The lead Politico story today is on President Obama’s rhetoric of “class warfare” and its implications for showdowns on guns, immigration, and budget politics. Politico takes an odd tone throughout, treating Obama’s push for higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” as opportunistic rhetoric, and not as a (half-hearted) response to yawning income inequality and tax policies skewed to favor the wealthiest Americans.

Given Washington’s obsession with spending, this won’t enter the picture, but this figure—from a recent Gallup poll on immigration—is more important to the future of entitlement reform than any policy discussed by President Obama or Congress:

When Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan ran for vice president last year, he campaigned against the $716 billion Medicare cut in the Affordable Care Act, calling it a "raid" on the program. "Medicare should not be used as a piggy bank for 'Obamacare,'" said Ryan last August, after joining the Romney campaign, "Medicare should be used to be the promise that it made to our current seniors. Period. End of Story."

Long before we thought of founding The American Prospect in 1989, I came to know Paul Starr through a prescient article titled “Passive Intervention.” The piece was published in 1979, in a now-defunct journal, Working Papers for a New Society.

Florida governor Rick Scott, with his skeletal frame, shiny bald pate, 9-figure fortune possibly obtained at least partially through Medicare fraud, and love of humiliating poor people, resembles nothing so much as a comic-book villain. So it was something of a surprise when he announced yesterday that he is reversing his previous position and will allow poor Floridians to receive Medicaid coverage as provided for in the Affordable Care Act. It isn't hard to explain why: the federal government is paying 100 percent of the cost of new enrollees in the first few years, and nearly all the cost thereafter, meaning for a small investment on the state's part it gets a healthier, happier, more productive citizenry. Only a truly despicable politician would turn it down, preferring to see their constituents go without health insurance than get it from the government, as I've argued (OK, "raged" is more like it) before.

After the Supreme Court said it its Obamacare decision that states could opt out of the Medicaid expansion, some people were more optimistic than I was, arguing that though Republican governors might shake their fist at Barack Obama for a while, eventually the Medicaid money would be too difficult to turn down. It's looking like I was wrong and they were right; Scott follows Republican governors in states like Ohio and Michigan in announcing that they'll accept the expansion, and though there are still some holdouts (most notably Rick Perry of Texas, which has more uninsured than any other state), the dominoes are starting to fall.

So what does this tell us? It turns out that even the most ideological politicians respond rationally to the incentives they're presented with—maybe not all the time, but much of the time.

For several years, sociologists and demographers have been discussing a new socioeconomic division in this country: the widening family divide between the highly educated and everyone else. On one side are those who get at least a bachelor's degree—or wait even longer—before they marry and have children. On the other side are those without a college education who have children—early and often—and have a series of partners (with or without marriage) who may or may not be related to their children. In the second group, an unexpected pregnancy may interrupt the woman's education; sometimes she wasn't going on anyway.