A hilarious article from the living-undeath suck.com about Cheney's atrocious military planning.

Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being "as bad as it could possibly be... But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn't die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney's staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait.

- posted by Jason @ 2:35 PM

 
I've been seriously considering the half-assed suggestion I made a while back to completely eliminate taxes and fund the government entirely through bonds. The obvious problems with this are issues of cost distribution (would the poor necessarily end up paying more than the rich under an all-bond system, though?), effects on the net level of investment, and the tendency of this system to east the constraints on government spending (which is a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your bent). So, here's an estimate of how it'd change investment.

According to this, the MPC for the U.S. is about .85. The change in consumption by entirely eliminating taxes should, therefore, be MPC * G while the change in investment is (1-MPC) * G - G = -MPC * G. Investment would drop by 177 billion, or 20%. Unfortunately, I'm using the APC here to estimate the MPC, because I can't find an estimate of the MPC for the life of me. You'd assume it should be lower than the APC, though.

Is there someway for the government to incentivize investment to make up this shortfall, without taxes? Another interesting possibility: rational expectations implies consumption and investment should, over the long run (the level of investment should be determined by the desired future level of income), be completely unchanged; would total consumption (government spending included) and investment return to their previous levels?

I'm toying with this theory because it completely eliminates the tactic of conservatives limiting the size of government with deficits; they'd have to actually argue against spending on the merits.

Update: as Daniel Davies pointed out somewhere or another (I can't find it anymore), it's pretty damn stupid to think you can look at replacing the entire system of government finance through the lenses of marginal analysis. Move along, nothing to see here.....
- posted by Jason @ 3:00 PM

 
Easterbrook makes an excellent, counter-intuitive point in the New Republic.

Chemical weapons are dangerous, to be sure, but not "weapons of mass destruction" in any meaningful sense. In actual use, chemical arms have proven less deadly than regular bombs, bullets, and artillery shells.

Biological agents are surely dangerous: Being alive, they can propagate, in theory "manufacturing" more of themselves from tiny initial amounts. But the biological weapon that creates a runaway effect, killing huge numbers rapidly, so far exists only in science fiction and preposterous Hollywood thrillers such as Outbreak.

- posted by Jason @ 2:04 PM

 
For reference the next time you get involved in an "it was evil to nuke Japan" argument, here's a summary of what the alternative would have been. Ok, ok, they might have just up and unconditionally surrendered, but I've seen nothing to convince me of that. The below is for Olympic; god only knows what Coronet, the invasion of the main island, would have involved. Here's the complete set of plans.

General Marshall gave Truman an estimate of approximately 40,000 U.S. casualties for Operation Olympic.(9) After hours of discussion, Truman approved further planning for Olympic, with an execution date of 1 November 1945. Operation Coronet, if needed, would be conducted in March 1946.

Admiral Nimitz would be in command of all the naval forces. The operation would be the first time that the two major Pacific fleets, Admiral William F. Halsey's Third Fleet and Admiral Raymond Spruance's Fifth Fleet, operated together. The number of ships involved in Olympic would be the largest ever gathered for a military operation.(15) The invasion force would include 14 fast aircraft carriers, 6 light aircraft carriers, 36 escort carriers, 20 battleships and over 1,300 troop and cargo transports.

The number of ground forces to be landed in the first four days of the assault would total approximately 436,486. Follow-up forces would number 356,902. With air support personnel of 22,160, the numbers topped 800,000 for Operation Olympic.(13) Should it be found that the fourteen divisions allotted to the Sixth Army were insufficient to capture and hold southern Kyushu, that army would be reinforced at the rate of three divisions a month from X+30 by the units earmarked for Coronet.(14)

In comparison, the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific theater of operations to date was Okinawa, were 182,000 men assaulted the beaches. In the European theater, the largest amphibious assault occurred on Sicily, were 170,000 troops landed. The historic D-Day landing at Normandy in June 1944 had an assault force of 150,000 men. Olympic thus would be the largest amphibious operation in history. The area to be occupied in southern Kyushu totaled about 3,000 square miles.

From another page:

Based on the terrain and the Japanese defensive preparations and strategy, the battle for Kyushu would have resembled the battles of the central Pacific instead of the campaigns in the Philippines. With the casualty ratios of those battles applied to Operation Olympic, the estimate for U.S. casualties would have been 94,000 killed and 234,000 wounded. The total casualty estimate of 328,000 equates to 57 percent of the U.S. ground forces slated for Olympic. On the Satsuma Peninsula, the V Amphibious Corps casualty estimate would have been 13,000 killed and 34,000 wounded, or approximately 54 percent of the Marine force. This casualty estimate for VAC is made without any additional Japanese forces moving into the 40th Army's zone. Add to these estimates the results of kamikaze attacks against transports, and the battle for Kyushu would have been devastating to the American people.

By comparison, the United States took 300,000 casualties during the entire course of the war.

Edit: Over time, my opinion of this one has changed. You can't wave away 100,000 civilian corpses by pointing at a "probably larger pile of military corpses." That's what the military is for, and that's what the laws of war are for.
- posted by Jason @ 1:50 AM

 
Speaking of Brin, he's got some funny stuff in Salon.

Thus few protest the apotheosis of Darth Vader -- nee Anakin Skywalker -- in "Return of the Jedi."

To put it in perspective, let's imagine that the United States and its allies managed to capture Adolf Hitler at the end of the Second World War, putting him on trial for war crimes. The prosecution spends months listing all the horrors done at his behest. Then it is the turn of Hitler's defense attorney, who rises and utters just one sentence:

"But, your honors ... Adolf did save the life of his own son!"

- posted by Jason @ 5:12 PM

 
David Brin's got some mean stuff to say about Star Wars:

George Lucas's version of romanticism is obsessed with nostalgia, feudalism, pyramid-shaped social orders, elitism, a hatred of science and the concept that only genetically advanced demigods matter. He openly avows to never having researched what real heroes do. He also expressed open contempt for this democratic civilization, telling the New York Times that he prefers a 'benign dictatorship.'

- posted by Jason @ 5:01 PM

 
An amusing column from Seattle PI columnist Joel Connelly, reminiscing on Alaska's history of wacky infrastructure projects.

Project Chariot: Back in the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission set out to use Alaska as a guinea pig in demonstrating peaceful uses of atomic energy.

It picked a site near Point Hope, north of Kotzebue, to use nuclear weapons to excavate a harbor and channel for ocean cargo vessels. Dr. Edward Teller, "father of the H-bomb," was a papa to Project Chariot.

The state's chambers of commerce and leading newspapers rushed to embrace the scheme. Native villages, however, rose in opposition. "Lower 48" opposition forced the AEC to back off.

Reminds me of that (serious!) plan for damming the Grand Canyon back in the 1960s.
- posted by Jason @ 12:51 PM

 
What on earth is The New Republic running this for?

On his website, DeLong is adamant that there is no such thing as excess capacity in the economy as a whole, only lackluster demand. That's true, as far as it goes. And if you think it tells the whole story, then cutting interest rates is the obvious response to the current situation. But the idea that demand is the problem breaks down once you look at distribution of prices across sectors. Generally speaking, there is steady deflation in manufacturing, where capacity is more difficult to adjust and where global competition can lead to oversupply. On the other hand, there is steady inflation in services--in everything from car insurance to sporting events-- whose capacity is either easy to contract (the former) or was difficult to expand in the first place (the latter), and where competition is more localized. Now that could certainly change--the latest consumer-confidence numbers show a sharp decline. But for the moment, it looks like our biggest problems are on the supply side. And those problems wouldn't have been solved by anything the Fed considered doing at its mid-August meeting.

Huh? Who let this guy in?
- posted by Jason @ 10:31 PM

 
Another entry in the ongoing campaign to demonize countries that are more liberal than the United States:

Then there's this observation: "Sweden has a negative natural growth rate, with more deaths than births now registered every year."

UPDATE: Gee, could this eugenics program involving the sterilization of tens of thousands of women as recently as the 1970s, have anything to do with that?

The link describes how Sweden sterilized "women released from prison, the mentally ill, people with learning difficulties, the poor, epileptics, alcoholics and women of 'mixed racial quality'" from 1936 to 1976. Mind you, the total number of sterilized, 60,000, would have no statistically significant effect on the population growth, but there's something more interesting: the United States did the exact same thing. We apparently stopped a few years earlier than them, and didn't sterilize quite as many people, but those are damned odd things to get all high and mighty about.
- posted by Jason @ 2:38 PM

 
Does anyone catch a real whiff of the old "Southerners understand the negro problem better" in Reynolds posts like this?
- posted by Jason @ 1:36 PM

 
This article, linked from Instapundit, is the silliest justification for invading Iraq I've seen.

Construction at the Abu Ghurayb Presidential Palace features extensive and complex water works. U.S. government web site notes that the Iraqi officials claim extensive crop damage due to drought. Photo shows use of scarce water resources to ensure that the lakes of Saddam's palaces are filled and grounds are well tended. CREDIT: U.S. Department of State.

Filling your swimming pool when there's a drought on is a casus belli now, I guess. The suburbs of the U.S. better watch out.

Yes, yes, I know it's a sign of how little he cares for his people, but give me a fucking break.

- posted by Jason @ 8:22 PM

 

The defamation of Sweden

Remember this study, which said Swedes are worse off than African-Americans? It used purchasing-power adjusted median household income to make its point. This choice of measurement makes it a case study in lying through misuse of statistics.

According to this, the average Swedish household size in 1995 was 2.28; this gives an average African-American household size in the United States of 3.5. Is that the numbers are so different already setting off alarm bells?

The U.S. census gives the average number of workers per African-American household as 1.95. I can't find a complete number describing the number of workers per household for Sweden, but this describes the top 20% of households by income in Sweden as having an average of 1.48 workers.

What does this all mean? Well, if the 1.48 number for the top 20% is close to that of the rest of the population, then the chief reason Swedish households are "poorer" than African-American households is that they're smaller. Throw in that U.S. workers work more hours than Swedish workers, and this study totally does not prove what it claims to: that Swedes are "poorer" than African-Americans in the U.S.

The easy way to show this is to look at hourly median wages for the two groups. Unfortunately, the best I can do is this, which gives a median annual income of 221,600 kroners for Swedish earners. Combine this with the Purchasing Power Parity multiplier of 9.68 from here, and that gives a median annual Swedish income per worker of $22,900. According to this, the median income of African-Americans workers in 1998 was $19,300 for men and $13,100 for women.

Finally, according to this, Swedish workers work an average of 1,552 hours per year, while United States workers work an average of 1,889 hours; apply the multiplier of 1.2 to the Swedish income, to get what they'd earn if they worked U.S. hours, and you end up with $27,900. This looks a tad bit higher than $19,300 and $13,100. Yes, yes, I really should break that hours worked number by race, but I can't find anything on it.

Anyway, I think the above analysis is mostly correct, and it's pretty goddamn obvious that Swedes aren't "poorer" than blacks. The researcher in question is being rather dishonest His numbers are the wrong measuring stick. Hourly compensation is all that matters.

Update: Glenn Reynolds says it's odd that this study is biased against the Swedes, since it was produced by them. It was produced by what appears to be a conservative Swedish think tank, HUI, in support of the conservative opposition party, though, so it's not counterintuitive at all.

Another update: Per criticisms from Todd Bass that the median earners per household number for Sweden is weak, I dug around some more and found this, which puts the mean workers per household at 1.38. Sure, it's 1981, but I doubt the number has changed that significantly since, and the median/mean distinction probably doesn't throw it too far off, either.

Yet Another Damn Update: I was trying to get at the fact that the median hourly wage (I don't know about you, but to mostly value jobs at income divided by hours worked) for U.S. and Swedish workers isn't all that different. I used the above convoluted process to derive something resembling the number for Sweden, as I couldn't find one.
- posted by Jason @ 4:08 PM

 

A Modest Proposal

I am greatly upset by the continued tactics of the post-Reagan GOP. They have discovered that they can cut taxes virtually independent of spending levels, and then use the resulting chronic deficits to bludgeon the democrats. Liberals currently have no defense against this tactic, being pathetically unable to call for cancellation of tax cuts yet to take effect, much less for tax increases.

Therefore, liberals should call the GOP's bluff, and run on a platform of the elimination of income taxes altogether, without any changes in spending. Government spending will be financed entirely through bonds.
- posted by Jason @ 11:12 AM