clear and appealing one; even as things got more technically complicated, they could still be fun, reliable, and easy to use. Over Jobs’ long career, every other realm—politics, finance, or even air travel—appears only to have grown more arcane, unreliable, and frustrating with time.

Apple and the tech industry will very likely continue to flourish. But, Steve Jobs’ death casts profound uncertainty on a long and prolific period of making technology more human, more accessible, and more relevant for the world. He represented constant progress and a future where technology could empower and delight, not confuse and frustrate.

The Last Leader

When you combine Jobs’ clarity of mission, excellence in execution, and willingness to take risks you come up with something seemingly rare today: leadership. The Onion ran an obituary:

Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56…[Obama said:] ‘This is a dark time for our country, because the reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen. Those days are over.’

While satire, The Onion captures real sentiment. With the political system paralyzed at home and abroad and with the economy on the brink of a double-dip recession, Americans distrust their institutions now more than ever. There are few remaining wells of trust, confidence, and experience. Amazingly, Steve Jobs may well have been one of them.

Though the problems confronting us are great, there’s a pervasive feeling that our politicians are failing us. As Matt Bai points out in the New York Times, they poll relentlessly and pander to constituents and special interests, refusing to act in fear of coming elections. They could learn something from Steve Jobs.

Jobs was famous for never consulting market research or focus groups. He was never afraid to take risks in moving his products and headstrong vision forward. Time and time again he angered his users, ditching floppy disks, DVD drives, and Adobe Flash. He unveiled a phone with no keyboard when every smartphone had a keyboard. He released a tablet after Microsoft had failed for a decade with its own tablets. Each time, users came around to Jobs’ concept, understanding and ultimately benefiting from decisions that they disagreed with. You might call that leadership.

He demanded excellence and gave us users things we didn’t even know we wanted. He moved technology forward, often against our wills, but he was confident, stubborn, and often right. He offered his vision, and he led. Across age, party line, and country, we followed.

Click for full graphic

On his final health care push in Ohio, President Obama told the audience, “I’m here because of Natoma.” Ms. Canfield’s story is hardly unique: one study conducted by Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance estimates that nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with a lack of health insurance.  While the recent health care reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will provide nearly universal coverage, its ability to put health care costs on a path to fiscal sustainability is less certain, dependent on congressional discipline and a hodge-podge of untested medical pilot programs.

Spiraling Spending

The United States spends significantly more on health care than any other industrialized country, yet covers a smaller proportion of its population. Rising costs are thanks in part to consumer demand over the past decades, which has fueled development of procedures. Treatment of chronic disease now consumes 75 percent of national health care costs as a result of our aging population, and administrative overhead accounts for 7 percent of expenditures.

Thanks to these and other factors, health care spending has grown from 7 percent of GDP in 1970 to more than 17 percent in 2009. Premiums have more than doubled since 1999, far outpacing worker earnings. As of 2007, some 15 percent of individuals were completely uninsured, and at least another 10 percent were underinsured, unable to fully pay their insurance deductibles and co-pays.

This is despite tremendous federal subsidies, a continuation of which would ultimately devour the federal budget. The Office of Management and Budget estimated that if current spending patterns continue, Medicare and Medicaid alone would cost 20 percent of GDP—the current level of all federal spending combined—by 2050.

Obama’s Reform

President Obama and the Democratic Congress sought to solve these problems with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or PPACA, which the President signed on March 23, 2010. The complex law expands coverage with insurance market mandates: beginning in 2014, it bars insurance companies from denying coverage based on preexisting medical conditions and previous insurance claims.  It also requires citizens to purchase federally approved insurance or pay a fine, with the goal of maintaining a financially sustainable risk pool for insurance firms.

PPACA increases affordability through $938 billion in subsidies over 10 years, much of which will fund state-level health insurance exchanges. By 2014, each state will have created an exchange in which families and employers can purchase private insurance plans that comply with federal guidelines. The federal government will provide refundable, means tested tax credits to families below 400 percent of the national poverty line. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the exchanges will extend coverage to 24 million Americans.

The other avenue for affordability is the expansion of existing programs. By 2014, individuals not eligible for Medicare with incomes below 133 percent of the poverty level will be eligible for Medicaid, which will cover another 16 million citizens. The CBO estimates that the new exchanges and the Medicaid expansion will provide insurance to 94 percent of Americans and cost some $900 billion over 10 years.

The law covers half of this cost with new taxes. It imposes an excise tax on high-cost “Cadillac” health plans, which begins in 2018 and raises a projected $32 billion through 2019. An annual fee on health care providers will raise $60 billion, and surcharges on individuals earning over $200,000 annually will raise $210 billion.  These and other taxes will generate $410 billion through 2019.

The rest of the cost is covered by reductions in Medicare reimbursements to care providers, reducing spending by $491 billion through 2019. Perhaps most importantly, the law funds a series of pilot programs, like investments in medical information technology and penalties for hospitals with high readmissions, that test ways of slowing spending growth. The CBO expects the law to reduce the deficit by $143 billion in the next 10 years and by as much as $1.3 trillion over the following decade.

Bending the Curve?

While the law goes a long way toward universal coverage, there is continuing debate about its fiscal implications. Democrats have criticized the CBO for underestimating the bill’s savings provisions, while conservatives have criticized Democrats for attempting to game the CBO by phasing in reforms late in the 10-year estimate window to lower apparent costs. Even if the estimate is accurate, it only reflects the law exactly as written. If Congress lacks the political will to implement the new taxes and Medicare reductions come 2018, hundreds of billions of dollars in projected savings may never materialize.

And even if the law works exactly as written, it should be judged not only by whether it pays for itself in the short run, but also, as Professor Michael Chernew of Harvard Medical School explained to the HPR, by whether it puts us “on a path to fiscal sustainability.” Unless it bends the curve on medical expenditures, meaning it significantly slows growth, short-term deficit reduction will be futile. The law might improve affordability for individuals, but health care costs will consume ever-larger portions of national income, which must ultimately be financed through taxation.

The greatest hope for controlling long-run spending lies in the bill’s smaller subtitles, which offer uncertain but innovative pilots that could blossom into effective cost controls. The CBO is conservative in scoring these unpredictable policies: community wellness programs, comparative treatment effectiveness research, pay-for-performance systems, and other experimental initiatives are predicted to have zero savings.

Even those that register in the projections are minor. The new Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, designed to explore new pay-for-quality systems, is slated to save some $4 billion through 2019. The biggest saver is a bonus created for hospitals with low readmissions, projected to save $14 billion.

Harvard economics professor David Cutler wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the law incorporates virtually every broad idea that has been offered for “bending the health-care cost curve.” Professor Katherine Baicker of the Harvard School of Public Health explained that although the pilots may be the key to fiscally transforming the health care system, they can only succeed if the workable ones are “implemented in full force.”  Whether that happens is a question of politics.

PPACA has definite potential to rein in costs over the long term, but passing this one bill is not enough. Policymakers must recognize which parts of the bill are effective cost cutters, and Congress must have the political will to enact these provisions in full force while eliminating the unworkable ones.

States could also exploit the threat from the living dead to acquire new territory, squelch irredentist movements, settle old scores, or subdue enduring rivals. The People’s Republic of China could use the zombie threat to justify an occupation of Taiwan. Russia could use the same excuse to justify intervention in its near abroad. The United States would not be immune from the temptation to exploit the zombie threat as a strategic opportunity. How large would the army of the Cuban undead need to be to justify the deployment of the 82nd Airborne?

And maybe Kirkland House knows something the rest of us don’t…

Major universities have developed mock contingency plans for a zombie outbreak, and an increasing number of college students have been found to be playing “Humans vs. Zombies” on their campuses, whether to relieve stress or prepare for the invasion of the undead.

Can someone go to Drew Faust’s office hours and ask if we have a zombie preparedness plan? If not, we’d better convene a task force immediately. I’d gladly serve.

Meanwhile, Android is already outselling Apple, according to market researcher NPD…My sense is that today’s Apple event marks an important tipping point—the point where Android starts to surge past Apple the way Windows surged past Apple in personal computers back in the 1990s.

The media loves conflict, and nothing could be better than finding the mythical “iPhone killer” or seeing Steve Jobs fail spectacularly. And now, we have an exciting narrative for the tech press: a great powers war between Apple and Google for the hearts and minds of smartphone users. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Daniel Lyons is totally wrong. Market share is indicative of nothing. Ever heard of Symbian? Well, Symbian by Nokia owns about 44% of the global smartphone market (by 2010 Q1 shipments), with Apple clocking in at 15% and Android at 10%. But, volume does not equate to success, especially for Apple. Steve Jobs would never make the devil’s bargain of cheapness for market share—the strategy of PC makers for some time (Dell). That’s part of the reason Apple struggled in the 1990s.

Steve Jobs truly cares about only one thing: creating amazing experiences. It’s not about this feature or that feature. It’s about creating something that people want and feel an emotional bond with. You might even say people treat their smartphones like their politicians. Policy and features be damned, we want things (and politicos) we can love. The tech press is filled with number-obsessed nerds (like the political press) who think that consumers choose based on obscure features. But, normal consumers don’t care what kind of processor goes into a phone or whether the phone’s software is open source. They want something that works, that is easy to use, and that makes them feel good.  That’s Apple’s strength and something Google can never beat Jobs at. Sentiments like this couldn’t be more wrong:

Also, a lot of what Apple is focusing on in the new phone seems to be kind of cosmetic. (I wanted to say “foofy,” but I guess that’s not an actual word.)…He showed off a new gyroscope that will let you play cool games, which is fine, except I’m a grown man and don’t really sit around playing games on my phone.

People love “foofy.” People gawk at the iPhone’s design and at the extremely sharp text in iPhone 4. We want to be wow’ed. Who cares what an OLED screen is or how IMAP is implemented? Grown men and women do play games on their iPhones as they sit on the train or bus. The tech press simply can’t get the average user, how they actually use and connect with their technology. Users don’t judge phones on feature lists, but on feel and everyday use; they don’t think about using phones, they use them. That’s the world that Apple excels in and the world that the tech press just can’t really get.

Icing is the practice whereby a prankster ambushes his or her victim with a Smirnoff Ice, typically by hiding it someplace the victim is likely to stumble upon it. The victim must then drop to one knee and immediately drink the entire malt beverage, during which time the prankster usually takes photos or videos of the icing-in-progress. This prank began at Southern college fraternities, which is why anyone involved in an icing is usually referred to as a “bro.”

The Wire goes on to recommend (sarcastically, I really hope) that Congressmen should start icing one another. As a college student, I am qualified to proclaim this trend as phenomenally dumb. The “meme” deserves not another inch of writing, even ceaseless, unforgiving mocking. It is idiotic beyond criticism. At this point, I can only apologize to you for having sullied your mind with such painful inanity. Oh, and don’t forget to read this 1,300 word Fortune report on it.

PS. Did I mention Goldman Sachs traders are icing one another?

I just finished watching Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ The Pacific, an HBO miniseries following a group of marines in WWII. And it was truly epic. Melodramatic and overwrought maybe, but the war in the Pacific was no jungle romp. As The Pacific vividly shows, it was unimaginably gruesome, traumatic, and relentless. The marines battled the unyielding and suicidal Japanese on malaria-infested, rain-ridden islands for months at a time. In one scene, a marine idly tossed rocks into a Japanese soldier’s open head, soupy with blood.

Yet, for all its cringe-inducing visual effects and messages of heroism, love, and friendship, I came away from The Pacific with just one feeling: the overwhelming pang of generational inadequacy. In the first episode, a marine at Guadalcanal mentions that his birthday had just passed. It was his 18th.

I finally understood the generational existential crisis. As A.O. Scott wrote recently (about Milo Burke’s novel “The Ask”) in the New York Times,

“Maybe not the glory of rushing a Nazi foxhole, or braving municipal billy bats to stop a war in Indochina,” he notes, trying to get a fix on what exactly he and his ilk achieved in their heroic youth, “but the privileged of our generation did what they could, like the rest of us.”

It’s hard to measure up to a generation that gave everything to defend the free world. It’s hard to live up to the fact that in 1945, some of us would have been at Okinawa; yet, here we are lounging around, playing Xbox and watching Lost. It is nothing short of inadequacy, a generational poverty of accomplishment.The Greatest Generation’s successors struggled through Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War. But, we didn’t save the world. We didn’t storm Normandy or watch our friends die. We browsed Facebook. I couldn’t shake the feeling.

As I ruminated, I stumbled on the answer. Its lack of immediacy was telling. Our accomplishment is ongoing and more subtle, easy to forget, but also impossible to. This wasn’t our crisis; we aren’t old enough to have mid-life crises. After all, A.O. Scott was writing about Gen X, born in the midst of Vietnam and too young to remember or to have taken part in it. Yes, this is their crisis of inadequacy: coming of age at the end of the Soviet Union and taking full advantage of the Clintonian “end of history” and Pax Americana. But we millenials—Generation Y, whatever—didn’t have that luxury. Peace and economic expansion collapsed suddenly, in front of our eyes. Peggy Noonan, rather perceptively, caught on:

I’ve been thinking about those who were children on 9/11, not little ones who were shielded but those who were 10 and 12, old enough to understand that something dreadful had happened but young enough still to be in childhood…Nine-eleven, he felt, changed everything for his generation. “It completely destroyed our sense of invincibility—maybe that’s not the right word. I would say it made everything real to a 12-year-old. It showed the world could be a dangerous place when for my generation that was never the case. My generation had no Soviet Union, no war against fascism, we never had any threats. I was born when the Berlin Wall came down. It destroyed the sense of carefree innocence that we had.”

We have our own war; it is not an existential one, but it is important and unlike any before. We live our daily lives, but we are at war everywhere at all times. The frontline is in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Times Square and Heathrow. It is less striking, less brutal, less sweeping, but more complicated and more nuanced. There are no islands to invade, but our enemies are everywhere. Gen X can have a crisis of confidence, but we should never let that feeling creep up. Our generation has its own heroes and its own fight:

He remembered after 9/11 those who rose up to fight terrorism. Even as a child he was moved by them. There are always in history so many such people, he said. It is always the great reason for hope.

The miniseries of our generation won’t lend itself to great television, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an epic to be told.

I won’t go on about the nomination process, which has been covered to death. But, I just wanted to point out this particularly conspiratorial, but savvy, analysis at Above the Law about Deputy Principal Counsel (and Harvard law professor, again) Dan Meltzer:

Also on Friday, Daniel Meltzer resigned as deputy principal counsel, to return to his post as a professor at Harvard Law School. What does this mean?

“Meltzer is out — meaning he didn’t get his way,” a source told us. “Expect an announcement Monday that [the nominee will be] Kagan.”

Hold on a sec. Dan Meltzer was on the Harvard Law faculty before joining the White House counsel’s office. Shouldn’t he be playing for Team Kagan?

Actually, no. Meltzer has been trying to sink Kagan throughout the entire process. Why? Because of a grudge dating back to their days in Cambridge. He threw his hat into the ring for the Harvard Law School deanship at the same time as Kagan, but lost out to her — and has never forgiven Kagan for beating him out for the post.

Now Meltzer is headed back to Harvard — where someday he might become dean, perhaps after Martha Minow finishes out her term. With Kagan out of the picture, after her confirmation to a life-tenured position on the Supreme Court, he won’t have to worry about her pesky meddling!

They further note that Meltzer played a key role in preparing Justice Sotomayor for confirmation, something he presumably wasn’t particularly excited about doing with his old rival…See, Harvard administrative politics is everywhere—even at the highest court in the land! And we thought faculty meetings were boring.