The Limits of Common Sense

Another thing that gets me frustrated is the endless tropes about "common sense" when it comes to governance.  It sounds good, which is why the phrase gets used so much.  But what it fails to acknowledge is that systems are complicated, big systems are even more complicated, and the US federal government is a really big system. 

So common sense that works around the kitchen table in your family just has no parallel in the federal government.  In fact it doesn't have that much parallel in lots of areas.

For example, when I go to the hospital for a medical operation, I don't want the doctor referring first and foremost to common sense when he starts cutting me up- I want him using the latest scientific research and drawing from his vast experience performing similar operations.  I don't care whether he has enough common sense to fix a lawnmower or carve a turkey.  I'm looking for a savant who knows about his specialty.

To take another example, when considering Global Climate Change, referring to common sense arguments has no meaning.  We had a snowy winter here in New England, so common sense tells me that the planet couldn't be getting warmer.  Except climatologists who are studying this stuff for a living overwhelmingly agree that the planet is indeed getting warmer, and that it's caused by humans.  I think I'm going with the geeks here.

And finally, comparing the US government budget to my own family budget is comparing apples to cow dung.  The goals are completely different- we should be paying attention to what professional economists and policy wonks say about deficits.  And we should look at history- not the history of my family's finances, because that's not relevant- the history of our macroeconomy when governments have run deficits, the history of tax rates and how growth is tied into taxes.  When I'm arguing with conservatives about this I start with this kind of stuff, and they inevitably reply with "common sense" arguments about how government deficits crowd out private borrowing and how the burden of debt repayment will be unmanageable- but they've got no data!  Because the data's all pretty clear when you look at history instead of analogies to your family budget.

I had an old boss who once said "common sense isn't so common".  True that.  But in political discourse we could use even less of it.

Budget Plans

I'm tyring to formulate different ways to think about the Ryan budget plan.  As I've said, I think it's silly to call it "courageous", but at the same time it is a stark example of what Republicans are trying to do.  What the plan should be is suicidal for conservatives, as it lays bare what they actually want to do.  The best thing to say about it is that they're no longer focused on lying about Democratic plans, but rather are telling Americans straight out what they stand for: the end of the Welfare State.

Not just "don't grow it any more".  Not "cut it back to 1970s levels".  They want to undo Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program of the 1960s, which created Medicare and Medicaid.  Basically the Right has decided that the answer to the problem of rising health care costs is to get government out of it even for the elderly and leave Seniors on their own to pay for insurance.  Of course, that's the way it was before 1965 so I guess it makes some sense.  I wasn't alive back then, but my understanding is that seniors had a pretty tough time with medical bills- and that was before many years of medical inflation outpacing GDP growth.

So this should be great for Democrats.  Polls show that Medicare is very popular.  Republicans used fear of Obamacare destroying Medicare to help them win the House in 2010, but now they've put out a plan that actually says it will destroy Medicare.  Even the Democratic party ought to be able to hit this batting practice fastball in 2012.

I'm in my 40s.  Under the Ryan plan, when I hit 65 (or a little later- they might push back the age too), I'll get a voucher to purchase health insurance, and the voucher won't be enough so I'll have to pay a lot out of pocket to round out my insurance.  That doesn't sound too reassuring.  And where are the savings going?  Tax cuts for the wealthy.  It's the Scrooge McDuck plan.

In many recent cases I've marveled at how Americans can be continuously fooled by Republican lies.  But this time they're saying what they want, unvarnished.  They're not even trying to fool people.  I think it's a Republican tactical error.  Well, hoping anyway....

Civility's Double Standard

I was watching Morning Joe this morning and the gang was talking about the president's speech on the budget yesterday.  Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, was complaining that Obama had broken protocol somehow by saying terrible things about the Ryan budget plan after inviting Ryan to sit in the front row of the speech.  He said something like "I can't understand why he would say things like that right in front of congressman Ryan". 

This brought out a "are you F---ing kidding me?????!!!!" yelp from me (apologies to the family for waking everyone up).  After listening to and reading the things Republicans have been saying about Obama for the past 3 years, calling him a communist and a terrorist sympathizer among other things, you'd think they could handle a principled argument against their budget plan.  He didn't call anyone any names- just stated that Ryan's plan calls for an America that "isn't the America I know". 

It's like Fidel Castro complaining about human rights in Canada.

UPDATE: video here.  Listen at the 13:00 mark, near the end.

Budget Deals and Hostage Taking

I'm sure you've all been waiting for my thoughts on the deal to avoid a government shutdown made last Friday.  Here they are:

• Talking about who "won" isn't really very interesting to me.  It can be spun lots of ways.  But I sure don't feel great about it- feels viscerally like the Republicans won.
• Obama gave away the store at the very start of the negotiations, accepting the Republican narrative of a government that needs to "tighten its belt" and essentially agreeing to Boehner's original offer of a $30 billion spending cut.  Of course that just led to the Republicans moving the goalposts further back.  It would be nice to see a tough negotiating position taken by the administration for once.  Which leads me to....
• It's clear at this point that Obama just isn't that liberal.  We can only conclude that the reason he doesn't start negotiating from a liberal position is because he's not inclined toward liberal policies.  At least that's what I hope is the case, because if he really is a closet liberal, then he's an idiot.
• The Next Big Thing is going to be the Debt Ceiling vote.  Now at this point a majority of congress will have voted for the 2011 budget, which has a deficit and will therefore by definition lead to the need to raise the Debt Ceiling.  Republicans have indicated that they want more spending concessions in order to vote to increase it.  Democrats just have to stand firm on this one.  Boehner has already gone on record saying that the Debt Ceiling has to be raised because the government has to pay its bills.  If the GOP threatens to refuse, the Democrats need to call the bluff and dare them to do it.  There's simply no reason to get anything in return for doing the obvious responsible thing.  The Tea Party types can vote no as a protest vote (as many liberals, including Obama, did during the Bush administration), but the Republican leadership has to be forced to do it for nothing.  If the Democrats can't pull this off, they'll have risen to a new level of spinelessness- it will be sickening.  I wish I were confident this will turn out right.
• Then we get to the Ryan budget plan, which has been annihilated by messrs Krugman, Yglesias, Klein, and many others.  I recommend scrolling through any of these bloggers' writings for last week, after which it's tough to take the plan seriously.  But one thing that drives many of us on the Left crazy is the Common Wisdom of the pundit class (Krugman calls them the "Very Serious People") that the budget plan is somehow "courageous".  It takes courage to buck the orthodoxy of the party you're in.  Ryan's courage consists of destroying Medicare and Medicaid in order to fund more tax cuts for the rich.  Now it would be courageous if a conservative Republican pointed out that the budget can not really be balanced without a repeal of the Bush tax cuts.  It would be courageous if a liberal Democrat proposed cuts in social programs on which his constituents relied.  It would be courageous for a legislator from Iowa or Nebraska to speak out against farm subsidies that benefit his state but which are a waste of money.  None of that's too likely I guess, but that's courage.

Politics and Youth Sports Part 3

Following up on my other two youth sports posts, I complete the trilogy with a discussion of the formation of travel or all-star teams and the constant cries of "politics".

There's something heartbreaking about the transition from recreational sports in which everyone plays the same amount and the focus is on fun, to tryout-based travel and all-star teams.  Parents usually don't feel their kids are old enough to have to deal with the disappointment of being cut from a team when they're as young as eight years old.  In fact, on some level I agree.  It seems wrong to me to be telling someone that young that he isn't good enough to play the sport he loves with his friends. [Note: I'll be using the masculine pronoun in this post for readability, but this certainly applies to girls too].  But unfortunately this is the world we live in- competition starts early, every town is doing it, and if we don't then our players won't be competitive as they get older.

So the big challenge for the youth sports administrator is to set up an objective process for choosing the travel teams.  This sounds easy, but in fact it's tremendously difficult.  Yes, we can bring in independent evaluators who don't know the kids, and they can score what they see in a vacuum, but that doesn't work for many sports.  In soccer in my town the evaluators don't look at goaltending, and may miss out on the best goalie in the group.  And that's a sport in which skills can be evaluated but goal-scoring instincts really can't in a one or two day tryout.  In baseball, evaluators can look at a swing's mechanics, but that's not the same as the ability to hit live pitching.  In basketball it's easier, as one can watch the players scrimmage against each other, but of course they're just running up and down and it's impossible to see how well the player can grasp an offensive set.

So in addition to evaluation scores it's necessary to take into account how an athlete performed during the previous season.  For that coaches need to be polled, and since coaches are human beings they have biases.

A crucial piece of this is that there is generally an incumbent head coach, and in many organizations that person just picks the team.  This is just plain wrong- having one person in a large organization make all the decisions is a recipe for bias and dissension.  Among other things, it puts the coach in a difficult situation when he has to, for example, cut his child's best friend or his best friend's child from the team.  Very often the coach will just take the player, and when everyone can see the dynamic it puts the whole process in a bad light.

But the coach's input is important and needs to be taken into account.  The way to do this is to choose the team by committee, with the coach being a part but not the leader.  Then it requires a strong leader of the process who is disinterested and can head off any obvious bias.  One organization I was involved with had such a leader, who I saw on a few occasions tell coaches "nope, you have to take that player, he scored too high to leave off the team".

So what about when the teams are made with a great process and the best of intentions, but there are still disgruntled parents complaining about how Politics kept their son off the top team?  Well, if there's one thing I've learned well in my years in youth sports, it's that most parents are completely delusional about their children's athletic ability.  Lots of people blame Politics when the fact is that their kid just wasn't quite good enough to be on the team.  There's no satisfying this type of parent short of putting the kid on the team... and then they're generally the parents who complain about playing time!  The most unfortunate thing about this dynamic is that the parents then give the child the wrong message about the result: not "you tried your best, but if you want to make this team in the future you'll have to work hard to improve your game", but rather "you belong there, and you were robbed".  Never mind that hard work thing!

So in the end, the youth sports politician is always left with some disgruntled families, no matter what he does.  This sad fact has to be accepted.  The nature of the process is that there is always a temptation to take the easy way out and put the child of the squeaky wheel or the child of the committed volunteer on the team.  At the end of the day, he has to make the right decision, and be able to sleep well at night even if former friends now think he's a jerk.

Goldstone Changes His Tune

I find this completely shocking, and I mean that in a good way.  Judge Goldstone, who wrote a UN report that was very critical of Israel in the aftermath of the Gaza action, accusing Israel of war crimes, has now written an op-ed in the Washington Post that at least partially absolves Israel of many of the most serious charges, and takes Hamas to task for its targeting of civilians in Israel.  It reads the way I would have liked the Goldstone Report to read in the first place. 

He blames Israel's lack of cooperation for his initial conclusions.  I don't really buy it.  Still, I give the guy credit for coming around in a very public way and correcting the record.  Good for him.

A Federal Budget Parable

A family sits around the table.


Dad: Well kids, we're hemorrhaging money, so we're going to have to cut back.

Jonny: But Dad, when you gave up your full time job and went down to part time, you told us we wouldn't have to sacrifice anything!

Dad: Well, Jonny, I didn't realize your mother's spending would be so irresponsible.

Mom: Excuse me? I haven't changed my spending habits at all. The difference is that you spent $50,000 on 12 guns and full body armor for all of us!

Dad: I needed that weaponry to protect us from the neighbors. They're Arabs, after all.

Jonny: But you bought it on credit right after you quit the full time job

Dad: Never mind that- the money's spent. The point is that we have to cut back. Jonny we're not signing you up for baseball this year- we can't afford it.

Jonny: AAAWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!

Mom: What if you just got your full time job back?

Dad: Cutting out baseball won't be enough. We have to cut down on our medical bills too.

Mom: OK, how about signing up for this new medical insurance plan that cuts bills by determining what care is cost-effective?

Dad: That'll never work! And it's rationing care. No, instead of that we're just going to stop going to the dentist.

Mom: Isn't that rationing too?

Dad: Stop confusing me with facts, woman! Medical care costs us more because we signed up for that prescription drug plan.

Mom: Yes, that plan is really good. But when you signed us up you didn't make any plans to pay for it. And it pays drug companies double the going price so it's more expensive than it should be.

Dad: Oh, you and your facts again! The point is that we have to cut spending. We're going to cancel that plan to fix the roof of the house. We can just keep changing the buckets that catch the leaking water.

Mom: Honey, we were making it just fine when you were working full time. Why don't you just go back to work? Then we can solve more than half of our budget problem.

Dad: You're not listening to me. It's like you want to go bankrupt!

Mom: But I have a solution! It worked 10 years ago, whereas your plan to make ends meet with only a part time job has never worked. But you won't even address my idea.

Dad: It's a good thing it's going to be my turn to run family finances after November 2012.

Jonny: But Dad, you were running our finances for 8 years.  When you started, you were putting money into my college fund and had enough for us to live on. Then you put all our money into your friend's bank and didn't make sure it was an FDIC-insured one, and we lost most of it. Mom has only had a couple of years to clean up the mess you left.

Dad: Yeah, but this time it'll be different.

Quick Hit on Libya

The more I read about Libya, the more I get the creeping suspicion that the rebels there are a rag-tag group with little chance of winning a civil war against Qadafi.  It seems like the massacre of their strongholds is coming one way or another, unless we intervene with much more force.  Which will in turn lead to a lengthy quagmire.

Never should have gone in.  This is going to be bad.

Misleading Stats from the WSJ

Infuriating article here from Steven Moore at the Wall Street Journal.  For your blog-reading pleasure I've decided to break it down.  Here's the whole thing, with my comments in red:

Stephen Moore: We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers - WSJ.com


If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government. There are fewer people working in manufacturing for many reasons, most of them good. The US manufactures more stuff than it did in 1960, but we're so much more productive and automated that it requires fewer people to do it. And of course lots of manufacturing has moved overseas, because poor countries can pay people pennies an hour, with which we can never compete (thank God)
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills? So this number presumably includes soldiers, police, firemen, teachers, postal workers, child protective service workers, etc etc. And it singles out town and city workers? Our voices are most easily heard in localities- I don't think my town is loaded with extra employees- is yours?

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York's. This is completely meaningless- the US is not a manufacturing country any more, most jobs are now in the services and high tech sectors. It's like complaining about how few jobs there are in the newspaper business now- the economy is changing, which doesn't imply that anything bad is happening at all. Jobs have moved from manufacturing to other things, because we're a rich country.
Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker. Again, absolutely pointless statistics. What would be valuable to know is the growth of government workers per citizen compared to the past, or government workers compared to GDP. Instead he's comparing apples to chairs.
Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. Because farm technology has reduced the number of farmers needed to farm the same amount of land West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners Same thing. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That's less than half of the state's 1.48 million government employees. Oh, that's what we need! More workers on Wall Street!


Don't expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. I'd like a source here- I doubt this is true- do you know college students who dream about being bureaucrats? Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. First of all I dispute that grads are dying to work in government. But of course they need jobs somewhere. In 2009 nobody in the private sector was hiring, and government through stimulus was filling the gap. It was government or nothing. When 23-year-olds aren't willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles. No, we end up with people taking jobs where they can get them. When the private sector generates jobs, they won't have any trouble finding workers thanks to the huge number of people not working right now. What a ridiculous statement- do you know anyone who wants to work in the DMV?  College grads work where they have to to make ends meet.
The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950. EXACTLY! That's why all those statistics you just went through are the way they are!
Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.
But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn't pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores. Give me a break! How can you teach kids in a classroom setting in a way that is more productive? You can use technology to increase class sizes I guess, with interactive systems. Anyone think that would be better? Manufacturing is totally different from education, or policing.
The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. I don't believe it's true that mass transit spending is higher now than it used to be. No citation here I notice. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we've gotten.
Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services. Well, yeah.  Unions allow workers to bind together to get better wages or working conditions.  Understandably, workers want that.  If they can't unionize then their wages will certainly fall.  Can you blame them? The biggest problem with this is that public employees perform tasks that aren't easily measured. Sure, we could contract out firefighting services, but then we're not sure the fire truck will be there when we need it- what if it's not profitable to keep the local fire station open?

President Obama says we have to retool our economy to "win the future." The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.

But I'm not completely done.  I kept thinking: is it true that government has been growing at some crazy pace?  What about this graph:
 
The graph is inverse of what I want- it shows citizens per government employee, not government employees per citizen, so lower means more government workers.  It looks like state government has grown while federal government has shrunk, for a net wash in rough terms.  I guess government isn't really growing in the US after all.  Of course the agenda of the Right isn't too stop growth, it's to cut to unprecedented levels.