See him every day:
— I used email to coordinate message with Kevin Drum.
— College wage premium is substantially higher in the US than elsewhere.
— DC on pace for its least-murderous year in decades.
— Civilian casualties and American war aims.
— The flooding in Pakistan is much worse than I realized.
I think there’s mounting evidence that Matt Sharp was the creative mind behind Pinkerton and the Blue Album. Here’s the Weezer/Rentals collaboration “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams”.
It seems to me that this chart is the key to understanding today’s political economy:
Virtually every single member of congress, every senator, every Capitol Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every major political reporter is a college graduate. What’s more, we have a large amount of social segregation in the United States—college graduates tend to socialize with each other. And among college graduates, there simply isn’t an economic crisis in the United States. This is not the best of times, but it’s perfectly rational in gradland to be balancing concern about the labor market situation with dozens of other concerns. If you did anything, you’d probably step in to prevent teacher layoffs, which is a clear and present danger to a large bloc of college graduates. But beyond that, no need to panic.
Dylan Matthews did an interesting survey yesterday, asking various figures what they think the revenue-maximizing tax rate is. The liberals generally look at the research and conclude that the Laffer Curve Inflection Point is in the 60-70% range, while the conservatives duck and cover. But it’s Greg Mankiw who, I think, makes the most important point, to wit: “the short-run answer and the long-run answer are quite different . . . the long-run answer is actually more important for policy purposes than the short-run answer.”
To perhaps put this in a more pointed way, over the long-run the revenue-maximizing tax rate and the growth-maximizing tax rate should be identical. Guinea and Portugal both have about 10 million people, but the government of Portugal has dramatically more revenue simply because Portugal is so much richer. And that’s how it works in general over the long-term. Government revenue will increase rapidly if the economy grows rapidly and not otherwise. The question is whether short-term revenue is valuable because it’s funding important growth-enhancing public services, or whether short-term revenue is harmful because it’s funding waste and bloat.
Meanwhile, the growth implications of tax system design—how do you raise your revenue, not just how much revenue do you raise—are much more important than the political debate commonly recognizes.
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Vienna, Austria
Something I ponder every once in a while is the strange ideological positioning of “real business cycle” or “recalculation” or “structural” or “Austrian” analyses of the current recession, or recessions more generally. These notions are usually put forward by people on the right, very strict libertarians most typically. And the idea of how the proposition fits together with the larger ideology is that the structural analysis serves as a bullwark against government intervention to stabilize the economy.
This all seems to me to suffer from a paucity of ideological imagination. The problem, as Jim Henley points out, is that the “Recalculation Story,” if true, implies radical underlying flaws in the capitalist economic model that call not for small-bore government intervention but for wholesale rethinking of the way the economy functions. I others would look at this differently if they, like me, had been raised in a family that contained various Marxists. From inside a “left” point of view, real business cycle theory is a radical theory that rears its head in any downturn as evidence of the systemic crises of capitalism and perhaps the need for revolutionary change. New Keynesian insistence that timely public policy can, if implemented correctly, stabilize the situation is a very status quo pro-market point of view. The point of the New Keynesian analysis is that mass unemployment, where it exists, reflects a failure of the political system—exactly the kind of thing a libertarian should expect will happen now and again—rather than a failure of market exchange.
John Maynard Keynes understood himself to be a liberal trying to preserve a free enterprise system threatened by communists and fascists. Milton Friedman, I think, also understood that the grinding misery of the Great Depression only led to unhealthy politics and was an advocate of bank bailouts, helicopter drops, and all the rest to prevent disaster.
In 2010, of course, we’re not going to go communist. Which is nice. But if you tell people that high unemployment is going to exist for a long long time, and there’s nothing the government can or will do about it, then of course people are going to support policies that make the economy less flexible and less open to imports and foreigners. If laid-off workers can’t find new jobs, then protecting incumbent sites of employment from competition becomes priority number one.
It’s true that if you adopt this view you do need to give up some libertarian purism. If periodic state intervention is required for the purposes of macroeconomic stabilization then you legitimize state intervention to, for example, help poor people. But the battle for that kind of purism is lost anyway. What you gain by embracing stabilization policy and treating the political problems of how to do it effectively as a problem to be solved rather than a reason not to try is an account of why it is that 9.5 percent unemployment doesn’t discredit the underlying principles of a market economy.
While cable news was obsessing over the non-story of disgraced former Senator Ted Stevens’ death, the Fed’s Open Market Committee released a mildly dovish statement paired with minor action—they’ll roll over existing positions, which you can interpret as either moderate expansion or else maintaining the status quo. Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig, who wants you to lose your job amidst a double-dip recession, dissented from the right. The stock market seemed to immediately leap upwards, underscoring the fact that you improve “business confidence” by improving growth prospects rather than by catering to businessmen’s political opinions.
What we’re left to wonder is: Would this have gone down differently if Barack Obama’s three nominees were in place? And if it would have, how different would the midterms look? This is the biggest political story of the week by far, and you’ll see virtually no coverage of it.
The Obama/McChrystal era combat doctrine in Afghanistan places higher emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties, but the increased level of fighting means civilian casualties are way up and mostly caused by anti-government fighters:
In a semiannual report, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said the number of civilians wounded and killed in the conflict had increased by nearly a third, 31 percent, in the first six months of the year.
Seventy-six percent of the civilian casualties were attributable to “antigovernment elements,” the report said, using United Nations terminology for insurgents. That was an increase of 53 percent over the same period, Jan. 1 to June 30, in 2009, it added.
As with the sad case of Aisha there’s no denying that the “bad guys” here are the brutal Taliban and other insurgents who are responsible for the bulk of the bloodshed. But that still leaves the question of who our efforts to fight them are actually helping and at what cost.
Scott Winship runs through some historical public opinion data and finds that while people get more pessimistic about their children’s future during recessions there’s no overall trend toward greater pessimism when you ask parents whether their own kids will do better than they have. This reminds me of a point that I feel often goes missing from discussions of wage and income stagnation, namely that when we compare the US population in 2010 to the US population in 1970 we’re not comparing the same group of people at two different points in time. Nor are we comparing a group of people to that group’s parents. Lots of people in the United States in 2010 either lived in Mexico in 1970 or else have parents who lived in Mexico in 1970, and smaller-but-not-insubstantial numbers of people come from other countries.
In particular, a very large proportion of low-income people in the United States are immigrants. I think the spin which Heritage’s Robert Rector puts on these facts in his “Importing Poverty: Immigration and Poverty in the United States” is fairly perverse, but facts like “First-generation immigrants and their families, who are one-sixth of the U.S. population, comprise one-fourth of all poor persons in the U.S.” and “Minor children of first-generation immigrants comprise 26 percent of poor children in the U.S.” are important to keep in mind when thinking about historical trends.
Rector seems to think the upshot of this is that we should kick all these people out, so they can be even poorer in developing countries, and then make our poverty statistics look better. That’s nuts. The real upshot of this is that things aren’t as bad as they sometimes seem—that many of the worst-off people in America are in fact engaged in upward mobility relative to where they started in life. That doesn’t mean we should be complacent about the education, health care, nutrition, and infrastructure needs of poor people.
Oftentimes, discussions of copyright policy hinge on hypotheticals. What if you couldn’t copyright recordings of songs? What would happen then? Maybe nobody would record new songs. Or maybe the quality of new recordings would be abysmally low. What would we listen to then? Won’t somebody think of the children?
Fortunately, in the realm of fashion we don’t need to speculate. We know what a world without fashion copyrights would look like, because we live in one today and we’ve always lived in one. It’s a world full of innovation in the field of design, and also full of various kinds of knock-off. Fashion leaders introduce new concepts, and cheaper imitators come along and follow the pack. In order to remain distinctive, the leaders are driven to further imitate. Meanwhile, everybody has plenty of clothes and styles in tie-width, skirt-length, etc. oscillate around. Yet somehow fashion designers and the members of congress who love them keep coming back to Washington looking for government-sponsored monopolies. The latest version of legislation to allow fashion copyrights has Senators Boxer, Feinstein, Hatch, Graham, and Hutchison as co-sponsors along with lead author Chuck Schumer.
I tend to argue that a lot of local business regulation is really just a mask for rent-seeking by incumbent firms who don’t want competition. But I don’t expect the rent-seeking incumbents to just come out and say that’s what’s happening. And yet here’s Elahe Izadi reporting from Silver Spring on Nando’s Peri-Peri attempting to engage in voluntary exchanges of chicken for money:
he general managers from those four restaurants voiced concern that the addition of Nando’s to the mix would hurt their bottom line. They submitted a letter to the board, protesting the award of the liquor license, arguing it would reduce business for existing restaurants.
The letter literally argues that “[a]pproving any additional licenses in this market would be merely causing more difficulties for existing businesses in an environment in which no additional demand exist.” Even if this is true, it would be an insane reason to deny a license. If we assume a fixed quantity of demand for Silver Spring dining, then it’s perhaps true that opening a Nando’s will drive the Macaroni Grill or the Red Lobster (to name two of the protesting businesses) out of business. But that’s only going to happen if customers prefer Nando’s. A firm that’s only staying in business because it’s persuaded local regulators to block new entrants is not the kind of firm your community needs. If a neighborhood only has the customer base to support four restaurants, then you still want as much competition as possible to ensure that you get the four best dining options possible.
Fortunately, the Montgomery County Department of Liquor Control found this unpersuasive and granted the license. But the fact that restaurants might even think “we don’t want to let competitors take our customers” was a potentially persuasive argument is telling.
As we’ve been noting Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain have decided recently that all endeavors that involve public funds flowing to animal research are funny-sounding, and therefore examples of waste. The reality is that most of us are interested in promoting human health, and you do this in part by studying other living creatures:
Snail venom in a pill could offer powerful relief for people who suffer from severe and chronic pain.
It may seem an unlikely source of pharmaceutical inspiration, but the chemicals that some snails produce have potent effects on the human nervous system. This makes them promising sources of drugs that could dull the pain of cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, HIV/AIDS, car accidents and other conditions.
In the latest advance, researchers have designed a venom-inspired medication that can be taken orally — a leap forward from previous forms that needed to be injected directly into the spinal cord.
As I’ve been saying, if you want to make the case that public support for scientific research in general is a mistake, you’re welcome to do so. But it’s a difficult case to make. Growing the stock of human knowledge has large benefits that it’s generally impossible to fully internalize, so subsidizing basic research makes sense.
Norm Coleman, former Minnesota Senator and current head of the American Action Forum, alleged that “only Washington politicians and limousine liberal economists would think that going further into debt would help you get closer to getting out of debt.”
If that’s true, then the entire existence of business lending becomes somewhat puzzling. In reality, it’s clear that going deeper into debt can improve your financial well-being in a wide variety of circumstances. You’re a truck driver and your wife’s a waitress. If she stops working to go back to school and finish her nursing degree, you’ll lose income and go deeper into debt. But nurses get paid a lot more than waitresses, so going deeper into debt will increase your family’s prosperity. Or you run a popular, profitable sandwich shop that’s located in a building you bought with borrowed money. Revenue easily covers the cost of the mortgage. The opportunity arises to expand to a second location in a new neighborhood with little competition and favorable demographics, but you’ll have to borrow more money in order to expand. Again, going deeper into debt will increase your business’ prosperity.
In all cases, what’s relevant is not the debt but the cost of interest and the merits of the underlying proposition. In the case of the US government during a recession that features low interest rates, it makes tons of sense to borrow money in order to do things that are genuinely useful or that mobilize genuinely idle resources.
I think Robert Gibbs needs to be drug tested if he thinks whining about liberal critics in an interview with The Hill is going to help him or Barack Obama in any way:
“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”
Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”
Longtime readers and followers of various squabbles with FDL bloggers will know that I have some sympathy with the substance of what Gibbs has to say here. But you don’t improve your relationship with same-team ideological activists by attacking them in red-baiting terms. What’s more, we’re seeing a serious confusion here on the role of political activists in the system. As I said during the health care debate, it’s not the job of the President of the United States to stand up for a pure ideological vision—his job is to cut compromises to implement policies that improve on the status quo. But by the same token, it’s not the job of activists to be “satisfied” with compromises premised on the current boundaries of political feasibility.
I’m excited about the Affordable Care Act, but it’s completely true that I won’t be “satisfied” with American health care policy until it’s made much much better. What’s wrong with that? Being satisfied with the status quo never got anyone anywhere.
(cc photo by richardmasoner)
Warren Strobel on the latest terrorism stats:
There were just 25 U.S. noncombatant fatalities from terrorism worldwide. (The US government definition of terrorism excludes attacks on U.S. military personnel). While we don’t have the figures at hand, undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism.
The State Department’s figures on “Death of U.S. Citizens Abroad by Non-Natural Causes” are available online. They represent an undercount since they only include deaths that were reported to State. Playing around with the numbers a bit I see that 26 Americans died in vehicle accidents in Mexico between 1 August 2009 and 1 January 2010, so it’s safe to say you’re dramatically likelier to die abroad in a traffic accident than a terrorist attack. In general, I’m a believer that we should be more alarmed by motor vehicle fatalities than we are so the message isn’t simply “calm down about terrorism.” The point, however, is that it’s important for public priorities to be brought into closer line with objective risks.
LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne offers a criticism in the form of a question about Inception: “Why are the movie’s architectural settings, for the most part, so hackneyed?”
It seems to me that there’s a perfectly good answer to this question. As Hawthorne notes later in his piece, the reliance on cliché physical forms is of a piece with the film’s general repackaging of very familiar cinematic tropes:
The bulk of the dream sequences take place in the following spaces: on the streets of downtown Los Angeles, including a wide intersection in front of a Famima store; the inside of a van; a hotel room; hotel hallways; an elevator; an elevator shaft; and a quasi-Brutalist mountainside complex where, in the deep snow, you can make out the boot-prints of both James Bond and Jason Bourne.
This is just one of the film’s pet notions—that life inside the dreams of hardened pysches resembles action movie clichés in which vast quantities of heavily armed goons assault you with terrible aim. Similarly, near the beginning of the film you’re given a series of very cliché heist movie “getting the gang back together” scenes complete with Joseph Gordon-Levitt swearing he’s just trying to pull one last job. Whether you like this or not (my dad said the movie is “too postmodern” for him) being original by creating a pastiche made up of individual clichés is the whole movie and nothing in particular about its treatment of architecture.
Neil Irwin’s Federal Reserve Open Market Committee pregame article is excellent but depressing. The conclusion:
Even less likely than major new asset purchase program would be ideas advanced by Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (who frequently cites a speech by Bernanke himself), such as explicitly increasing the Fed’s inflation target from its current 2 percent, or entering a price-level targeting regime in which it would promise future inflation high enough to make up for any period of below-trend inflation. Those are viewed on the FOMC as radical steps that would only be considered if conditions were much worse than they are now.
Stodgy organization rejects correct advice as “too radical” is a time-honored turn of events. But what’s so frustrating about this is that the radical steps in question are exactly the ones Ben Bernanke prescribed for this sort of situation before he got his government job. And we’re not just talking about an off-hand remark; this is one of his core areas of academic expertise. What’s more, when Bernanke got the job it wasn’t considered an act of wild-eyed radicalism to appoint him. People knew his ideas, knew his work, and he had a great reputation. So what’s the hold up?
Doubling the frustration is the fact that at the last monetary policy oversight hearings in congress, the majority of member seemed incapable of posing these questions squarely. Why don’t you do for the United States what you recommended Japan do in the 1990s? Why isn’t undershooting your inflation target as bad as overshooting it? It’s not brain surgery.
Being alone’s the only way to be:
— I’m going to be on Countdown tonight, circa 8:15 PM.
— The juice box turns thirty.
— On “chop shops” and Indian software firms.
— FOMC preview.
— US/EU sanctions on Iran not working, only multilateral sanctions would have bite.
— Unnecessary and damaging fashion copyright bill reintroduced.
— Grading the NBA free agent season.
Janelle Monae, “Cold War”
If someone proposed that the United States adopt a policy that massively reduced the wages of every worker in America as a strategy to increase the profitability of US-based firms, everyone would recognize the policy for what it is. But when China holds its currency artificially low—which has the same impact—many people tend to see it as a cunning example of economic policy in action, rather than as special interests capturing the Chinese policy process and running it in a destructive way. Part of the issue is that people often don’t see that interest group politics exists in foreign countries, especially ones that aren’t democratic. But look at the latest reports out of China on Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s efforts to deliver on his promise to use an “iron hand” to increase energy efficiency:
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology quietly published a list late Sunday of 2,087 steel mills, cement works and other energy-intensive factories required to close by Sept. 30. [...] Over the years, provincial and municipal officials have sometimes tried to block Beijing’s attempts to close aging factories in their jurisdictions. These officials have particularly sought to protect older steel mills and other heavy industrial operations that frequently have thousands of employees and have sometimes provided workers with housing, athletic facilities and other benefits since the 1950s or 1960s.
To prevent such local obstruction this time, the ministry said in a statement on its Web site that the factories on its list would be barred from obtaining bank loans, export credits, business licenses and land. The ministry even warned that their electricity would be shut off, if necessary.
Chinese political institutions aren’t the same as American ones, but what you can see here is that they’re not totally different either. This is not at all dissimilar to the debate playing out over the EPA’s Clean Air Act mandate to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Public officials, whether in China or West Virginia or Ohio, often see it as their job to defend the interests of local employers and businessmen.
By Ryan McNeely
You may have heard that retailer Target was caught up in a controversy last week after it was revealed that its corporate PAC had donated (thanks to the Citizens United decision) $150,000 to an organization backing extreme anti-gay Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. LGBT advocacy organizations and blogs expressed outrage, and MoveOn.org sent me an email arguing that since “Target just gave a huge contribution to a anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-progressive candidate for governor in Minnesota,” I should sign their petition calling for a boycott of the store. Somewhat surprisingly, this campaign actually worked, and the CEO took the unusual step of apologizing for the contribution and promising that “later this fall, Target will take a leadership role in bringing together a group of companies and partner organizations for a dialogue focused on diversity and inclusion in the workplace, including GLBT issues.”
So I thought this was the end of the story — until I received another email from MoveOn.org. They are still angry, and they want to hold Target accountable. “As long as corporations like Target think that it’s OK to plow money into political campaigns, we’re in trouble. Corporations are not people. We need to make sure that Target and each and every corporation in the country gets this message: Stay out of our elections!” So MoveOn has a problem with — as I do — corporate influence over elections as such. It turns out that Abe Sauer noticed the wording in MoveOn’s original campaign, and was concerned about their involvement from the beginning:
Jumping aboard, MoveOn.org launched a petition calling for 150,000 consumers to commit to a boycott. While welcomed by many, there is reason to be wary of MoveOn.org’s particular involvement. For starters, its statement reads “If we don’t push back hard, this will just be the tip of the iceberg. Other corporations will learn that they can pour money into elections to buy the outcome they want.” It essentially lessens the anti-gay rights part of the Target donation outrage in exchange for a focus on a larger battle about the post-Citizens United campaigning world… one in which MoveOn.org’s side benefits greatly. Some, like me, might use a stronger word than “lamentable” to characterize MoveOn’s failure to even once use the term “gay” in its petition.
My first reaction was that this is a perfect example of left-leaning advocacy groups engaging in turf wars rather than — like their right-leaning counterparts — keeping an eye on the big picture and working together in the spirit of solidarity. To put it bluntly, why can’t LGBT organizations keep hammering away at Target even after the apology as part of a common cause with the left regarding corporate influence over elections, much as the “pro-family” right backs the right-wing anti-tax movement?
But I’m not sure it’s so simple. For starters, a lot of the anti-gay family groups have lost a lot of credibility with Republican office holders, so it’s not clear that this strategy has worked to advance their narrow interests. But more broadly, there’s a simple incentive structure at work — you want to punish people who harm you and reward people who help you — and in this case, the Target CEO’s apology was something to be applauded.
Who would have thought it figures: “U.S. forces are staying in Iraq to prevent foreign powers from meddling with the new government, Gen. Ray Odierno said Sunday.”
In defense of General Odierno, what he actually said was that his efforts will “make it less likely of others from the outside being able to interfere” which is probably true.
Many commentaries today on the subject of public sector pay, my favorite of which are by Jonathan Cohn and Adam Ozimek.
But I would posit that the important issues here are different from the ones people are talking about. One key issue is the actuarial health of public sector defined benefit pensions. The issue here is that the health is poor. Whether or not the pensions are “too generous,” they’re as generous as they are and they generally aren’t funded properly. The other key issue is the quality of services. If it’s true that public sector workers earn more than superficially similar working in the private sector, then I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. After all, paying people more should mean you get better people. High quality people and high quality public services are important, and I’m happy to pay for them. But of course if we’re not getting high quality public services, then something’s gone wrong.
That strikes me as the crucial point. If there’s a change we could make that would reduce overall teacher compensation while not degrading the quality of education, then of course we should make it. My read of the landscape is that the reverse is probably true—there are changes we could make that would substantially improve the quality of American education, but they would almost certainly require an increase in overall teacher compensation since they involve decreasing teachers’ job security. Whether parallel situations exist in public safety services, I couldn’t say. Beyond that, at the state and local level I’m inclined to say that it’s more common to see people being paid to do things that really shouldn’t be done at all—does New York State really need people out there preventing the scourge of interior designing without a license?—than that they’re being paid too much per se. I would say that $0.00 is the right amount for Indiana to be paying people to oversee the licensing of hypnotists, and the Indiana legislature did the right thing by voting to abolish the hypnotist-licensing system as of this summer. But if I’m mistaken and it’s actually quite important to be licensing hypnotists, then we should probably be paying the licensers pretty well to make sure our candidates have sufficient psychic strength to resist being glamoured by the people they’re supposed to regulate.
When you think about the federal government, the people regulating the financial services industry pretty clearly need to be paid more so that their incentive is to do a good job and get promoted, rather than to do a bad job and cash in. Similarly, regulatory agencies with worthwhile missions need to be able to hire lawyers and scientists good enough to go toe-to-toe with industry stooges. But a regulatory agency with a non-worthwhile mission is by definition overpaying everyone it employs.
V.I. Lenin offered related thoughts in 1923 that I think are worth your time.
Paul Krugman observes that based on Ben Bernanke’s academic writings about monetary policy in Japan, Ben Bernanke should be having the Federal Reserve set an aggressive inflation target and catch up to the price level trend:
A problem with the current BOJ policy, however, is its vagueness. What precisely is meant by the phrase “until deflationary concerns subside”? Krugman (1999) and others have suggested that the BOJ quantify its objectives by announcing an inflation target, and further that it be a fairly high target. I agree that this approach would be helpful, in that it would give private decision-makers more information about the objectives of monetary policy. In particular, a target in the 3-4% range for inflation, to be maintained for a number of years, would confirm not only that the BOJ is intent on moving safely away from a deflationary regime, but also that it intends to make up some of the “price-level gap” created by eight years of zero or negative inflation.
This, it seems to me, is exactly what the Fed should do. But it’s not happening. Tim Duy observes:
That said, despite Fedspeak that appears resistant to further easing, the press has been fueling speculation that more easing – albeit largely symbolic – is imminent. From where does this chatter emanate, other that unnamed sources? Perhaps from high ranking staff. Word on the street is that Fed staff are increasingly frustrated with the lack of action from leadership. Why exactly is Bernanke showing such deference to the more hawkish elements such as Kansas City Federal Reserve President Thomas Hoenig, Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fischer, and Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser? If you seek more easing, you are not alone. Board staff are increasingly your allies.
Bernanke may be suffering from a fit of amnesia. Or maybe Bernanke is an ideologue who wants the economy to suffer long enough to produce a more conservative congress. Or maybe Bernanke is a smart economist who’s also an inept manager. Or maybe Bernanke simply knows he’s outvoted on the current Open Market Committee. Who knows? But in all cases, the solution is the same. The President needs to get his nominees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors confirmed, and then as a country we need to hope that they can switch the dynamic.
By Ryan McNeely
Via Greg Sargent, we learn from The Hill this morning that in addition to their push to consider changes to the 14th amendment regarding birthright citizenship, the GOP is also planning on calling for a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution after the August recess. The proposal is being spearheaded by Sens. DeMint, Graham, McCain, and Coburn.
There are a couple things to say about this, the first being that while the article describes the amendment as “the latest foray in a crusade that conservatives have waged for two decades,” this leaves out the fact that conservatives strangely declined to continue this crusade during the period when they controlled the entire federal government. Setting that aside, we see that the main thrust of this amendment is not to actually balance the budget, but rather to make it even more difficult to raise taxes:
A popular element of the amendment is the requirement of a supermajority to raise taxes.
“The point of that is so that raising taxes won’t be the default way to balance the budget,” said DeMint. “The whole idea is to cut spending.”
…A senior Senate Republican aide who works on tax policy said that creating a supermajority threshold could be part of a grand legislative compromise that emerges from the recommendations of the fiscal responsibility commission...
“I support a supermajority to raise taxes,” he said. “But to use it as leverage to agree to other tax increases, I’m not sure.”
To which I ask, if “the whole idea is to cut spending,” then why not propose spending cuts? It’s a lot easier to pass a budget than to pass a constitutional amendment. Surely, if a majority Americans are clamoring for “robust spending cuts” as DeMint claims, then the GOP would benefit in the midterms by proposing such cuts. Instead, the GOP either cannot or will not propose anything specific; rather, they continue to push for extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy without any spending offsets. That really should end any serious consideration of what this balanced budget amendment is all about.
But the larger point here is that the Republican Party is refusing to detail an actual agenda in advance of the November elections. There are plenty of things a Speaker Boehner really might do if the GOP were to regain the House majority in the fall. But instead of talking about which of those things they’ll attempt, Republican leaders continue to play to their base with notions of ACA repeal and radical changes to the constitution that require 2/3 majorities and approval of 38 states. The answer of the pundit class seems to be to sort of laugh off this talk of amending the constitution since it “won’t happen” — to which the follow-up should be, what will happen if the GOP takes over Congress? Voters should probably hear the answer before going to the polls.
Interesting study from David A. Butza and Kumar Yogeeswaranb with implications for the impact of economic conditions on social tolerance:
Macroeconomic conditions have long been suspected of increasing hostility toward ethnic outgroups. Integrating prior work on macroeconomic threat with recent threat-based models of prejudice, the current work employs an experimental approach to examine the implications of economic threat for prejudice toward ethnic outgroups. In Study 1, participants primed with an economic threat (relative to a non-economic threat and neutral topic) reported more prejudice against Asian Americans, an ethnic group whose stereotype implies a threat to scarce employment opportunities. In addition, economic threat led to a heightened state of anxiety, which mediated the influence of economic threat on prejudice against Asian Americans. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating that economic threat heightened prejudice against Asian Americans, but not Black Americans, an ethnic group whose stereotype does not imply a threat to economic resources. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the role of macroeconomic conditions in potentiating antisocial responses to particular outgroups.
I think you can see this very clearly with immigration politics. Over the past three years, the net flow of undocumented migrants has declined sharply and even turned negative but the level of public concern about the issue keeps going up. That’s because overall labor market conditions are driving an increase in concern, despite a reduction in the “objective” scale of the “problem.” People are worried and people like to personify their emotions.
Ross Douthat explains that opposition to gay marriage is about trying to uphold a certain kind of ideal of marriage:
This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.
The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.
I think one could dispute that, but let’s grant it. The natural thing to observe is that very little of our current legal architecture of marriage has much to do with this. Actual marriages in 21st century America aren’t required to be lifelong or monogamous. Douthat concedes as much:
Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.
So at this point we’re upholding an ideal of lifelong heterosexual monogamy by legally requiring the heterosexual part, but not the lifelong or monogamous part. The unfairness of such a standard seems both obvious and overwhelming.
And the solution seems to me to be fairly clear—a separation of religious and quasi-religious ideals of marriage from the civil/legal aspects of marriage. You should have a defined legal state, that could be called “marriage” or “civil union” or “civil marriage” or whatever else we want that’s recognized by the state on a non-discriminatory basis. And then religious groups can also have whatever kind of ceremonies with whatever attendant status they like. If the Catholic Church doesn’t want to perform marriages for gay couples or allow divorced people to remarry, good for them.
But as Douthat’s piece makes clear, the status quo is really a cop out. Instead of holding heterosexuals up to a rigorous standard of conduct—no divorce, harsh & unforgiving attitude toward infidelity—we’re going to discriminate against the gay and lesbian minority and then congratulate ourselves on what a good job we’re doing of upholding our ideals.
Spencer Ackerman reports that faced with 9.5 percent unemployment, the US Congress has appropriated the funds necessary for massive public works projects and infrastructure upgrades:
Then there are all the new facilities. West Disney has a fresh coat of cement –- something that’s easy to come by, now that the Turkish firm Yukcel manufactures cement right inside Bagram’s walls. [...] There on the flightline: the skeletons of new hangars. New towers with particleboard for terraces. A skyline of cranes. The omnipresent plastic banner on a girder-and-cement seedling advertising a new project built by cut-rate labor paid by Inglett and Stubbs International.
Oddly, though, the locals aren’t enthusiastic:
Troops here told me of shepherd boys scowling their way around Bagram’s outskirts, slingshotting off the occasional rock in hopes of braining an American. Again, something else I wouldn’t have believed two years ago.
Shepherd boys? Where’s that? And why do they want to brain Americans? Ah, because even as we’re turning the streetlights out in Colorado Springs for lack of funds, all this construction is happening in Afghanistan!
This is the oddity of American politics in 2010. To simply appropriate funds to give to poor foreigners (”foreign aid”) is hideously unpopular and politically unthinkable. To appropriate funds to give to state governments to keep the public sector operating is also politically untenable. But to appropriate the funds to build facilities for Americans but located in Afghanistan is easy.
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