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James Medlock Profile picture
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Jan 16,, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I've neglected taking care of my teeth (still need to get wisdom teeth out, have cavities, etc), and 2020 was gonna be my year to finally do it. Decided to do an adverse selection and sign up for good dental insurance, I got a single cavity filled, and then, boom, pandemic
But I forgot to disenroll from the dental insurance until a month ago, and so I ended up paying a ton of money for insurance I didn't use - which I guess serves me right for trying to just sign up for insurance only when I knew I'd use it
I've got to admit, when the pandemic hit, part of me was just relieved I didn't have to go to the dentist
We should just have universal public dental insurance so no adverse selection.

And yes, I will be good and take care of my teeth now

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More from @jdcmedlock

James Medlock Profile picture
Jan 17,
I think most people in this discourse basically agree with these planks and the interesting questions are about how much room we have to push on different margins - getting hung up on semantics tends to distract from this
There are free lunches to be had when we're operating below capacity, though I think industrial policy is often what is needed to get at this. Welfare state plays an important automatic stabilizer role, but tends to be a blunt tool
Until recently we've been under capacity enough that we could get away with not tax financing new transfer payments, but I'm not sure we should consider that the baseline. Goal should be to always run the economy so steaming hot that new transfer payments would need to be offset
Read 4 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
Jan 17,
From my own job I can confirm that LTL freight is insane right now. Not only are prices up, but it’s challenging to even get shipments picked up on the first attempt, often takes rescheduling it over and over until someone finally shows up
Meanwhile small parcel shipments have been going extremely smoothly compared to a year ago (true for both USPS and FedEx/UPS). Very divergent fortunes for similar industries
The trucking labor market has been terrible for decades so it’s not totally surprising
Read 5 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
Jan 15,
What would mine be?
There was the time people thought I was a Sirhan Sirhan truther, and people were very mad when I said Castillo wasn’t as bad as Fujimori, feel like I’m forgetting some
This was fun
Read 4 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
Jan 6,
This would be very worth doing, but we'd be better off replacing the Gross Receipts Taxes with a VAT
GRTs are just not ideal. The exemption would encourage firms contort themselves to stay below $2 million, while the tax itself would encourage excessive vertical integration, creating a weird bias against medium sized firms for no real reason
In an ideal world, it'd be nice if we had a federally administered VAT that states and municipalities could piggy back on the infrastructure of, so if you want to do state single payer, just have the feds bump up the VAT in that area and transfer the extra revenue to them
Read 7 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
Dec 8, 2021
One thing I'm very sure about my dad is that if he had grown up in the internet age, he would have gone down as one of the greatest poasters of all time.
He had his own unmistakable aesthetic you could see in everything he wrote. His sense of humor never left him, even when Parkinsons took his ability to speak, he would take his time, typing out a word per minute at best, just to share a silly joke. He never stopped posting.
I still can't piece his entire life story together - he didn't like to stay in one place long, he never made much money, he had a knack for finding the weirdest living spaces, whether it was someone's porch, a trailer in a backyard, or a closet.
Read 8 tweets
James Medlock Profile picture
Jan 20, 2021
My take on the back and forth about the advanced child tax credits is that, as it was proposed in the AFA, where payments are only sent if your tax liability is negative, it seems likely to lead to administrative problems. 1/?
peoplespolicyproject.org/2021/01/20/why…
But if we did actually copy Canada and assess eligibility entirely based on prior year income, & send checks out to everyone below the high phase-out, that would be fine. It’s not ideal because it’s less responsive to income changes, but administratively it’d avoid major fumbles
In Canada, 6% of people on last-ditch social assistance do not receive the full child benefit because it’s based on prior income. This isn’t great, & may be worse in the US where our social assistance is worse, but it’s a relatively small number of people jrf.org.uk/file/36835/dow…
Read 4 tweets

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