Hronkomatic

2005-02-06T13:37:00.000-08:00

Remember how Bloomberg's smoking ban was going to lead to the death of the NYC bar scene?

Funny, doesn't seem to have worked out that way.

By many predictions, the smoking ban, which went into effect on March 30, 2003, was to be the beginning of the end of the city's reputation as the capital of grit. Its famed nightlife would wither, critics warned, bar and restaurant businesses would sink, tourists would go elsewhere, and the mayor who wrought it all would pay a hefty price in the polls. And then there were those who said that city smokers, a rebellious class if ever there was one, simply would not abide.

But a review of city statistics, as well as interviews last week with dozens of bar patrons, workers and owners, found that the ban has not had the crushing effect on New York's economic, cultural and political landscapes predicted by many of its opponents.

Employment in restaurants and bars, one indicator of the city's service economy, has risen slightly since the ban went into effect, as has the number of restaurant permits requested and held, according to city records, although those increases could be attributed in part to several factors, including a general improvement in the city's economy.

City health inspectors report that 98 percent of bars and restaurants are in compliance with the rules, though some critics question those statistics. Wrath at Mr. Bloomberg, at least pertaining to the smoking ban, seems to be abating.

There are still those cursing the ban as an affront to their civil liberties, and some bar and restaurant owners say that it has undoubtedly caused a decline in business. City officials say they doubt that contention, pointing to data from the first year of the ban showing that restaurant and bar tax receipts were up 8.7 percent over the previous year's. They said they were still waiting for more detailed and current data from the state.

2005-01-04T03:02:00.000-08:00

Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas is the definitive book on post-60s politics in the United States, detailing the roots, strategies, and history of the working class cultural backlash.

It's an amazing, funny, breezy read. But as you flip through the pages, seeing the bricks of his argument thud into the dirt, you come to realize what the future has in store. If the Democrats continue their policy of "hey, at least we're not the GOP!" giveaways to the rich, acceptance of union-busting, well-meaning but badly-framed givewaways to the non-working poor, and totally unrestrained cultural liberalism framed in aggrieved-minority spoils terms, they will lose elections for the indefinite future. They will see the destruction of everything they care about. They will see the United States of America turn into "Brazil with a big military" - an insanely rich plutocracy ruling sway over a seething, manipulated underclass. Frank doesn't go into it in too much detail on solutions - he mostly diagnoses - but I think this book points the way towards a policy of value-framed, working-class centered money policies - smart trade, regulation of the heavy hand of big business, helping those who actually work, who don't live on inherited money. More on solutions below the review.

In the 2000 presidential election, the poorest county in the entire United States - McPherson County, Nebraska - voted for George Bush over Al Gore by a margin of 60 points.

Read that again, and reflect on the cosmic insanity of that sentence. All liberals know that the Republicans are the party that screws workers and crushes the poor. What's happening here?

Thomas Frank knows. The modern narrative of politics in the United States is this:

My friend's dad was a teacher in the local public schools, a loyal member of the teachers' union, and a more dedicated liberal than most; not only had he been a staunch supporter of Geroge McGovern, but in the 1980 Democratic primary he had voted for Barbara Jordan, the black U.S. Representative from Texas. My friend, meanwhile, was in those days a high school Republican, a Reagan youth who fancied Adam Smith ties and savored the writing of William F. Buckley. The dad would listen to the son spout off about Milton Friedman and the godliness of free-market capitalism, and he would just shake his head. Someday, kid, you'll know what a jerk you are.

It was the dad, though, that eventually converted. These days he votes for the farthest right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The particular issue that brought him over was abortion. A devout Catholic, my friend's dad was persuaded in the early inineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures; the elite media and the American Civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted - right here in the U.S. of A. It doesn't even bother him, really, when his new hero Bill O' Reilly blasts the teachers' union as a group "that does not love America."

His superaverage midwestern town, meanwhile has followed the same trajectory. Even as Republican economic policy has laid waste to the city's industries, unions, and neighborhoods, the townsfolk responded by lashing out on cultural issues, eventually winding up with a hard-right Republican congressman, a born-again Christian who campaigned largely on an anti-abortion platform. Today the city looks like a minature Detroit. And with every bit of economic bad news it seems to get more bitter, more cynical, and more conservative still.

This sentence is probably the best summary of the last 40 years in politics:

Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the enter planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A.

This would be strange enough, but it becomes downright loony when you reflect that the exact same people using the exact same rhetoric gave us all of the liberal reforms of the late 19th and early 20th century. Unions, the minimum wage, a shorter workweek, bringing corporations to heel - railroads in those days - worker safety, social security, the progressive income tax - all of it. Remember that line about "raise less corn, and more hell?" From a Kansas mass meeting. The midwest had socialist newspapers, socialist mayors, Eugene Debs won counties there, it was convulsed with bloody working class strikes. Now, they're willing to give it all away, if that's the price they have to pay to get rid of those damned treasonous liberals at the colleges, get the girls kissing each other off tv, stop your kids from getting pregnant and cursing at you - the Republicans promise to fix it, and Kansas votes for it knowing exactly the cost. That the Republicans never deliver, instead turning the country into an economic Brazil isn't that big of a deal; everyone knows the death of christian culture is insolvable - after all, we're probably in the end of days. What's important is we fight, and stick it to those damned Hollywood liberals with their save the whales and hatred of God.

Tell this to sort of thing to your average upper-middle class liberal today - Atlantic Monthly reader, New Yorker lover - and he'll tell you these voters are one of three things:

"They're uneducated hicks." Ok, but what about the rural roots of the progressive movement?

"Well then, they're racists." What about white-bread Kansas, with its history of bloody fighting against the forces of slavery? Kansas was the site of open warfare over slavery in the mid-19th century and they're damned proud of fighting against it.

"Ah, they're crazy religious nuts!" Ok, what about the history of the evangelical movement, especially in the midwest, on progressive economic reforms and fighting slavery?

In short, those stock answers are a dodge that comes from the growing separation between the rich and poor in our country, especially in culture, *especially* in the war around our modern consumer culture's desire for authenticity. They say we don't understand them, and they're goddamn right. So they sneer at our pretensions, write hundred page fantasy screeds about the coming war against urban intellectuals, and always with the hatred of our precious, precious lattes. You see, the one thing they have over their new overlords - us, the upper classes, whether it's the charlatan Republicans promising to fix their problems or the clueless liberals - is their cultural authenticity. Man of the people, clarity, appeals to common sense - those are what everyone in modern consumer culture is fighting for to define their jobs and their lives. The upper class movement for "simplicity" has the same damned roots as the lower middle class buying cowboy hats, after all.

Abortion is the issue in this story. As Frank details, there was an evangelical uprising during the 1990s in Kansas over abortion which threw out the Democratic governor, control of both houses, and knocked off half the Republican moderates. Just like the previous populist movements, there were mass meetings, spontaneous mass demonstration, reinforcing disapproval from the establishment - all the ingredients of a political firestorm to blow through the state, cleansing everything more complicated than earthy bedrock, leaving a flat divide over abortion as the single decision you *must* make, that is unavoidable, that is the new dividing line between Us and Them. The Republican establishment of old there is barely hanging on; a few have started defecting to the Democrats out of absolute terror that their upper middle-class cultural niceties will be threatened . Which only reinforces the stereotype, of course.

Those in the GOP who've decided to ride the wave of rage have done far better - take Senator Brownback. He's famous for wanting to hold congressional investigations into "cultural decline", insisting cultural coarseness can be measured objectively, and once washed the feet of a former aid leaving his service. Funny - he was actually a boring Republican pro-choice moderate before abortion got big. He's just found a new gig, being careful to focus on issues that are extremely remote and almost by definition cannot be solved - international human trafficking, cultural decline, abortion. That it's all a possibly-not-conscious sham can be seen in his opposition to loosening media concentration rules in the late 1990s; he favored getting rid of the rules because hey, that's what companies do! How dare you try to get in their way! He's the absolute toast of the local Koch rich people money, of course, with all the trappings of power that go along with it.

That's the current situtation. Now how the hell did something this batshit crazy come to pass? Frank's theory is that the business world has slowly faded out of the worldview of the working class, both due to organized propaganda campaigns from the right and massive mistakes on the left; and once that's gone, well the backlash is an appealling theory. On the right: there was an actual organized campaign by the advertising industry to get people to identify themselves as "consumers" instead of workers. I'm serious. Ever notice how strange that word is, or wonder where the hell it came from? There you go. Then there's the story of a tiny set of very rich conservatives - British-style aristocrat conservative, that is - buying themselves the trappings of a social movement. Olin, Scaife, Koch, and so on, as detailed by David Brock and Sidney Bluementhal. On the left: reacting to the racial convlusions that killed the FDR coalition by intentionally turning into the party of the social mores of the upper middle-class, jettisoning ever more of the working class, culminating in the collective decision to become the party of socially liberal bond traders in the 1990s.

When business & economics is something that just happens, that might as well be on the astral plane for all you think about it, the backlash makes sense. All the things the working class doesn't like about where our culture is going - saucy stick-it-to-the-man rebellion by teenagers, sex on television, the dissolution of the nuclear family into teenage pregnancy and living together outside of marriage, casual sex, gangster rap - it's all because of those damned hollywood & college liberals poisoning their minds through flee-floating insiduous ideas.

That this theory is manifestly at odds with the real world - is there a more powerless political group than college english professors or Hollywood stars? - doesn't matter; you can't beat a bad theory with no theory. That all the things in crass popular culture are there because corporations get very, very rich putting them there is so off the wall and against the conventional wisdom people literally don't understand what you're talking about. Here's Frank discussing the obsession with Hollywood:

But the backlash offers more than this ready-made class identity. It also gives people a general way of understanding the buzzing mass-cultural world we inhabit. Consider, for example, the stereotype of liberals that comes up so often in the backlash oeuvre: arrogant, rich, tasteful, fashionable, and all-powerful. In my real-world experience liberals are nothing of the kind. They are an assortment of complainers - for the most part impoverished complainers - who wield about as much influence over American politics as the cashier at Home Depot does over the business strategy. This is not a secret, either; read any issue of The Nation or In These Times or the magazine sent to members of the United Steelworkers, and you figure out pretty quickly that liberals don't speak for the powerful or wealthy.

But when you flip through People magazine, you come away with a very different impression of what liberals are like. Here you read about movie stars who go to charity balls for causes like charity rights and the "underpriviledged." Singers who were big in the seventies express their concern with neatly folded ribbons for this set of victims of that. Minor TV personalities instruct the world to stop saying mean things about the overweight or the handicapped. And beautiful people of every description don expensive transgressive fashions, buy expensive transgressive art, eat at expensive transgressive restaurants, and get edgy with an expensive punk sensibility or an expensive earth-friendly look.

Here liberalism is a matter of shallow appearances, of fatuous self-righteousness; it is arrogant and condescending, a politics in which the beautiful and wellborn tell the unwashed and the beaten-down and the funny-looking how they ought to behave, how they should stop being a racist or homophobic, how they should be better people. In America, where the chief sources of one's ideas about life's possibilities are TV and the movies, it's not hard to be convinced that we inhabit a liberal-dominated world: feminist cartoons for ten-year-olds are followed by commercials for nonconformist deodorants; entire families of movies are organized around some transcendent dick joke; even shows for toddlers have theme songs about keeping it real.

Frank talks to the workers responsible for organizing and running the 1990s Kansas revolution. They're line workers at the bottling plant, they live in the tract homes that the local upper middle class establishment sneers at, they dress unpretentiously like their parents used to, they shop at the very Wal-Mart that picks their pockets. But - this is an important but - they use the revolutionary rhetoric and plans of action developed in the 1960s by the New Left. Kids wear anti-evolution t-shirts, imploring us to "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm." The commodification of dissent, as Frank has discused in his previous books, is here in full force - express your disapproval of popular culture by buying Christian music and clothing! When Frank tries to ask them what they think of the idea that big business is the root of all their problems, they basically give him blank stares. The capitalists have won. The question of their power is way off the map, an unthought.

I'm leaving out a lot - how the very American focus on the power of positive thinking leads to the creation of a certain type of guy who is incredibly bitter aggrieved and bitter, in spite of having it all; the hilarious bits of doublethink David Brooks and his ilk go through to explain the backlash without using any economics; the many ways in which the Red State/Blue State divide is wrong; the almost-governor of Kansas in the 1920s who promised to restore male virility through goat testicle transplants; the dead-serious perfectly nice guy who declared himself Pope a few years back and is a perfect example of the backlash mindset. Not to mention Frank's truly amazing grasp of rhetorical power. Watch the master at work:

Let us pause for a moment to ponder this all-American dysfunction. A state is spectacularly ill served by the Reagan-Bush stampede of deregulation, privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate - and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in revolt, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its rebels demand? More of the very measure that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place.

This is not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all possible.

In Kansas the shift is more staggering than elsewhere, simply because it has been so decisive, so extreme. The people who were once radical are now reactionary. Though they speak today in the same aggrieved language of victimization, and though they face the same array of economics forces as their hard-bitten ancestors, today's populists make demands that are precisely the opposite. Tear down the federal farm programs, they cry. Privatize the utilities. Repeal the progressive taxes. All that Kansas asks today is a little help nailing itself to that cross of gold.

In its implacable bitterness Kansas holds up a mirror to the rest of us. If this is the place where America goes looking for its national soul, then this is where American finds that its soul, after stewing in the primal resentment of the backlash, has gone all sour and wrong. If Kansas is the concentrated essence of normality, then here is where we can see the deranged gradaully become normal, where we look into that handsome, confident, reassuring, all-American face - class president, quarterback, Rhodes scholar, bond trader, builder of industry - and realize that we are staring into the eyes of a lunatic.

From the air-conditioned heights of a suburban office complex this may look like a new age of reason, with the Web sites singing each to each, with a mall down the way that every week has miraculously anticipated our subtly shifting tastes, with a global economy whose rich rewards just keep flowing, and with a long parade of rust-free Infinitis purring down the streets of beautifully manicured planned communities. But on closer inspection the country seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys in midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a "rust belt," will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover.

It's all enough to make you go soak in the tub holding your head.

This is the question for 2005: where is liberalism? Where is a real, honest-to-god left that focuses on the value of work, not the value of money? Don't believe me on "economic populism is the solution?" Read this.

In Vermont, Representative Bernie Sanders, the House’s only independent and a self-described socialist, racks up big wins in the “Northeast Kingdom,” the rock-ribbed Republican region along the New Hampshire border. Far from the Birkenstock-wearing, liberal caricature of Vermont, the Kingdom is one of the most culturally conservative hotbeds in New England, the place that helped fuel the “Take Back Vermont” movement against gay civil unions.

Yet the pro-choice, pro–gay-rights Sanders’ economic stances help him bridge the cultural divide. In the 1990s, he was one of the most energetic opponents of the trade deals with China and Mexico that destroyed the local economy. In the Bush era, he highlighted the inequity of the White House's soak-the-rich tax-cut plan by proposing to instead provide $300 tax-rebate checks to every man, woman, and child regardless of income (a version of Sanders’ rebate eventually became law). For his efforts, Sanders has been rewarded in GOP strongholds like Newport Town.

While voters there backed George W. Bush and Republican Governor Jim Douglas in 2004, they also gave Sanders 68 percent of the vote.

Sanders' strength among rural conservatives is not just a cult of personality; it is economic populism’s broader triumph over divisive social issues. In culturally conservative Derby, for instance, a first-time third-party candidate used a populist message to defeat a longtime Republican state representative who had become an icon of Vermont’s anti-gay movement.

There's more examples in there of Democrats standing up on economics and beating the shit of the GOP in places where they "shouldn't" be doing so - Montana, North Dakota, North Carolina.

Unlike the unrestricted free-trade, moderate upper-class Democrats who normally run against culture backlash Republicans - kind of the average swing election nowdays - they win.

The interesting thing about the left-aligned people on the blogs seems to be that we're all upper-middle class, at the very least in outlook if not income. As such, there's kind of this economic sorta-libertarian plus culturally liberal thing, which is the accurate stereotype of why we lose. It's hilarious. Myself, only recently have I done the reading and found out the econ 101 nostrums about "free trade" are ridiculous; before that I was a trade absolutist, like a large part of the educated professional left. Little thing called reality doesn't match up, apparently - only a handful of first-world countries have industrialized through neoliberal trade policies, and they're not very good models for anyone else - Singapore. By contrast, the United States, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea all had amazingly sheltered domestic industries until after they got rich, and things have been liberalized since then less than you realize, and almost always only in areas that benefit the rich of the United States.

So I've got to ask: would you vote for FDR's policies? This is not an rhetorical question anymore. They're all on the chopping block: social security, the income tax, probably the minimum wage at some point (who would have thought of a 2005 push for social security's elimination in 1980?) - if there is not a serious return to the progressive tradition in the Democratic party, we will lose them all.

A closing thought: do you know what they called the socially liberal upper middle class of the 1920s?

Republicans.

2004-10-10T18:13:00.000-07:00

Everyone seems to be totally misinterpreting Kerry's quotes in today's NYT magazine article covering Kerry's framework for thinking about terrorism. For example:

But what remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, "escort services" are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages.

The problem with this? *No where in the article* does Kerry suggest we should fight terrorism the way we fight prostitution and illegal gambling. Those crimes are examples of things that we can't eliminate entirely - Kerry's point was that we can't eliminate them entirely.

How does he say we should fight terrorism?

Kerry turned his work on the committee into a book on global crime, titled ''The New War,'' published in 1997. He readily admitted to me that the book ''wasn't exclusively on Al Qaeda''; in fact, it barely mentioned the rise of Islamic extremism. But when I spoke to Kerry in August, he said that many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror.

When you combine this with the rest of his quotes, it's pretty clear:

''I think we can do a better job,'' Kerry said, ''of cutting off financing, of exposing groups, of working cooperatively across the globe, of improving our intelligence capabilities nationally and internationally, of training our military and deploying them differently, of specializing in special forces and special ops, of working with allies, and most importantly -- and I mean most importantly -- of restoring America's reputation as a country that listens, is sensitive, brings people to our side, is the seeker of peace, not war, and that uses our high moral ground and high-level values to augment us in the war on terror, not to diminish us.''

Plus the followup by Holbrooke, Kerry's probably secretary of state, & related commentary:

Even Democrats who stress that combating terrorism should include a strong military option argue that the ''war on terror'' is a flawed construct. ''We're not in a war on terror, in the literal sense,'' says Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton-era diplomat who could well become Kerry's secretary of state. ''The war on terror is like saying 'the war on poverty.' It's just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers.''

These competing philosophies, neo-conservative and liberal, aren't mutually exclusive, of course. Neo-cons will agree that military operations are just one facet, albeit the main one, of their response to terrorism. And liberals are almost unanimous in their support for military force when the nation or its allies face an imminent and preventable threat; not only did the vast majority of liberal policy makers support the invasion of Afghanistan, but many also thought it should have been pursued more aggressively. Still, the philosophical difference between the two camps, applied to a conflict that may well last a generation, is both deep and distinct. Fundamentally, Bush sees the war on terror as a military campaign, not simply to protect American lives but also to preserve and spread American values around the world; his liberal critics see it more as an ideological campaign, one that will turn back a tide of resentment toward Americans and thus limit the peril they face at home.

Does anyone actually read the whole thing?

2004-08-09T02:44:00.000-07:00

Boy, that was a long hiatus.

So I'm reading tomorrow's Seattle PI when I come across this interesting article. A college organization apparently got CostCo to deliver them some wine by mail without checking their ids.

Bear with me, this gets interesting. Here's my thought process as I'm flipping through it:

Ok, that's not good.

Then again, underage college students willing to wait a week for booze to show up in the mail are a ridiculously penne-ante thing to worry about. I can't imagine why'd they bother, when it's so much easier to just have an older friend buy it for them.

Who the hell are the college students worried about this? This seems remarkably out of character, to put it mildly.

CostCo says they require id and adult signature and use special delivery people. It seems unlikely that they would deliver to someone underage, considering the process they set up for this.

Wait a minute - the name of the college student organization claiming this smells like conservative astroturf. "Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow?" Extremely vague, ludicrously aspirational title? Check.

Hey, here's their webpage. Will you look at that, they talk like a Four Sisters think tank. Some headlines from their page:

"What the world needs now is DDT:
"Mad Cow is a bovine disease - link to humans is unproven"
"Greens cause death of millions in the world"

Oh, and they're using this article to attack Christine Gregory, one of the Democratic primary candidates for Governor here in Washington.
"Armed with full bottles and delivery receipts, the students are demanding that state Attorney General Christine Gregoire investigate several online companies selling and delivering alcohol to minors.

I do a bit more digging and guess what - they’re the college offshoot of CFACT, a libertarian think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife.

The penetration of the media by the propaganda organs of the right is starting to scare me.

2004-04-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

Why review Clarke's book when this one already includes everything I'd say?

2004-03-29T23:36:00.000-08:00

There's this story bouncing around the blogs about an innocent person in CA having their house searched for pot based on electric bills. I have some issues with Eugene Volokh's explanation.

Under the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment cases, the police may get such information just through a subpoena to a utility company (or perhaps even just by asking the utility company), with no need for a warrant or probable cause. The utility company is treated like any other witness who may have relevant information in his possession: The government may subpoena the witness to get this information whenever there's some reason to think that the subpoena will yield relevant (even indirectly relevant) information; it may also ask the witness to voluntarily turn over this information. Probable cause is not required.

Except that in this case the cops have no idea a crime is committed unless they ask the witness, and the witness doesn't care until the cops ask. It's all screwy; it's like the cops walking down the street asking everyone they see if they know of anyone who's done X, Y, or Z, which while not illegal, are correlated with pot growing. It's kind of analagous to community street policing, but it's all strange.

For one thing, the power company is a monopoly, and that doesn't give a lot of leeway for people to complain about having their bills handed over to the police; there's no way for a company to pop up that's more concerned with privacy than helping the cops go after marijuana growers. I rather doubt the cops could get a blanket warrant for the electric bills of every single customer of a company that refused to comply. Or could they?

Update: Volokh, by email, says yes. Well, that's just dandy.

2004-03-24T00:04:00.000-08:00

I'll put a review in here later, but I'd like to point out the mind-blowing stuff I've gotten from Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies. A lot of this hasn't made its way around yet.

To start off, here's a "so absurd it can't be made up" one. Clarke is giving a briefing about Al Qaeda, trying to convince the new administration how big of a threat they are. Wolfowitz brings up his conspiracy theories about Iraq actually being behind everything terrorism-related. Everyone tells him he's wrong and continues. Clarke tries to paint a broader picture of bin Laden's goals, describing how, just like Hitler, he's already told us his terrifying and ambitous goals, and we shouldn't assume he's not going to try to enact them. In response, Wolfowitz gets all offended that Clarke compared bin Laden to Hitler. It's pricelessly stupid on so many levels.

Page 232:

It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley liked to chair, but I thought it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: "Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the U.S. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up a radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states." Then I said something I regretted as soon as I said it: "They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they will do."

Immediatelly Wolfowitz seized on the Hitler reference. "I resent any comparision between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan."

"I wasn't comparing the Holocaust to anything." I spoke slowly. "I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it."

To my surprise, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. "We agree with Dick. We see Al Qaeda as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority." The briefings of Colin Powell had worked.

Wolfowitz comes off as a total moron throughout the book. A well-meaning one, but useless. Anyway, the highlights:

These all start in chronological order on the morning of 9/11.

Page 12: People continue working as they're informed of hostile aircraft eight minutes out. None of them will leave; Frank writes everyone's name down and emails it out in case they need a body count for when the White House is hit.

Page 13: FBI tells Clarke they've identified names from the flight manifest as Al Qaeda. This sounds like it was before *10 AM*. It was that fast; the towers hadn't even come down yet.

Page 15: Mentions that the USSR had nuclear weapons en route to Egypt when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war stopped. Talk about terrifying things I didn't know.

Page 21: Two F-15s blast across the South Lawn of the White House at 300 feet; staffers start praying.

Page 23: Richard Armitage: "Look, we told the Taliban in no uncertain terms that if this happened, it's their ass." This is a total political bombshell. Edit: later in the book Clarke mentions he exceeded his authority by stating this in a national television interview. Interesting little sideshow here.

Page 24: Clarke mentions the President was confident, focused when he arrived at the White House, unlike his speeches.

Page 24: Bush responding to Rumsfeld, who had noted interional law allows the use of force only to prevent future strikes, not for retribution: "No," the President yelled in the narrow conference room, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

Page 25: Clarke is discussing getting the stock market back up with Verizon, who lost one of their main switching centers when the WTC collapsed. The Verizon CEO, dazed, asks for 5 miles of fiber optic cable.

Page 25: CEOs from AT&T, Cisco, and the like have been calling up offering all the manpower and material the government wants, no questions asked.

Page 26: Clarke says he hasn't eaten since last night, when he dined with Richard Bonin of 60 minutes, who was also obsessed with Al Qaeda; he was working on a story about them, interviewing Clarke. "The night before, Bonin had asked if it was true that I wanted a transfer. As of October 1st, I would be starting a new national program on cyber security. Bonin wanted to run the story that I was quitting the terrorism job in frustration with the new administration's lack of focus on Al Qaeda. I asked him not to, but admitted that I had asked for the transfer. So here's a source verifying that Clarke really was pissed off about the non-focus at the time.

Page 26: The President had never seen the plan Clarke & the principals (NSC, etc.) had been working on to roll up Al Qaeda; showing it to him was the next step. Had not been allowed to brief the President on terrorism at all up to 9/11. "It had taken since January to get the Cabinet-level meeting that I had requested 'urgently' within days of the inauguration to approve an aggresive plan to go after Al Qaeda. The meeting had finally happened one week earlier on September 4. Now, as I was telling Cressey, I thought the aggressive plan would be implemented. "Well, that's fuckin' great. Sounds like they're finally going to do everything we wanted. Where the hell were they for the last eight months?" Cressey asked. "Debating the finer points of the ABM Treaty?" I asked, looking up at the sky for fighter cover.

Page 27: Clarke says killing bin Laden in the few months before 9/11 wouldn't have stopped it.

Page 30: Clarke heads back to the White House on the first night. "I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq."

From here on out, Clarke steps back to provide a historical overview of counter-terrorism during his career.

Page 49: Clarke praises Richard Perle for helping him get the Stinger missiles to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Clarke makes a rather good argument that turned the war against the USSR.

Chapter 5, total bombshell: The US very *very* nearly went to war with Iran in 1996 in reaction to Iranian terrorism. A full-scale invasion was on the table.

Chapter 7: Following the Aum Shinrikyo sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo, the FBI discovers that they have a division listed in the frickin' NYC phone book.

Chapter 8: The Pentagon fucked up the cruise missile strike to kill Osama in 1999 by not using submarines, which they said they would use, but cruisers. The cruisers were detectable on radar, and the Pakistani ISI warned Osama in time.

Page 127: One really really really interesting bit - there's a theory that Ramzi Yousof taught Terry Nichols how to build bombs. Both of them were in the same city in the Phillipines for a while. Maybe he got known around time as the American who hated his country. His bombs sucked before he went there, but worked after he came back.

Page 224. Clarke has just finished detailing how CIA & the Pentagon had to be dragged kicking and screaming into using a Predator drone to spy on Afghanistan, and now they're refusing to agree to either bomb the hell out of every camp in the country, regularly, disrupting the jihadist training and killing bin Laden if they get lucky, or using armed Predator drones there. Clarke says the CIA bitched because they had to take the 200k to replace one crashed Predator out of their own budget; the book is crammed full of the CIA and FBI whining about budgets.

Clarke then describes how CIA & the Pentagon don't want to do anything about the Cole bombing until they could conclusively prove that either Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad did it, even though everyone knew it was one of them, and they'd recently united operations anyway. "On a brisk October day in 2000, Sheehan stood with me on West Executive Avenue and watch as the limousines left the White House meeting on the Cole attack to go back to the Pentagon. 'What's it gonna take, Dick?' Sheehan demanded, 'Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin' Martians? The Pnetagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell, they won't even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?"

Page 232: Wolfowitz says bin Laden had to have state backing to pull off all the stuff he does, says it's Iraq doing it. Talks about "Iraqi terrorism" and is flatly contradicted by all the career people involved.

Page 233: The Indonesian ambassador, Gelbard, was heavily pressuring the government there on Al Qaeda. Wolfowitz, hearing complaints from his Indonesian connections(?!) got him removed. The 2002 attack in Indonesian was done by Al Qaeda, and the same people Gelbard was after.

2004-02-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

Am I hallucinating, or did *Bruce Barlett* just call for tax increases?

The addition of an expensive new unfunded benefit to Medicare for prescription drugs means that future spending will be much, much greater than projected. When people are given something that is heavily subsidized, they use a lot more of it. Consequently, we can expect drug spending by the elderly to rise very rapidly, especially since drug prices are also likely to rise as demand outstrips supply.

The budget itself admits that these trends are "unsustainable." Since Congress will never reduce benefits to retirees, the only way to make the trends sustainable is by raising taxes significantly.

Sure, he soft pedals it, but what the fuck.

2004-01-10T19:19:00.000-08:00

In the what-the-fuck department, Stephen Moore has his belly button pierced.

Stephen Moore, the president of the Club for Growth, said the commercial was not based on market research about Times readers. In fact, the original script had "NPR-listening" instead, he said, but he changed it to Times-reading to appeal to Iowans angered by a Times editorial suggesting the presidential campaign would improve if candidates skipped the Iowa's caucuses.

"We're trying to present an image of Northeast liberals," Mr. Moore said. But as a resident of Washington, doesn't he fit some of the stereotypes himself? What about sushi?

"I don't eat sushi," Mr. Moore said. "I don't drive a Volvo. I don't read The Times — except for the Political Points column, of course. I don't drink latte. I do have my navel pierced, though."

2003-12-18T01:06:00.000-08:00

A proposal

I got in another argument with a libertarian today about bringing back the draft. I won't bother to recount the details, as it was the same old same old.

I did hit on an idea, though. Forget the draft - why not raise military pay really high? Like, say, $100k to start or so, or roughly about what the most high-paid college graduates get to start. It'd achieve the liberal goal of broadening the responsiblity of defending the nation across a broad, representative cross-section of the population, instead of imposing it strictly on the lower middle class and poor.

According to this PDF, the 1.2 million enlisted soldiers get about $37,000 right now, so it'd cost about $100 billion a year to give them all a $100k raise, or a one-time increase of about 20% in the Pentagon budget. Not sure about officer salries, but there's no where near as many of them, so it'd wouldn't be much.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

2003-11-06T21:27:00.000-08:00

Another personal note about Krugman that's probably going to lead to unpleasant rhetoric from the right in the near future: his wife is black.

Edit: Never did. Ok, I take it back.

2003-10-26T20:23:00.000-08:00

Does anyone else suspect that Paul Krugman mentioning that he's Jewish is going to lead to some very, very ugly rhetoric from the right in the near future?

Edit: Never did. Ok, I take it back.

2003-10-08T11:27:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else think it's funny that John Lott doesn't specify, at all, how he got "black quarterbacks are 27% more likely to be praised after adjusting for media outlet and performance"? He puts up the raw data here on his website, but good luck figuring out how he got that 27% number.

Explaining your methodology is for wussies!

Update: Ah ha, it's up now.

Update: Tim Lambert finds evidence Lott was cherry picking stories to get the result he wanted. I'm stunned!

2003-09-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

An interesting bit from Krugman's NPR interview:

Gross asked if he stands by that column where he claimed the Enron scandal would be a bigger turning point in America's perception of itself than 9/11:

"No, but not for the reason you'd think. The story about September 11th that people were telling at that time was that it was going to be the moment when an angered America took up arms and we really showed the world. I don't think that's the way we will remember it. What I did not understand at that point was the extent to which - I'm going to say something fairly stiff here - the depth of the cynicism in our leadership. I didn't understand the extent to which they'd exploit September 11th for political goals. The extent to which they would use it for partisan advantage, in the elections, and the extent to which they would use it to rationalize projects that had nothing to do with terrorism.

Now, having done all that, I think we will look back at September 11th as a turning point, but as a turning point that we'll be ashamed of in future generations. We'll look at the way in which patriotism and fear were abused, and we'll say 'my god, this is the point where America really took a very serious wrong turn.'"

2003-09-16T01:10:00.000-07:00

I just realized what bothers me so much about discussing Social Security after reading some comments over on Brad Delong's website.

Namely: can you recall privitization proponents *ever* talking about raising taxes, which absolutely must be done to fund a privitization program? I'm not talking about in obscure journals where they discuss it in technical terms, I'm talking about in public. It simply doesn't happen - can you recall a public conservative ever, ever admitting we'll need to raise taxes to privitize Social Security? By contrast, raising taxes to fix Social Security is pretty much all liberals talk about when the subject comes up.

If conservatives want to argue "we're going to have to raise taxes anyway by about as much, so we might as well privitize; there's benefits," fine, go for it. It's an honest debate. That's not what happens, though; what happens is Bush trots out and insists that $1 put into private accounts today *won't* have to be made up by equivalent tax increases elsewhere. Hey look, kids, free money! Conservatives know we'll have to pay just about as much to transition to a privatized system, but that's a cost you can reveal after tricking the voters into approving it by lying about the costs.

This goes back to something revealed back in the 2000 election; the right has a real distrust for the messy concept of democracy. The conservative position on deficits is pretty much "they won't vote to cut spending like they should, so we'll just cut taxes, run deficits, and then use that to trick them into cutting spending", for example. The vein cuts across a bunch of issues; the 2000 election, Bush's tax cuts, Social Security, Iraq - it's disturbing.

2003-09-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

Conservatives claim Scrooge McDuck as their own. I know liberals sure don't want him.

The only relevent match from google for "Scrooge McDuck Allende" says he has his history on the Allende/McDuck connection wrong, too.

2003-08-22T23:46:00.000-07:00

Summers came up recently; here's a neat NYT magazine article on him.

2003-08-17T00:34:00.000-07:00

The Sunday NYT has some seriously bad economics this week. This article says the US's declining proportion of manufacturing employment will somehow impoverish us. This article insists that jobs going overseas will leave us with no good jobs at all.

Yuck. And to think Krugman's usually just a few pages over.

2003-08-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

A bit from an MSNBC article on the blackout:

About 3,170 electric utilities are connected into the U.S. power grid, grouped into three smaller groups. Thursday’s outages occurred in the Eastern Interconnected System, which extends throughout the Northeast and into the Midwest and Canada.
When one utility has a shortage, it can buy electricity from regional transmission organizations (RTOs) or an independent power generator, which essentially produces energy on a free-lance basis.

Like a river’s tributaries, their contributions spill into immense regional power grids, where they become anonymous and untraceable. Managers at dozens of control sites monitor intricate crosscurrents of supply and demand, watching over their delicate balance.

Uh, so there's no central authority tracking who's sticking load on the lines? That can't be good.

2003-08-04T16:01:00.000-07:00

Landsburg has another pain-inducing nonsense "economics" article up at Slate. The highlight:

As a matter of fact, childless households (whether gay or straight) spend, on average, 56 percent more on cigarettes and alcohol than their childbearing neighbors. (Among households where the parents have some education, the discrepancy is even larger.) Nor is there anything mysterious about why. First, parents have extra reasons to live long and stay healthy, both so they can be there when their kids need them and so they can enjoy the company of their grandchildren.

Uh, yeah. The connection between child-bearing and risk avoidance could run the other way.....

2003-07-24T16:25:00.000-07:00

What is it with people? Every time a new technology comes along, there's a panicky mis-informed crowd that immediately declares permanent mass unemployment will be the result.

Factories will replace everyone at the factory!
Industrial farming will replace all the farmers!
Desktop computers will replace everyone at the office!

Sheesh.

2003-07-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

Bush Country is an extremely funny website. Mind you, its unintentional; check this out:

Modern Feminism Is Not Feminine

Little did I realize how subtly the unisex trend had infiltrated our culture. Then it dawned on me as I was watching a Billy Graham Classic Crusade from the late '60s or early '70s. How did I guess when the crusade took place? I only assumed because the fashion styles dated the program. Wow, the ladies looked like ladies! Why? Because they dressed like ladies and their hair was styled differently from the men's. And this was the late '60s or early '70s--when women's lib had begun to emerge but hadn't yet caught on with mainstream society.

.....

Surprisingly, it now seems that the elderly women have adopted the short, boy-cut hair more than the younger girls have. You see an older couple together and try to figure out which is the husband and which is the wife. And you wonder whatever attracted the guy to a masculine-looking woman in the first place. Unless, of course, they're both gay. Hmmm. . . that might be another part of the feminists' agenda. Could it be the unisex trend in hairstyles that has slowly been creeping into our society is another in the movement toward acceptance of the gay and lesbian lifestyle as being "normal"? Or worse yet, is the radical feminists' motive so shocking that the only way they want us to be able to distinguish male from female is by--good grief--no fashion at all?!

2003-07-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

Reading shit like this royally pisses me off. God forbid we let the Vietnamese make money, or have free markets! Grr.

First world agricultural protectionism is just inexplicable.

2003-07-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

Let's make fun of the National Review, shall we? Check this David Frum column:

JUL. 17, 2003: GIRLS & PIRATES
Is there some contemporary equivalent of the Hay’s Office in Hollywood to enforce the rule that the heroine must never, ever be rescued by the hero? Took the kids last night to see Disney’s latest piece of fluff, Pirates of the Caribbean, and it happened again! Evil ghost-pirates kidnap our heroine, the delicately raised daughter of the governor of the British Caribbean island of Port Royal. Our hero sails to save her. But, as if this is all too much for the writers to bear, half an hour later, they have to plunge him into jeopardy so she can save the day: suddenly taking command of 18th-century sailing vessels, leading boarding parties, and clouting pirates – all while wearing a (very fetching actually) soldier’s red coat. (It should have been the blue of the Royal Marines, but we’ll let that pass.)

It always happens: not sometimes, not generally, but always. I think I know where it started – in Raiders of the Lost Ark, back in the early 1980s: Spielberg has his heroine throw punches with the boys. Now it has become an iron law: no matter how sheltered and virginal the heroine, at the moment of crisis, it turns out that she has all along been an expert kick-boxer.

But how is it enforced? Is there some in-house equal-opportunity enforcer who reads scripts to ensure that women are always shown rescuing themselves? Is it spontaneous conformity on the part of writers and directors? Is it market research? Or what?

Hollywood is poisoning our children's minds! Or something.

2003-07-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

Remember the case of the disabled NJ high school student who sued for 2.7 million when her school tried to give a co-valedictorian award to another student with a lower GPA? The justification was that the disabled student had a GPA advantage based on her being able to take more AP classes; she could take more of them because her disability, under the ADA, let her take them at home.

Well surprise, surprise, it turns out this was all 100% incorrect, according to the district judge. KM is the lower-GPA student they wanted to also give the award to:

With respect to Kadri's allegation that plaintiff withdrew from in-school classes in order to protect her high G.P.A., plaintiff notes that she withdrew from two classes, with the school's permission and, in both cases, withdrawing actually lowered her G.P.A.
.....
Despite Kadri's implication that plaintiff's father hand-picked her home instructors, Mr. Hornstine responds that the only teacher he referred was Mr. O'Neill, plaintiff's Latin teacher, because no Latin teacher at the school was willing to teach home-bound students.
.....
Moreover, a comparison of plaintiff's transcript with that of K.M. reveals that he had a mathematical advantage over plaintiff.Statistically, he took more weighted courses than plaintiff. In the four years at Moorestown High School, plaintiff took 8 AP courses whereas K.M. took 10, and plaintiff took 15 Honors courses while K.M. took 12. AP courses are weighted more heavily than Honors courses. An AP class is worth one grade point more than a standard class, and an Honors class is worth one-half grade point more than a standard class. For example, an A+ in standard Latin is a 4.3; an A+ in Honors Latin is a 4.8, and an A+ in AP Latin is a 5.3. Since K.M. completed 2 more AP courses than plaintiff, and she completed only 3 more Honors classes than he, compared to him, plaintiff was at a weighted course disadvantage.

So media reports were just regurgitating the school boards' defense, which the judge declared to be factually incorrect. Funny, that. No doubt we'll see corrections to all those articles about the out-of-control American legal system any day now.

On a final discordant note, Harvard rescinded her acceptance when they found out she'd blatantly plagarized in some newspaper columns she'd written. Oops.

Edit: Another thing is that she apparently wasn't very popular. Hmm.

2003-06-29T15:25:00.000-07:00

Can I get a great big "fuck you" for Fareed Zakaria? Reviving "enlightened dicatorship" theory and fetishing Singapore. Jesus.

2003-06-23T00:13:00.000-07:00

Can someone explain to me why offering tax incentives of 3 billion to secure 1,200 jobs from Boeing for 20 years is a good deal? By my math, that's $125,000 a job per year; the salaries offered are no where near that.

Edit: David Segebarth points out by email that when you include benefits and whatnot, $125k/job is about what Boeing will pay. I'm still not sure as a whole how the state comes ahead on the deal; how is taxing the entire state to pay the full salary of the new Boeing employees a good idea?

2003-06-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a paperback copy of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier that I picked up at Twice Sold Tales yesterday. Here's an interesting passage, from an essay describing Why Socialism Isn't Getting On or somesuch; that its proponents are usually the vanguard of "vulgar progress for its own sake":

Clearly I do not, in a sense, "want" to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't "want" to cut down my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc., etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilisation in which "progress" is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.

Orwell had it all figured out.....

2003-06-15T22:26:00.000-07:00

Oooh, those lucky duckies!

I'm was fooling with some tax stuff today and found this little gem on the Turbotax website:

What types of income do I not have to report?

Income received as reparations for being a victim (or a heir of a victim) of the Holocaust.

2003-05-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

Mike T (new blogger?) over at Gorilla-A-Gogo has an amusing chart from Waxman's study of the Bush dividend tax cut. Sure, it overstates things a bit by averaging together the tax cut of the bottom 80% and comparing that with the average of the top 1%, but the numbers are still hilarious. $29.50 for the bottom 80%, $11,483.00 for the top 1%.

2003-05-05T18:58:00.000-07:00

Slate has a truly horrifying throwaway line about Mitch Daniels today, buried in an amusing story about how the Bushies are stiffing the Army Corp of Engineers (and they're right to do so, for once!)

"Daniels, a tight-fisted budget hawk who was once spotted picking change out of a toilet in college, has been the administration's most aggressive advocate of corps reform."

Ewwwwwwwwwwwww.

Other than that, it's a hilarious little "thank god for the GOP" type of thing. Sometimes only they can get away with killing pork.

2003-05-03T04:43:00.000-07:00

I had a long conversation about Scrooge McDuck the other day.

How often in Ducktales did you see a Scrooge McDuck business? I'll be damned if I can remember a single one, but I haven't forgotten that fucking money bin. The sheer scale implies an awfully profitable business empire. In fact, too profitable; there's no way anyone could be that rich.

To see what I'm talking about, let's guesstimate the net value of the money bin. It supposedly contains 3 cubic acres of gold. Using the density (19,000 kg/m3) and price ($350/troy ounce) of gold, plus a packing density of 80% (probably too low) results in a money vault that's worth 320 billion dollars.

If Scrooge really only kept a small fraction of his wealth in the money bin, what is the son of a bitch really worth? 10% gives a net worth of 3.2 trillion (32% of US GDP); 1%, 32 trillion (320% of GDP). For comparision, Bill Gates is only worth around 15 billion (.15% of GDP), and estimates have Rockefeller at his peak worth only around 1% of GDP.

Our initial conclusion was that the money bin *had* to be a cube of something worthless surrounded by a little bit of gold coins to fool the little people. That can't be right; I remember seeing the entire thing pour out of the vault on multiple occasions. Maybe the gold coins are only fractionally backed? Even 10% still gives him way too much money, though.

Altogether: what the fuck? No duck can possibly be that rich. Why would the Disney Corporation want to lie to children about the value of money?

2003-05-02T03:22:00.000-07:00

A rather earth-shattering development in the stem-cell wars: conversion of a stem cell into an embryo.

"Besides the unaccustomed idea of generating human oocytes in the laboratory, Dr. Scholer's research points to another anomaly: the oocytes can develop in a dish into embryos, a process that involves a spontaneous doubling of their own genetic material instead of acquiring a second set of chromosomes from a sperm. Dr. Scholer said he has not yet had time to test whether the mouse oocytes and embryos are viable or whether human embryonic stem cells behave in the same way."

The implications are pretty far-reaching; more evidence that fertilization is a wierd place to demarcate the beginning of life, for one.

2003-04-28T22:35:00.000-07:00

On a completely different topic for this blog, there's a new Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game out there: A Tale In The Desert. It's an interesting twist on the genre:

No killing.
No non-player characters; everyone you can interact with in the game is a real person.
The "goal" of the game is to create an ideal society. To get there, an enormous list of things has to be done by players in seven areas: art, politics, competitive card games, competitive building construction, cooperative rituals, exploration, and riddles.
Various in-game resources are required to meet all of these tests. The world starts in a state of grace, with minimal production methods (growing barley, catching fish); cooperative action is necessary to research new ones (silver mining).
Laws can be passed (by two-thirds vote) changing the game itself - regulations on building placement, item decay, and so on.
You can group with other players in "guilds" for local cooperation.
There's an intense conflict between cooperation and competition when it comes to meeting the game's goals; you don't want someone else to finish it, but you need them to do so.

Unfortunately, the legal system is in complete shambles:

Well then, should I say that at this point the results are spectacularly uninteresting. Allow me to summarize for you:

Initial conditions: 2000 people put together to try to create a simulated society. Placed in world seeded with resources, and given system to self-regulate.

Results as of 1 1/2 months into experiment: People build many buildings, agressively strip mine Egypt for its natural resources, and complain that they can't get more resources and build more things. Organization into guilds occurs for some sharing. Legal system's greatest achievements are allowing people to tear down other's buildings so they can build more, banning someone from the game, and creating a library where the many failures and few successes can be listed.

Conclusions: Humanity's natural tendency is to consume. No one wants to give someone any kind of power over them, but they also want someone to fix all of their problems for them. People therefore must be confused and unable to think properly. Experiments should be run on possiblity of extremely damaged brains in all human specimens, due to this illogical behavior.

As he mentions, pollution from mining (which is toxic to plant and animal life) is completely out of control, although a flax farmer threatened by silver mining runoff is trying to start an environmental movement. I have a feeling the game is going to end up in an economic journal some day.

2003-04-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

I wrote this up for a comment over at Ygelasis's today, but it's interesting enough to repost here.

What does the racial breakdown of members of the GOP and Democrats look like? It's a question with fuzzy answers. The general election totals tend to underestimate the differences, as independents and the loosy-aligned have to pick a party, but the makeup of delegates and elected official makeup goes the other way; only the "hardcore" get that involved.

Let's just use the general election numbers. Assuming the makeup of GOP voters roughly matches their 2000 totals, the GOP has 54% of whites as members, 9% of blacks, and so on. If you multiply the proportion of voters in each racial category with the percentage that went for each party, then calculate the ratio between the numbers inside the parties, you get:

Those voting for Democrats in 2000 were 71% white, 19% black, 8% hispanic, and 2% asian; the sex breakdown was 58% women, 42% men.
Those voting for Republicans in 2000 were 93% white, .2% black(!), 5.5% hispanic, and 2% asian; the sex breakdown was 53% men, 47% women.

Unless the election totals seriously deviate from actual party makeup, the GOP is far whiter than I'd ever have imagined. One-fifth of one percent of the Republican party is black? Geez, I guessed it was at least a percent or two.

2003-04-25T14:14:00.000-07:00

MediaWhores flagged this Paul Krugman speech at the New School a couple days ago. Paul discusses a few interesting things, which we'll probably see more of in the book he has coming out this fall:

The income distribution has become extremely polarized.
The political power exerted by the rich as a result of this has completely eliminated the overlap between the political parties.
Class warfare is actually starting to break out. The rich didn't used to have enough money to make it worth the trouble of going after their money, but they sure do now.
The explosion in executive pay illustrates the new cultural gap on money; the ratio of CEO to employee pay has gone completely haywire. No 1950s or 60s executive would dare to open up such a large gap between his compensation and that of the regular employees.
The polarization of politics on income lines and the increased power of the rich explain how dividend and inheritance tax cuts have managed to become dominant political issues.

It's over an hour, but well worth your time.

2003-04-24T16:26:00.000-07:00

Ben Muse has an interesting Medicare chart up. Current projections show Medicare spending growing from its current level of about 2.5% of GDP to 9% of GDP in 2075.

The problem with this sort of analysis (and the usual conclusion attached - "How on earth will we pay for this?") is that, implicitly, it kinda-sorta assumes medical spending is worthless. To boot, there tends to be a underlying panicky assumption that unless something is done, and done right now, we'll have a future of poverty; nice medical care, but no money left for anything else. I'm complaining about the "per capita growth in medical costs in excess of GDP growth" category, which is most of it; the aging population thing is another bit entirely.

As an example of the mathematical fallacy being engaged in here, imagine a similar chart, depicting the amount of candy people buy. Assume that people have a never-ending desire for candy; they could always use more, and once they've got their basic needs satisfied, they'll spend the rest on candy. The chart would look about the same. As income keeps increasing, more and more basic needs are satisfied (transportation, housing, food) and people "splurge" on stuff that's not absolutely necessary, but nice to have (candy, the latest and greatest medical tricks.) If the essentials are mostly satisfied, then of course you'll see the proportion of income spent on luxuries skyrocket.

Now, candy and healthcare aren't directly comparable, but the basic point is the same. Paul Krugman has written a bit on this; why is healthcare considered a loss? The only reason projections show it getting so big in the future is people really like medical spending, and judging by their private buying decisions, they're looking to spend a lot of future income on it.

A quick mathematical example of this:

Imagine per-capita income is $100, annual per-capita income growth is 1.5%, annual growth in per-capita medical spending is 3%, and the proportion of income used for medical spending starts at 2%, with all leftover money is spent on other things. You've got $2 in medical spending and $98 in other spending to start.

After ten years, income is $116.05 and medical spending is $2.69. After thirty years, income is $156.31 and medical spending is $4.85. After 75 years, income is $305.46 and medical spending is $18.36.

Explosive growth, right? Medical spending went from 2% to 6% of income over 75 years. Note, however, that everyone wasn't reduced to poverty; non-medical spending had a smaller growth *rate* over the time period, but in *aggregate* it increased more, from $113.36 to $287.10.

It is useful to wonder if the deadweight loss imposed by a government that collects 6.5% more of income would be a problem, but that always seems to be a side issue in articles about the medical industry. Read enough of them and you'd think those medical premium increases were being trucked out to a landfill for burning, instead of spending on new treatments and research. Sheesh.

2003-04-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

Something leaped out at me when reading Alterman's What Liberal Media?: Reason magazine gets a lot of money from Richard Mellon Scaife.

Check it out. From 1985-1999, $1,427,500 dollars went from various Scaife groups to Reason.

Another one to put on the "do not trust" pile, I guess.

2003-02-12T17:30:00.000-08:00

I think it's time to do some looking at the Milton Friedman argument for deficits that conservatives have scrambled to embrace of late. You know, "deficits tend to decrease spending; specifically, they tend to constrain non-defense domestic spending," and so on.

If this is true, you'd expect to see surpluses correlated with spending, and deficits inversely correlated with spending.

I loaded 1962-2001 data on government spending as a proportion of GDP from the tables of section 8 into Excel and ran some correlations. I deleted the bizarro TQ, because I'm too lazy to fix up the results for that correctly, and it doesn't change much anyway. A few items of note:

The correlation between surpluses and non-mandatory non-defense spending is weakly negative.
There is no correlation between revenue and non-mandatory non-defense spending - the "big government" conservatives complain about.

These both contradict Freidman. Here's one that doesn't:

The correlation between interest outlays and non-mandatory non-defense spending is weakly negative.

So a fallback hypothesis, that interest payments constrain spending, matches the evidence pretty well.

On closer inspection, interest rates, which have little to do with the matter under discussion, have extremely strong effects on interest payments. Year-to-year changes in the annual deficit don't do much to the size of the total deficit, after all, so annual interest payments are barely affected by short-run changes in the deficit; it's almost entirely interest rates. These rates are mostly the result of inflation and long-run growth expectations; altogether, this means interest payments probably aren't a very good measurement of the delta in congressional spending from revenue changes.

I don't think the evidence is with Friedman here.

Update: Megan McArdle makes some good points about consumption smoothing and forward-looking interest rates, but they don't really change anything.

To see why, let's assume that interest outlays constrain domestic spending. Interest payments are spending, too (they're certainly not free), so I added them to the spreadsheet. Interest payments + domestic spending starts at 3.7% of GDP in 1962, crawls up to 6.6% of GDP in 1980, and then stays there until 1995, after which it slowly falls to 5.2% in 2001. Does that look like cheaper government through deficits to you? The correlation between deficits and interest+domestic is strongly negative, already - what are conservatives trying to do? Make the government spend just as much tax money as before, except on bond payments?

Welfare for rich people!

2003-02-10T16:35:00.000-08:00

Something you won't hear in all the neocon blathering about how "everyone hates Germany": after the 20 point drop of the last year, 71% of those polled have a favorable opinion of them.

Coincidentally, 29% is close to the proportion of strongly identified Republicans out there.

2003-01-24T12:43:00.000-08:00

There's been a bit of discussion over on Delong's website about the weirdness of the chart in this NYT article. Do the various income brackets really all pay about the same tax rate? How do you fund government spending at 32% of GDP when no bracket pays over 19% of their income?

After some discussion, and talking to Steve Henderson at the BLS, it looks like the NYT misinterpreted the data. As Steve explained by email:

Good afternoon,

Thanks for your phone call yesterday. Here's what I found out about the tax data from one of the CE senior economists:

As I understand it, the tax amounts are simply those reported by complete reporters, and nothing more.
That is, if a person says, "I don't know how much I paid in state or local taxes last year, but my federal taxes were $1,000," then total taxes are shown as $1,000. If the person says, "I refuse to tell you how much I paid in taxes in any form last year," the total taxes are shown for tabulation purposes as $0.

The inclusion of zero tax amounts into the mean tax
expenditure for complete income reporters can cause the tax estimate per household by income bracket to be lower.
- - Steve

In other words, the strongest statement you can make about the survey data related to the tax burden is something like "incomplete data results in all brackets reporting about the same proportion of income spent on taxes." That the state, local, and federal government adds up to about 32% of GDP, yet no bracket has a higher rate than 19%, is a big tip-off.

2003-01-22T21:44:00.000-08:00

Hitler's Willing Executioners

This book is.....complicated.....to get through. There are only so many descriptions of guys grabbing kids by the hair and blasting them in the back of the head that you can take, really, before you hurl it into the wall. Be forewarned if you pick it up; it's not a pleasant endeavor.

It's worth it, though. The point, more or less:

Eliminationist anti-semitism was one of the central defining features of German culture in the Weimar period. The apologist statement that "the average Weimar German wasn't an an anti-semite" has a rough time of it; there was plenty of public discussion about "the Jewish problem," long before Hitler's arrival. They were poison to German society, that was common territory; the only point of debate was the best way to get rid of them. Should they be relocated outside of Germany? Would mass murder be easier?

Building on this, he insists that the existing explanations for why individual Germans agreed to kill Jews are wrong. At the core, they all blame the Nazi system of government and culture in some manner for what happened, instead of focusing on the "beliefs and actions of the individual perpetrators." The stories of the Police Battalions, which were tasked with maintaining order in the occupied territories (and spent a lot of time eradicating Jews), are examined in detail to refute the common exculpatory theories.

One of these is the "just obeying orders"/authoritarian/groupthink argument. Many police battalion commanders made it quite clear, however, that anyone who did not feel up to the task was not required to engage in the killing operations; more strangely, only a few members took up these offers. Contrary to the statements of defendants at Nuremburg, no one has been able to find a single case where someone was significantly punished for refusing to kill a Jew. Does this sound like an authoritarian climate of fear, where refusal to shoot Jews results in harsh punishment?

Another is "the killing was done by extremist, out of control fringe elements." The obvious response is scale: the police battalions killed something like a million Jews, at a minimum. How could a fringe element possibly kill so many? More usefully, demographic data shows the battalions weren't composed of "extreme, crackpot, Jew-hating elements," as the conventional wisdom would have us believe; they were a virtual cross-section of the non-military-eligible male population. The German equivalent of guys from the suburbs, most with wives and children, offered no objection to slaughtering entire villages.

Killing actions weren't carried out in "chaos of combat" situations, either. The battalions had regular social events during their scheduled deployments; bowling, music, and other common get-togethers of civil society. Commanders had their significant others visit them. An occasion of genocide wasn't particularly noteworthy from command's standpoint; the only reaction was a bigger alcohol ration. No discussion, no indoctrination, no conflicting orders, no return gunfire. Occasionally a commander would explain the actions to the men as "suppression of partisan activity," so I suppose the case can be made that the killing of Jewish men was somewhat understandable under the circumstances (oh, and it has). Shooting the elderly, though? Blasting away at infants?

The weirdest avenue explored is how Germany didn't put Jews to work for their production value; you'd think they at least would try to get some cheap labor out of them. The popular conception of Jewish forced labor contains a lot of this view; Schindler took his Jews because they were cheap, remember? Goldhagen's conclusion is the direct opposite: that the German approach to Jewish work was entirely punitory. The camps were the logical consequence of the common statement "Jews do not do honest, real work, and they hate it"; the chief goal was Jewish suffering, with economic value but a happenstance. Jews were made to work because it was considered so inimical to their "nature" (greedy, slothful bankers, and so on) that the act of lifting a hand was itself punishment. Their living conditions certainly weren't designed for optimum production, or even barely sufficient to turn a profit; the death rate in some work camps was upwards of 100% per month. Work wasn't "work" for the good of the Volk; it was just one last caper at gunpoint, the final amusement of the captors.

Similarly, the Jewish death marches that occurred towards the end of the war served no material purpose. They were in some cases explicitly ordered not to kill the Jews enroute, but that apparently was only to prolong the suffering. Their destinations were pointless (in the middle of forest, miles from civilization), the Soviet army was right behind them, and they weren't treated in a manner where economic value could be extracted from them at some future date. The marches were simply torture, to inflict the maximum possible suffering on the Jews before exertion and malnourishment took them.

The "average German" of this period was perfectly fine with killing Jews. Nazi eliminationism wasn't a trick of Hitler's spellbinding oratory and economic circumstance. It was the logical outgrowth of the virulent anti-semitism of Weimar Germany. Goldhagen does state that he rejects the notion of collective guilt; standing there and watching (metaphorically or literally) doesn't make you guilty of genocide, even if you think the Jews do need to be killed. For those that engaged in the killing, however, or were directly involved in the killing operations (100,000? 1 million? more?), there aren't any excuses. They quite clearly believed that Jews were a direct threat to Germany, if not the world, and that the good of humanity required their destruction.

From the epilogue:

This study of the Holocaust and its perpetrators assigns to their beliefs paramount importance. It reverse the Marxian dictum, in holding that consciousness determined being. Its conclusion that the eliminationist anti-semitic German political culture, the genesis of which must be and is explicable historically, was the prime mover of both the Nazi leadership and ordinary Germans in the persecution and extermination of the Jews, and therefore was the Holocaust's principal cause, may at once be hard to believe for many and commonsensical to others. The evidence that so many ordinary people did maintain at the center of their worldview palpably absurd beliefs about Jews like those that Hitler articulated in Mein Kampf is overwhelming. And the evidence has been available for years, indeed available to any observer in Germany during the 1930s. But because the beliefs have seemed to use so ridiculous, indeed worthy of the ravings of madmen, the truth that they were the common property of the German people has been and will likely continue to be hard to accept by many who are beholden to our common-sense view of the world, or who find the implications of the truth too disquieting.

Germany during the Nazi Period was inhabited by people animated by beliefs about Jews that made them willing to become consenting mass executioners. The study of the perpetrators, especially of police battalions, who were a representative cross section of German men - and therefore are indicative of what ordinary Germans were like regarding Jews - compels us, precisely because there were representative of Germans, to draw this conclusion about the German people. Being ordinary in the Germany that gave itself to Nazism was to have been a member of an extraordinary, lethal political culture. That German political culture was producing such voluntaristic killers suggests, in turn, that perhaps this was a society that had undergone other important and fundamental changes, perhaps cognitive and moral ones. The study of the Holocaust's perpetrators thus provides a window through which German society can be viewed and examined in a new light. It demands that important features of the society be conceived anew. It suggests further that the Nazis were the most profound revolutionaries of modern times and that the revolution that they wrought during their but brief suzerainty in Germany was the most extreme and thoroughgoing in the annals of western civilization. It was, above all, a cognitive-moral revolution which reversed processes that had been shaping Europe for centuries. This book is ultimately not only about the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Because the perpetrators of the Holocaust were Germany's representative citizens, this book is about Germany during the Nazi period and before, its people and its culture.

2003-01-20T14:35:00.000-08:00

Want to argue about the size of the budget? Taxes? Relative distributions, spending cuts, blah blah blah? This right here has everything you need.

A few things that stand out:

Taxes haven't changed much since the 1970s.
Spending hasn't changed much either, excepting a drop in defense spending.
None of the stereotypes about Democratic or Republican budgets are true, really.

2003-01-10T20:52:00.000-08:00

A quick note for the "deficits have no effect on interest rates" crowd. Estimates put the 2003 deficit at around $350 billion. In 2000, there was a $200 billion surplus. That's a shift of $550 billion, or 5.5% of GDP. Annual private investment is about 1.8 trillion, so that's a 30% shift of net investment in just 3 years.

2003-01-10T12:36:00.000-08:00

An interesting little throwaway over at Salon:

There are 11 million people living together unmarried in the United States. And 40 percent of births to so-called single mothers are actually babies born to two-parent cohabiting families -- the mothers are single only in the legal sense.

2003-01-07T04:19:00.000-08:00

While looking for something else entirely today, I found an interesting Krugman article about the relative merits of investment-based and consumption-based approaches to ending a recession. The kicker is that it was written ten years ago. The parallels are eerie.

2003-01-07T02:00:00.000-08:00

The Washington Monthly has just been fantastic lately. This month:

Reagan's liberal legacy - Josh Green
Why John Edwards is a dangerous presidential candidate for the GOP - Josh Green
Dick Cheney's horrible decision making - Joshua Marshall
An analysis of why NPR is so damned bland - Some Guy I've never heard of
An interesting proposal for a homeland security draft - Two Other Guys I've never heard of

They've turned into a liberal powerhouse overnight. Specifically, that Reagan article is just fantastic, puncturing the conventional wisdom on Reagan:

A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative dogma that taxes should never be raised.

Oh, and a good line from Marshall summarizing Cheney's (and the administration's) problems on policy:

Not since the Whiz Kids of the Kennedy-Johnson years has Washington been led by men of such insular self-assurance. Their hierarchical, old economy style of management couldn't be more different from the loose, non-hierarchical style of, say, high-tech corpor-ations or the Clinton White House, with all their open debate, concern with the interests of "stake-holders," manic focus on pleasing customers (or voters), and constant reassessment of plans and principles. The latter style, while often sloppy and seemingly juvenile, tends to produce pretty smart policy. The former style, while appearing so adult and competent, often produces stupid policy.

2003-01-07T00:09:00.000-08:00

Uh oh.

If pension liabilities had been counted in financial statements, aggregate earnings for the S&P 500 would have been 69 percent lower than the companies reported for 2001, or $68.7 billion rather than $219 billion, the Credit Suisse study found.

2003-01-05T23:03:00.000-08:00

Brad Delong is a funny guy.

"There! By mixing my labor with this table and these chairs, I have appropriated them out of the Lockeian state of nature and have made the right to sit at them for the next two hours my private property!" "Throwing your sportcoat on a table is mixing your labor with it?" "Don't fight with me, go fight with John Locke." "He's dead. And I thought items in the state of nature were things like trees... soil... animals to be domesticated... not tables and chairs made in the Shenzhou Special Economic Zone." "I don't inquire into how they got into the state of nature, I just observe that the right to sit at them for the next two hours was in the state of nature, and that I have just appropriated it." "Well, now that you have Locked in our seats, I had better see if I can find someone to sell us drinks. Oh. Isn't there something about 'as much and as good' left for others, and wasn't this the last free table?" "You seem to think that I am using Lockeian doctrines as part of a serious philosophical argument to justify our monopolizing this table. I'm not. I'm using it as an ideology--as a plausible but ultimately specious justification that gives us the right to ignore the glowers of others standing around, others who clearly wish we would get up and leave so that they can sit down here instead."

2002-12-20T00:09:00.000-08:00

You're probably going to hear a bunch from the mighty Wurlitzer about how "Robert Byrd is just as bad as Trent Lott because he said white nigger on TV!!!!" in the upcoming weeks. Oddly enough, I think this was a typical example of an ex-racist trying to make amends.

Here's the actual exchange: Snow asks Byrd about the state of race relations in the United States. Byrd's response:

"They are much, much better than they've ever been in my lifetime," Byrd said. "I think we talk about race too much. I think those problems are largely behind us...I just think we talk so much about it that we help to create somewhat of an illusion. I think we try to have good will. My old mom told me, 'Robert, you can't go to heaven if you hate anybody.' We practice that."

"There are white niggers. I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time; I'm going to use that word. We just need to work together to make our country a better country, and I'd just as soon quit talking about it so much."

Now, how does the second paragraph relate to the first? On casual inspection, it doesn't. Remember something you often hear from ex-racists, though; that "nigger just means a bad black person." Why, that's what they meant all those times they used it! It becomes, in their mind, a derogatory term for bad members of a race like "white trash," instead of the all-encompassing term for a race that it actually is. Of course, they're wrong, but they don't know that.

Now why would Byrd talk about white niggers in this context? Well, under the assumption that its just a reference to bad members of a black race, the use of the phrase "white nigger" is a backhanded attempt to point out that being a bad person is independent of race.

There you go: Byrd was being incredibly clumsy and insensitive, but I guess he's trying. This is all lifted from a Justin Driver's article about reactionary black comedy in TNR, more or less.

Yes, he still hasn't really figured out what's going on, but he's an anachronism in the Democratic party, unlike the goddamn Senate majority leader.

2002-12-19T02:15:00.000-08:00

Seeing The Forest has dug up the Silliest Right Wing Think Tank Article Ever, from our good friends at the Heritage Foundation. The question: why should corporations be able to reincorporate outside the United States to dodge taxes? The answer:

Corporate Expatriation Protects American Jobs

2002-12-09T15:08:00.000-08:00

A remark over in Brad Delong's comments got me thinking. The marginal tax rates poor workers suffer due to the phaseouts of the EITC, food stamps, and the like are truly horrible; about 50% in some cases, and it's a real problem. What to do?

Well, a high marginal rate is a problem of any phaseout program. So why not just give the benefits to everyone? EITC, food stamps, child nutrition, and so on, all of which were created with the explicit intention of improving the welfare of poor children, should be rolled into a universal per-child grant from the government, capped at 2 eligible kids per worker. Oh, and we need to make sure to roll enough money for child care in there, too. Possibly an immigration-related fix, too, not sure about it.

Would anyone actually oppose this? The change in spending wouldn't be much, it's "family-friendly," and even has the nice side effect of fending off a Japanese-style population bust.

2002-12-08T21:05:00.000-08:00

Everything I've seen so far on the appointing of Henry Kissinger to lead the 9/11 investigation has focused on that nasty little "war criminal" angle, instead of the extremely good tactical reasoning behind it.

If it's done honestly, the investigation is going to sully just about everyone in power. However, if they just bury the whole thing, it'll make only the people doing the investigation look bad. Who better to take the heat than the one man in Washington whose reputation can't get any worse?

2002-12-01T18:41:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across an extremely interesting paper today implying that China's economic numbers are completely made up. For example, from 1997 to 2000 GDP supposedly went up by 24.7%, while energy consumption dropped 12.8%.

Here's the hilarious nut graf:

Official performance measures for recent years imply that China’s economy has entered an unprecedented interlude that combines high-speed growth with declining energy use, falling prices, minimal employment growth, widespread excess supply, rampant overcapacity, low expectations, and large-scale pump-priming.

2002-11-12T20:25:00.000-08:00

Brad Delong has an interesting chart relating the congressional district income to the party of the representative.

With the fall of Connie Morella, Democrats now represent 12 of the 20 highest-income congressional districts--and 16 of the 20 lowest-income congressional districts.

I think Kevin Phillips gives a good explanation for this in his last few books (Wealth and Democracy, The Cousins' Wars, and The Politics of Rich and Poor).

My take on them:

The political conflicts of the United States are rooted in a recurring cycle of old money (decaying industries and modes of production, combined with a populist cultural streak) fighting a rearguard action against new money (technology-driven, often with lots of government "access" or support, combined with a focus on "new" culture). For example, the Republicans were the party of new money in the time of McKinley, but the Democrats were the party of new money in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s.
(Before any conservatives go apeshit about that 1990s bit, I'm talking about the makeup of party members and donors, which isn't controversial. Policy effects are more arguable. "1990s technology money" also doesn't mean CEOs, either; I'd talking about Judis and Teixeira's stuff on professionals.)
Traces of the cultural and political fault lines of the English Civil War are still visible today.
Waves of immigration have provided new power blocs at regular intervals. These immigrant groups have shown little signs of fundamental philosophical change, even over century-long timespans.

Of these, The Cousins' Wars is flat-out the best political book I've read. It's fascinating, no matter your politics.

2002-11-06T00:06:00.000-08:00

Well, that was one horrid election. I don't have anything useful to say about why the Democrats lost, so here's an alternative: an excellent Cato summary of why incumbency has become so strong (yes, you read that right, something excellent from the Cato institute.)

The statistical advantage of incumbency they use grows from 3% of the vote to 10% of the vote over the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and identify the explosion of congressional staff and multiplier effect of television as the prime causes.

2002-10-31T11:23:00.000-08:00

I picked up Dominion yesterday; it's a new animal rights book by Michael Scully, Bush's senior speechwriter. No, I'm not making that up.

Only Nixon could go to China, and maybe only conservatives can stop factory "farming." Maybe only conservatives can stop hunters flying to Africa to blast caged, sedated elephants in the head. Scully argues from a natural law perspective, so I agree with very few his processes and assumptions, but I can't really disagree with any of his statements of the way things should be.

It's an interesting approach; he devotes a good chunk of the book to whacking Peter Singer with a stick, and drawing out some disturbing parallels between the cost-benefit analysis attitude of the factory farms and Singer's opinions.

The most effective part is where he visits "Farm 2149" in Virginia. I've stuck further background info in parentheses where helpful.

Page 267:

The answer can be seen in the swollen legs of the sows standing or trying to stand. To lie on their sides, a powerful inclination during months of confinement in twenty-two inches of space, they try to put their legs through the bars into a neighboring crate. Fragile from the pigs' abnormally large weight (500 pounds), and from rarely standing or walking, and then only on concrete, their legs get crushed and broken. About half of these pigs whose legs can be seen appear to have sprained or fractured limbs, never examined by a vet, never splinted, never even noticed anymore.

"What's that on the thigh of NPD 45-051?" I ask. "That's a tumor," says Gay (an employee of the company that owns the farm; she has a doctorate in animal sciences.) The tumor, I observe, is the size of half a soccer ball. "Yeah, and she's just one year old," says Gay. "Getting thin, too. So she's not desirable anymore." What causes these tumors? A shrug. What happens when they get tumors? "She goes into the cull pen after her next litter." The sow herself may not even survive till birth, Gay explains, but they have a new method, called "superovulation," of harvesting the eggs and getting the live babies from the dead mothers.

Page 268:

A single piece of rubber tire hangs by a string over one crate in the entire barn, apparently someone's idea of "environmental enrichment," yet out of reach unless NPD 88-283 has been genetically engineered to leap five feet in the air. One of those "soft pliable objects" recommended by Temple Grandin (near as I can tell, the industry has tricked her into covering for their sins; try Google), whom Smithfield has paid for consultation. I have an awful hunch it was put there just so they can tell her, yes, Dr. Grandin, we've applied your findings, our pigs now have toys and they're happier than ever. NPD 39-215 is bleeding profusely from a gash above her eye. Nothing a little Kopertox won't fix. NPD 45-066 has a bright pink "X" painted on her back, indicating an imminent birth and transport to the Farrowing Barn. New life on the way, as the expectant mother noses at straw that isn't there to make a nest she'll never have for another litter she'll never raise. NPD 38-453 pulls back, shaking and screaming wildly, as I lean down to look at a perfect little spiderweb between an iron bar and a wooden board at the base of her crate. No Charlotte to bring help.

Gay trundles ahead, directing my attention to this and that with the AI rod she has been using as a pointer, cheerfully unaware, apparently, of the profound betrayal of veterinary ethics everywhere around us - the sworn obligation of every veterinarian "to protect animal health and relieve animal suffering." Who cares for these creatures, besides Gay and Roberto (a non-english speaking visa worker) and whatever other poor soul reports here every morning? Some Smithfield shill of a vet comes by every few days to check on the stock. But for the vets, too, they are not even animals anymore. They're piglet machines. And tumors, fractured bones, festering sores, whatever, none of these receive serious medical attention anymore. If the ailment threatens a particular production unit's meat-yielding capacity, like the vaginal and urinary tract infections apparent from discharge stains on some of the sows, they'll get treated. That can be justified by the return on labor and costs - though only if the unit isn't too old to even bother, "old" meaning three or four years instead of one or two. Otherwise, it's a quick cull and sale to the renderer. There is no sick ward here. For most, it's either Kopertox (a copper napathe cure-all that's the only treatment these pigs receive; it's dangerous if ingested by either pigs or humans) or the cull pen. Nothing in between, no care anymore for animals as such, no regard for their suffering or for the most minimal duties of ordinary decency.

Page 269:

NPD 41-132 is lame and losing weight and dying in the cull pen - here, at least, able to stretch out her limbs. She never made it to her eighth litter, Gay tells me. By the miracle of fertility drugs she had eighteen piglets in her first litter - twice what a sow will normally carry - thirteen in her second litter, but then started losing weight and aborting, and now, says Gay, "has served her purpose" and will be killed. Lying near her is another sow who left us this morning, dying of pneumonia, and strewn elsewhere in the cull pen the bodies of six others who for some reason just never learned to love it. The man in the truck will come by soon to take care of them all. "Most of the culls go to market," says Gay as we survey the day's casualties, "but the ones with disease don't go to Smithfield at all. These are, like, trash."

The diseased ones don't go to market because at Smithfield they have standards. They make only quality products here. You, the consumer, deserve only the best.

2002-10-11T10:21:00.000-07:00

McCain really does not like Paul Weyrich.

His summation: "a pompous, self-serving son of a bitch."

2002-10-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

Steven Landsburg is a hack. In his latest submission for Slate, he pretends that people have an irrational love of forcing others (taxpayers) to give money to complete strangers. Mysteriously, no link is given to the actual study he's discussing.

In one experiment, you (assuming you're the subject) are placed in a room and given 10 dollars. You're invited to put some of those dollars in an envelope that is passed to the stranger in the next room. Whatever doesn't go in the envelope is yours to keep.

In the next experiment, you're placed in a room and given 10 dollars. Once again, you're invited to put some of those dollars in an envelope that is passed to the stranger in the next room. But this time, your gift is automatically tripled: If you put two dollars in the envelope, the experimenter adds another four to make it six. All the extra cash goes to the stranger, and once again whatever doesn't go in the envelope is yours to keep.

In other words, the experimenter is offering, for a fee (i.e., whatever you put in the envelope) to take money from B (the taxpayer who's funding this experiment) and give it to A (the stranger in the next room). You have no reason to think that A is any poorer or richer than B, no reason to think that A is any more or less deserving than B, and no reason that I can think of to care more about A than about B. Nevertheless, now a lot of money goes into the envelopes—the average envelope contains $3.63, so that A gets $10.89 of B's money. And you, the subject, have paid $3.63 to make it happen.

Based on the curious phrasing he uses, I suspect that the source of the extra funds in the second experiment is never specified to the participants. That is, they just assume it's free money. If you told them it came from "the government" or "everyone's tax dollars" of course people would be less likely to support it.

This isn't the first time he's warped evidence to suit his libertarian views; his last policy submission, on the Supreme Court and the "takings" clause, also included lots of paraphrasing, unsupported implications, and no links whatsoever. Why does Slate run his columns?

I could be wrong, but as he admits the practitioner of the experiment (the latest Nobel Winner for economics, Vernon Smith) disagrees with him, so I'm confident this is the right trail.

Update: Here's the original article in Reason by Landsburg which Smith disagrees with. I still can't find the actual experiment. It'd be easy to do if he'd at least given the goddamn name. Grrr.

Another Update: Maria Eugenia Garibotti found the original paper; everyone thank her. As you can see, it doesn't have crud that supports Landsburg. As Maria says, "it's really a paper that attempts to isolate the altruistic aspect of giving from the reciprocal."

2002-10-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

After reading this takedown of More Guns, Less Crime: what is it with conservatives and creative misuse of statistics?

2002-10-03T13:47:00.000-07:00

I think I've got the fundamental point of disagreement on the Torricelli mess: the conflict between parties and individuals in our political system, and the differing frameworks people use to think about it.

As an example of one, imagine that political parties don't exist (a nonpartisan judicial election, maybe). There are still deadlines for reasons of printing, time and whatever. Now, as a Torricelli parallel scenario, there's 5 people running for a seat, and one drops out after the deadline. Should some other random guy get to take his slot on the ballot. I think virtually everyone can agree "of course not." Why on earth should he; he didn't previously indicate any desire to run for the seat, and it's past the deadline. It doesn't matter if he has the same political views as the dropout.

Now, as an alternative, imagine that individual candidates don't exist; only political parties are allowed to run for office, and they just pick a figurehead to represent them. In this case, the closest analogy to the Torricelli situation is if a political party drops out after the deadline, and another party wants to take its place on the ballot. What's the big deal if the political party changes its figurehead? You're voting for the party!

I'm obviously creating ideal scenarios on both ends, but I think the point is valid. I'm not sure where the U.S. political system is located between the two, in legal theory, but I do know that in practice it's a lot closer to competing parties on the ballot than competing individuals. This is exemplified by the incredibly strong biases in the presidential selection process towards parties (strong governmental involvement in primaries, debates, getting on the ballot, blah blah blah).

Anyway, this is why a lot of Democrats, myself included, think the Torricelli replacement isn't that big of a deal.

2002-10-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

From the NYT, the real reason the GOP isn't going to win on the Torricelli thing:

But the Republicans said that adding the name of Mr. Lautenberg, 78, would give parties the leeway to replace candidates before elections simply because they seemed likely to lose.

Uh, so what? Is there something wrong with giving voters better candidates to choose from?

2002-09-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-09-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

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.....

2002-09-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-09-24T01:50:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-09-18T17:12:00.000-07:00

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!"

2002-09-18T17:01:00.000-07:00

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.'

2002-09-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-09-10T22:31:00.000-07:00

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?

2002-09-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-09-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

Does anyone catch a real whiff of the old "Southerners understand the negro problem better" in Reynolds posts like this?

2002-09-04T20:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-09-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-09-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2002-08-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

What the hell are they up to in Delaware? Lots of other people have commented on how creepy the "likely criminal database" they've got going in Wilmington, Delaware is. I don't think anyone's picked up on this part, though:

The police units taking the photographs are known in some Wilmington neighborhoods as "jump-out squads" because they descend on corners, burst out of marked and unmarked vehicles and make arrests in seconds. Up to 20 officers make up each squad.

Police routinely line the people on the corners against a wall and pat them down for weapons. This is known as a "Terry stop," named for a 1968 Supreme Court decision, Terry vs. Ohio, that allows officers to stop, question and frisk people they think are suspicious or people in high-crime areas.

Just one problem: there's not a damn thing in that decision that can be construed as supporting stops of people in "high-crime areas" just for being there. Heck, look at these bits from the opinion:

2. The issue in this case is not the abstract propriety of the police conduct but the admissibility against petitioner of the evidence uncovered by the search and seizure. P. 12.

(c) The officer here was performing a legitimate function of investigating suspicious conduct when he decided to approach petitioner and his companions. P. 22.

Update: Doh! Eugene Volokh says the above are "quotes from the reporter's syllabus, which doesn't have precedental value." Still, I don't see anything in there supporting frisks solely for standing on the street.

2002-08-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

Brad Delong found that Gingrich memo I mentioned a while back.

2002-08-20T20:23:00.000-07:00

Here's the line that finally convinced me Mickey Kaus has gone over to the dark side:

P.P.S.: Does Krugman really think it's a sensible government expenditure to have a whole separate, costly, and not-very-good system of Veterans' health care? If not, why blast Bush for trying to save money by suspending "marketing activities to enroll new veterans" in that white-elephant system?

What the living fuck is going on? This is the same Mickey Kaus that wrote the End of Equality? Bush is trying to hold down spending by indirectly denying veterans health care. This is pretty slimy, as veterans have an entitlement to free health care by virtue of, oh, getting shot at. Kaus's reaction is to question whether should have the entitlement at all and complain about the quality of the system. Last time I checked, free health care was better than no health care.

Talk about jumping through hoops to make your friends look good.

Update: Brad Delong comments:

"But Mickey Kaus can't join the Dark Side. After all, the Dark Side does believe in free medical care for veterans. On this John Derbyshire, Chancellor Palpatine, and Ming the Merciless agree."

Ok, this screws things up. Maybe Kaus has broken off entirely from the political paradigms of mere mortals and found an orthogonal axis of evil.

2002-08-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

It's time for an exciting adventure in contradictions, with your host, Mickey Kaus!

First, let's look at his latest bit, where he quotes Robert Reischauer:

Reischauer refers to a "very rapid increase in discretionary spending, " which in "the last two or three years" has grown about 7.6 percent before inflation.

.....and then extrapolates from that the standard line about porkish congressional spending and so on.

Now let's look at this article this article, where the same Robert Reischauer says this:

Like boastful teenagers, the president and the congressional Republicans are engaged in a reckless game of chicken over the discretionary spending caps that restrain spending in the one-third of the budget not devoted to entitlement programs or interest payments. The problem lies in the unrealistically low caps established for fiscal years 1999 to 2002 by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997.

What's wrong with the "unrealistically low caps" for 1999 to 2002 being broken by a "very rapid increase in discretionary spending"? Wouldn't you assume that's a good thing, from the standpoint of the speaker? Am I missing something?

2002-08-20T17:11:00.000-07:00

A relevant article on Social Security recycling every one of the conservative bits of disinformation out there. You know, stuff like comparing the return on a fully privatized Social Security system, not including the transfer costs, to the return of the current system.

2002-08-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

Working from the last post, the "Social Security crisis" is coming from the baby boom generation. Look at the equation and work it out: they're a generation that's much larger than either the previous or following ones. When they enter the labor force, taxes can be decreased, and when they retire taxes will need to be increased (assuming, mind you, that the program should always stay in balance).

This is the root cause of the "crisis." Now, what sounds like a fair solution to this problem? Well, why should they get to (basically) lower their own SS taxes, and then expect the not-that-big generation that follows them to raise their taxes to pay for boomer retirements? The most obvious solution is that the boomers should pay a little higher SS taxes, so the generation after them isn't completely screwed.

This is kind of what happened, actually. Go here and read the "1983 amendments" section.

Then it started to go horribly, horribly wrong.

It costs more to have the money sit there than it does to pay down the debt with it; why not save money? Just have the rest of the government buy bonds from the program, and pay it back in 20 odd years.
The government began running ever increasing deficits in the 1980s. This was exacerbated by the social security surplus, which effectively drove down the cost of running deficits.
As time went on the deficit that the surplus was supposed to pay down came right back, as politicians discovered they could cut taxes and make it up out of the surplus.

The last point there is an oversimplification. Here's the history in detail:

The 1983 reform creates a surplus over the course of the 1980s, through increases in the FICA tax rate.
The surplus is rolled over into the deficit.
The surplus grew, but the deficit grew even more.
The elder Bush and Clinton both raised taxes to lower the deficit.
The Social Security surplus kept growing and growing, eventually becoming so insanely large that when combined with the tax receipts of the 1990s boom, the "total" deficit virtually disappeared. Sure, the on-budget deficit was still there, but it was less than the FICA surplus.

Projecting forward from this point, the very large reduction in the deficit due to the Social Security surplus would let the next generation have a reasonable total tax burden; sure, their income taxes would be a little "higher" as they paid back the trust fund bonds, but they would also be a little "lower" due to the room freed up in the deficit, and their Social Security taxes wouldn't need to change.

What actually happened was that the younger Bush passed an absolutely enormous tax cut which brought back deficits. Oh, sure, if the recession hadn't come about the damage wouldn't have been quite as bad, but between 40% and 60% of the net change in the government's position is due to the tax cut, not the recession. Also, over the long run, the recession won't have as much of an effect; recessions only last a few years.

You can summarize the whole thing as the 1983 Social Security commission being punished for their sins of actually being fucking responsible: the GOP managed to use the changes to effectively shovel part of the tax burden from the rich to everyone else. FICA taxes went up, income taxes went down, and the net position of the government debt didn't improve; in the short run, the poor will pay more taxes, and in the long run the next generation is absolutely screwed on paying for their parents' retirement.

It's a good thing we're in an Era of Responsibility.

2002-08-15T18:10:00.000-07:00

What with all the hyperventilating about how an unreformed Social Security program is doomed, I thought it'd be interesting to go over the basic fundamentals of an intergenerational transfer retirement program.

You know the deal: you pay for the retirement of your parents, more or less. In general, I think only the following variables matter when looking at the long-run health of a program:

Annual % change in per-capita GDP; let's call this A.
Annual % change in the working population (from population growth and immigration); B.
Annual % change in the lifetime retirement payments received by retirees (from increased life expectancy and income); C.
Annual % change in the size of the retired population; D.

The state where the program will be in balance, and no changes in the tax level are necessary, is:

A * B = C * D

If the left side is greater than the right side, than taxes can be reduced. If the converse is true, then taxes must be increased. Yes, instead you can cut benefits, raise the work requirement, or so on, but it's equivalent to "raise taxes." Furthermore, benefits are pretty much going to be a constant related to GDP; an "ok retirement."

How does this apply to our situation today? Well, A * B is about 3%, so as long as C*D is less than that, we're just fine. If you assume that population growth is constant, then you're just matching per-capita GDP growth to time in retirement, and though I can't find any numbers to actually back this up, it's seems awfully likely for the foreseeable future that the annual change in total retirement time will be below 1.5% a year.

This begs the question: where is the Social Security "crisis" coming from?

Edit: If lifetime retirement payments increase at the same rate as per-capita GDP, then you can just divide A & C out, and you get B = D, which should be mostly true over the long run. One problem with assuming A = C is that the time in retirement will increase in addition to income, so the annual per-capita GDP change has to equal (annual retirement income change * annual life expectancy change). You'll probably have to fiddle with total time of retirement, but that doesn't change the basic point.

2002-08-15T16:56:00.000-07:00

We have a sale today on fish n' barrels.....

Focus on the Family's psychologist-in-residence, Bill Maier, said BBBSA should realize that "matching fatherless boys, starving for attention, with homosexual men is reckless and irresponsible, not to mention a recipe for disaster."

Not-so-subtle implication that all homosexual men are pedophiles: win!

A friend of mine's paraphrase:

"It's like a grocery store for homos," writes Tom Powell of Focus On The Family. "They can just walk into a Big Brothers & Big Sisters center and pick a tender piece of ass right from the produce section. It's disgusting."

2002-08-12T22:57:00.000-07:00

Cato has declared the Federal Reserve "obsolete," and has a few amusing suggestions:

Repeal all laws giving the Fed monopoly power to issue currency.
Eliminate all government regulation of banks and financial institutions.
Change the tax laws so there was no preference given to transactions done in dollars (payment could still be required in dollars but there should be no capital gains if you choose to hold your money in yen, for example).
Completely privatize the Fed either through an auction or fair distribution of shares to taxpayers.
Exempt banks and financial institutions from antitrust laws.

Props to the Amateur Economist for digging this up.

2002-07-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

Bush finally got around to doing something where I agree with him. Way to go, 1 for 300!

Of course, it'll actually need to be enforced, and this bit is worrisome:

Phil Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust, an environmental group, said the proposal embraced the principle that utilities are financially responsible for the pollution they emit. But he criticized language that for the first time would require that cost-benefit analyses of adding pollution controls be done in tandem with studies of the public health.

2002-07-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

You know, I thought all the 1984 stuff you've been hearing lately was a bit overwrought. Then I read this:

"Congress has got to choose whether or not we're going to continue to reform," Bush said. He spoke in a high school gymnasium in front of a backdrop which allowed the words "work" and "opportunity" to repeat behind him in television clips.

2002-07-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

Should Democrats really get themselves involved in the seamy business of exploiting scandals?

I know that it's really easy for reasonable political inquiries (Whitewater, way, way back; like maybe the first month, was perfectly justifiable) to take on a life of their own and become an all-destroying cancer on politics. Maybe Democrats should refuse to play the game on the principle of being slimy, even though they have Bush dead to rights on Harken - it's a perfect example to point out that the administration's interests run counter to those of the vast majority of the country.

Then again, that's a recipe for losing, over and over and over, as the right manages to twist themselves into whatever necessary ideological contortions to be shockingly offended by whatever the hell a powerful Democrat may or may not have did or created the appearance of impropriety in doing. They'll titter behind their hands at the high-minded Democrats refusing to return the sucker punches.

Clinton beat Bush because he was willing to play by Atwater's rules: attack, attack, attack. I think Democrats by and large tend to pick much more intellectually defensible positions when it comes to slime politics and scandal - look at Clinton's '92 campaign. I don't recall defamation and insults from Clinton; just repeating as effectively as possible how bad Bush's economic policies were for the country.

Clinton did all sorts of mean things to Bush, but they were on the issues. By contrast, Bush spent most of the campaign repeating that Clinton was a draft-dodging, pot-smoking, moral relativist who renounced his US citizenship on a college-era trip to the USRR. He had the whore of Babylon for a wife, favored kindergarten indoctrination of children into homosexuality, and.....horror of horrors.....cheated on his wife. He's Slick Willie, the no-good, black-loving literal incarnation of the dark side of Elvis Presley, with the transferred power of black sexuality to lure your daughters into miscegenation and lesbianism. He has slicked-back hair, won't shut up about Woodstock, and is going to confiscate your property and ship it to inner city parasites.

Sure, the Democrats occasionally do the same thing: crude race baiting and ludicrous Nazi comparisons come to mind. I think they're an order of magnitude less common, though, and they aren't used as the mainstream approach to forwarding your political agenda. If you don't believe me, look at any given day over on the National Review's website, or search for that memo Gingrich handed out in the early 1990s which directed candidates in the use of pejorative terms to describe Democrats and their policies.

Republicans intentionally try to drive down voter turnout in elections. They opposed the moter voter bill because it would make the registration of Democrats easier. The GOP party brass sent their congressional staff down to Florida to stage a protest that shimmied right up to the edge of political violence (pounding on windows, encircling counters), in hopes of forcing the vote recounters to shut down their operation; Paul Gigot of the WSJ praised this craven bit of undemocratic action as a "bourgeoisie riot." David Stockman, Reagan's OMB director, stated in an interview in Reagan's first term that the reason the administration was running massive deficits was to starve government and force unpopular cuts: rather than convince the public why it should eliminate any federal programs, they planned to force the government into fiscal crisis and use it as an backdoor to shove unpopular spending cuts down the public's throat. In 1994, Gingrich and company attempted the process all over again with a government shutdown.

In just about every way I can think of, the GOP exhibits an overriding contempt for democracy, thinking the public too clueless and in thrall to the conspiracy of corporate-owned centrist ("liberal!") media to understand the obvious superiority of their positions. They need to be defeated at the polls, and I honestly don't care anymore how it's done. After reading David Brock's confessional, and then seeing him subsequently smeared as "having been committed to a mental ward" with unsourced comments and sneering hackwork discreditation by Jonah Goldberg, Matt Drudge, and the rest of the echo-chamber conservative press, I'm done playing nice.

It's time for the Democrats to do all they can, legally (no Arkansas Projects), to get conservatives the hell out of power.

Edit: Doh! It's David, not John Stockman, and Paul Gigot, not John Fund. How embarrassing.

2002-06-26T16:27:00.000-07:00

What on earth is up with the ridiculous reaction to the 9th circuit decision invalidating the 1954 addition of the phrase "under God" to the pledge of allegiance? It's transparently a violation of the establishment clause, and I've never been able to figure out why it held out as long as it did.

The suggested remedy of those outraged, a constitutional amendment, would look just great in there. Ok, right here we have equality before the law; here's free speech; there's some stuff about civil rights; oh, and here's school prayer. Gah.

2002-06-26T14:28:00.000-07:00

Dana Milbank got some stuff about the trifecta sideshow into an unrelated article on Karl Rove. Weirdly, the administration points to the January 7th primary debate in New Hampshire (discredited two posts down) and the January 10th debate in Michigan as examples of Bush discussing it.

Here's a transcript of the January 10th debate; a video of it is also available, if you click "next records" until 2/10/2000. It's not as good as funny New Hampshire debate, where Bush actually said he'll raise taxes in a recession; it just doesn't mention anything related to recessions, wartime, or deficits at all. It does contain one of the better Bushisms, though:

BUSH: "I want to knock down the toll booth to the middle-class."

I'm still looking for an example other than the 9/22/2000 interview with Paula Zahn. I read through the transcript of that one again, and I noticed that he only talks about deficits in an offhanded manner related to tax cuts. Does anyone really think this remotely resembles what he's saying now?

BUSH: Don't be nervous. I know what I'm doing. And when I show up in Washington with the will of the people behind me and say, “I've campaigned on this ever since I got started. This is what the people want,” you'll be amazed at how they vote. And so what if they're nervous? I'm not. I'm doing the right thing, and I understand Washington. People will cut and run from you in a minute in Washington. If the polls look a little soft, people—“See you later, George W.”

ZAHN: Is that where they are now, some of these Republicans are saying...

BUSH: I would say...

ZAHN: They're not calling it an irresponsible tax cut, but they're certainly not supporting the size of the tax cut.

BUSH: I don't think so. I think most Republicans are supporting it. And there may be a few nervous voices, but most people are supporting it. For example, a lot of the Republicans voted to get rid of the death tax, and that's a part of my plan. A lot of the Republicans voted to do something on the marriage penalty, and that's a part of my plan. I think when they—I think, absolutely, when I win, they'll be solid behind me. What they need is a leader up there to help them have some

BUSH: Well, first, I don't anticipate the economy turning south. As a matter of fact, that's one of the reasons people ought to elect me, is to—is because I got a plan to keep the economy from turning south.

Secondly, if the economy turns south, that's a reason to accelerate the tax cut. See, I come from the school of thought that during a recession, it's important to give people more money back faster. Now, that may cause us to run a short-term deficit, but the fundamental question is: How do you cause the economy to grow?

Al Gore has said at one time that if the economy turns south, he would raise taxes, which would accelerate and deepen a recession, and that would be the absolute wrong public policy.

ZAHN: What would be the first major decision you'd make, though? I know you say that, God willing, if you're elected president, the economy won't go bad. But if it did, what would be the first major move you'd make?

BUSH: Well, first you'd talk to, you know, the Federal Reserve and the banking system to make sure everybody understood that there was a plan to come out of recession. Secondly, go in front of the Congress and ask for an accelerated tax cut because a tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness.

2002-06-19T23:58:00.000-07:00

Whoops! Looks like someone's found a case of Bush actually stating the recession in wartime thing.

However, this does kind of contradict his "raise taxes in wartime to pay for it" position in the debate linked below.

2002-06-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

It's pretty damn likely that George W. Bush never said he'd only run deficits for "wartime, national emergency, or a recession" during the presidential campaign. That he told the public something like it is constantly referred to in his laugh-getting, somewhat-disturbing trifecta phrase. The lack of evidence that he ever said anything remotely resembling this is finally starting to filter out to the mainstream media.

Ben Domenech says he's found an example of Bush detailing this back during the GOP primaries. What was actually said during the debate, though, is embarrassing to Bush in all sorts of ways, and doesn't support Ben's claim of a trifecta smoking gun.

Here's a transcript of the debate Ben refers to in his post; I managed to dig it up from the two Boston Globe stories he cites in his comments section. Since transcripts or quotes can be inaccurate, as we'll shortly see, a video of the debate is also available here (click through the records to January 6th, 2000.) Yes, I know it's annoying, but there's no apparently no static links.

The highlight is around 2:20 into the video:

BUSH: There is a mindset in Washington that says if we have extra money let's create government -- more federal government. That's not the way I think. I think what we ought to do is lockbox all the payroll taxes for Social Security. I think we ought to make -- meet the basic needs of the federal government.

Wasn't that fun? More importantly:

Q. Governor, so we're clear, even in the case of a prolonged world war with the United States involved, you would not consider raising taxes?
BUSH. If you're talking about the extremest of extreme hypotheticals, which sometimes you have the tendency to do --
Q. Which sometimes happen.
BUSH. Well, let me put it to you this way: When I'm the president, we're not going to obfuscate when it comes to foreign policy. If I ever commit troops, I'm going to do so with one thing in mind. And that's to win, Tim. And that's to win in a fashion that not only achieves victory, but gets us out of the theater in quick order.
Q. And spend what it takes.
BUSH. Absolutely. If we go to war.
Q. And raise the revenues to spend.
BUSH. See what happens.

The line from Russert about deficits that Domenech quotes is not in the video; see it yourself, the exchange occurs about 3 minutes in. Russert doesn't say:

And spend what it takes? Even if it means deficits?

Russert actually says:

And spend what it takes?

That Bush says he'll raise taxes in wartime (or weasels out of actually saying it in Clinton-speak, while leaving the impression that he'll do so) is a wonderfully ironic bonus.