The Budget Deal and the Triumph of Conservatives

The Ryan-Murray budget deal is generally a positive development for America, I guess.  It apparently means that we won't have endless budget showdowns and brinksmanship for a while.  No threats to shut down the government.  Hopefully (though I don't think this is part of the deal) no more Debt Ceiling hostage taking.

I find a few things notable about the deal:

• For the first time, Republicans have accepted some increased revenues as part of a deal.  This really is shocking, as it seemed so impossible.  The fig leaf they used is that they raised "fees" on air carriers, not "taxes".  Of course, that's a distinction without a difference. Of course, I'd like to see a broad-based tax hike instead, but this is still something.  I was sure that Democrats had accepted that tax hikes were never going to happen, and were going to start making concessions to Republicans without getting anything in return.  But they got something, even if it wasn't much.
• Make no mistake, though.  Republicans have won. Yes, there's a de facto tiny tax hike.  But this locks in spending at essentially Sequester levels going forward.  Federal government spending will continue its downward trajectory, just as conservatives have demanded.  It's now clear that Democrats miscalculated horribly in 2011 when they figured that making defense cuts a prominent part of the Sequester would give Republicans a reason to come to the table.  It turns out that there aren't as many Republicans hawks as we thought there were.
• On the bright side, though, we actually did get a reduction in Pentagon spending, at least in comparison to what it would have been.  That seemed like a far-left pipe dream a few years ago, and it's a really good thing.

Given that we now have a Republican victory and an essentially austerian policy, let's keep that in mind when we see the results of the economy in the next few years.  If the economy takes off soon, conservatives get a lot of credit.  If it stays in the doldrums, they get a lot of the blame.

Explaining ObamaCare

I wrote the below explanation in an email correspondence, and figured taht after spending so much time on it, I ought to share it with all of my fans.  I was asked to explain the ACA to a conservative who keeps complaining about pieces of the law, and also complains that the bill is too long and complicated.

So here goes:

1. We want to make it possible for anyone to get health insurance, even those with pre-existing conditions who have been shut out by insurance companies.
2. Americans don't want the government to take control of the system any more than they already have- they want private insurance companies to continue to operate.
3. So the law tells insurance companies that they must take people in their plans whom they previously rejected or charged crazy rates to- cancer survivors, old people, diabetics, etc.  They also have to charge the same to everyone, so they couldn't say: "Sure, we're offering you insurance, but it will cost you $10,000 a month".
4. But now that we're forcing insurance companies to take everyone, their costs are going to go up- after all, the reason they rejected people with pre-existing conditions is because they're expensive to insure.  So we need to make sure that young healthy people sign up too, so the risk pool is diversified and ins cos are still viable.  That's why we have the individual mandate, so young healthy people must sign up.
5. Because anyone can get insurance now, we can't allow people to not get health insurance, and then sign up as soon as they get sick- they'd be freeloading on the system- another reason for the mandate.
6. To make it possible for people to shop for plans intelligently, the government standardized the plans so people will know what they're buying.  That way a company can't get people with a really low premium for a policy that doesn't cover hardly anything, as a lot of them used to do a lot.
7. Also, if you allow a plan that covers practically nothing, more of the young healthy people would sign up for it because it would be cheap, and that would screw up the risk pools for the rest of us.
8. So if you force everyone to sign up for health insurance (or get fined), then you have to subsidize poor and lower middle class people- we obviously can't tell people they must get insurance, if they can't afford it. So that's why the law includes subsidies for middle class, and expanded Medicaid for the poor.
9. Some employers don't provide health insurance to their employees, leaving those people stuck.  The law mandates that employers provide it to FT employees.  That will keep some people off the exchanges.
10. So the costs: many people are still paying for their own insurance, but now it's more affordable because of the reasons above.  But the expanded Medicaid and subsidies are expensive.  Those were paid for with various taxes, like the one on medical devices and on "cadillac plans".  The bean counters did the Math, and calculated how much revenue they'd need for the plan, and set up the taxes to cover it.

So as you can see, it's complicated!  But each piece flows from the previous one.  It won't work without the individual mandate.  It won't work without employers covering their employees.  It won't without subsidies and Medicaid expansion.  It won't work if insurance companies can offer bare bones plans to siphon off the young healthies.

 

As I've said a bunch of times, if you want a simple plan, we could do that.  Make Medicare available to everyone.  You'd have to have way more taxes of course, but we'd be getting something back for it.  That's what Canada does.  Or you could have government do even more, paying the doctors and hospitals directly- socialized medicine.  That's what England does.

 

But if you want to keep the current system of insurance companies and employer-based health insurance, and you want to make insurance available to those who currently can't get it, then you have to get complicated. 

All conservative alternatives might improve some things around the edges, but they wouldn't solve the BIG problem, which is how people with pre-existing conditions would get insurance through the individual market, and how poorer people (including the working poor) would get insurance if their employer doesn't offer it.  I guess Republicans think this isn't a very important problem- I think it obviously is.

Killin' Time

So I was planning to surf the intertubes while I had some time between jobs today, but I find that the internet is down here and I have time to kill.  So I’ll write a totally unresearched and de-linked blog post about what’s been on my mind and post it when I get access to the web.  Aren’t you lucky?

The ObamaCare Crap Show

 It’s really disappointing and infuriating to see the ACA website start off as such a disaster.  Now I’m not a techie and I have no experience with government procurement, so I don’t really understand why this was rolled out so poorly.  Was it due to crazy government procurement rules that make it really hard to do such a project?  Was it terrible decisions by managers or by Kathleen Sibelius?  Graft and corruption?  Just a really complex program that would inevitably have lots of bugs?

I don’t know, but the meta-message is bad.  Democrats have been trying to say that government can be a force for good in our lives, and specifically that it can do health insurance better than the private sector can.  Republicans have been saying that everything the government touches turns immediately into a crap sandwich.  Now I think conservatives have set up a Straw Man with respect to ObamaCare, accusing liberals of promising that it would improve prices for everyone and lead to a golden age of medicine.  Obviously that’s setting the bar pretty high, and liberals haven’t made that claim.  We’re just saying this will be a significant improvement over the status quo.  That should be an easy target to hit, since the ACA basically leaves the health insurance and health care delivery systems intact, while funding insurance for more people and solving the problem of pre-existing conditions in the private market.  My health insurance isn’t going to change; ditto for nearly everyone I know.

So the only way this could go wrong is if the new law doesn’t work… and that seems to be happening! A technical problem with a website doesn’t mean that the whole law was folly, but it sure fits the Republican narrative- that government can’t do anything right.  And hey, it’s true that the private sector is way better at things like launching websites, and I didn’t expect the feds to do as well as Google.  But we have a functioning Medicare system and a functioning Social Security system and a functioning Department of Defense, so I know we can do this.  The administration needs to prove it; I hope people are panicking and getting on the move.

That said, I’m still confident that they’ll do so and the ACA will be fine.  By the next election, Democrats will be able to point to a functioning system and say “why all the hysteria from our opponents last year?  What’s the big deal?”

 

OK Now Can We Put to Rest the “Both Sides are Extreme” Headlines?

I think I’m tapped out on the government shutdown and debt ceiling fight story, which has been beaten to death by every commentator out there.  As you might expect, I side with the Democrats, and am happy to see Republicans getting blamed, as they should.

So I wonder how long it will take for the mainstream media to start writing stories again about how both sides are to blame for the gridlock.  I’ve been arguing for years that this false equivalency is just wrong.  Republicans have moved wwwaaaaayyyyyy over to the right, and really plunged off the cliff this month with their extreme positions and tactics.  But Democrats have NOT done the same, and really shouldn’t be accused of doing so.  Elizabeth Warren, in Ted Kennedy’s old seat, is defining the left end of the Democratic caucus, and she doesn’t have much company over there.  Michael Moore is irrelevant.  Liberals wanted a Single Payer health care bill, and it was never even considered.  Taxes remain historically low, and Democrats are not talking seriously about changing that.  “Card Check” pro-union legislation is a non-starter even in the Democratic party.  Barack Obama is to the right of Lyndon Johnson on every economic issue.  Barack Obama is to the right of Richard Nixon on many issues!  Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan would be considered a liberal by today’s party (remember he supported tax hikes in his second term).

So please don’t try to tell me that “both sides” are getting too extreme.  One side is getting extreme. I want to see them make an honest argument about that, something like this:

Yes, it’s true, we have moved the position of the Republican party to a more pure position than it used to be. We know taxes are historically low now, but we want to roll them back to an even lower level, lower than they’ve been in 100 years.  We want government to stop funding Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, or to scale them way back, because we believe economic freedom is more important than economic security.

Et cetera.  Instead we hear them talk about how the country is falling apart because of a massively expanding government and welfare state, when in fact the government has contracted in recent years.

The Budget Issue is Just So Simple

Amidst all the sound and fury in Washington, and talk of a bargain between Republicans and Democrats on the budget, I think we keep losing sight of the fact that there is a fundamental issue that's just not going to be solved through negotiations:

1. Democrats will not agree to any more spending cuts unless they're paired with revenue increases.
2. Republicans will not agree to any revenue increase, under any circumstances

So we can criticize the politicians for "kicking the can down the road", but really, what else can they do?  There's no changing these fundamental positions.  There's just no deal to be had!

These are honest positions held by the parties, not cynical lies.  The only way the budget is going to get back on a normal footing is if one side wins and election handily and puts in their program.  This already happened in California- the state was stuck in budget gridlock and seemingly endless disaster, until Democrats took full control recently, put in their plan of spending cuts and tax increases, and balanced the budget. 

I know we all like the fantasy that divided government and "reaching across the aisle" is good for the country.  And maybe it used to be.  But not any more.

Syria

I'm having a busy Summer, so blogging has been nonexistent (sorry fans!), but the lurking Syria debacle, along with a slow day, has lured me back for a post.

This is outrageous.  President Obama drew a line in the sand, saying that use of chemical weapons was a "red line" that could not be crossed without consequences.  But it appears he didn't think about what consequences the US was prepared to mete out, and now Syrian President Assad has crossed the line and is thumbing his nose at the US.

Oops.  It turns out that a US bombing campaign would have no effect on the regime, which is already locked in a civil war.  And ground troops are out of the question, as very few Americans are willing to risk US lives for Syria.  We also saw how ground troops worked out in Iraq next door (wow, it turns out that Arabs hate us when we come in and occupy our country!)  Bombing hasn't worked out very well in the Muslim world (huh! Seems like Afghans don't like it when we bomb villages and kill women and children along with a few terrorists in the shack next door!)

But the President drew a line in the sand!  We have to do something or we'll appear weak! Think this through: in order to save face after an ill-advised statement months ago, the US should go on a bombing campaign, which will necessarily kill and maim hundreds or thousands of non-combatants, all for the ostensible purpose of protecting the Syrian people from their own government.  Meanwhile, that same Syrian government will barely feel the affects, and continue on their own killing spree.  Our "humanitarian mission" will very likely lead to more innocent Syrian deaths than doing nothing would.

But what about the flaunting of international law? Well, it turns out that Syria never signed the treaty banning chemical weapons, so technically they haven't broken any treaty obligation.  And few have pointed out that enormous irony that is the US punishing Syria for breaking international law by... breaking international law itself! There is simply no justification for attacking a country that has made no threats against us, when all the relevant world bodies (UN, NATO) have refused to approve any action.

The President is in a tough spot.  He promised to do something about Syria, and now it turns out that there's nothing he can do except make empty gestures.  He is indeed going to look weak.

But that's not a reason to bomb.  You don't save face at the expense of killing hundreds of innocent people.  A president who does that has crossed a very serious ethical line.

Some other thoughts:

• What's the moral difference between chemical weapons and conventional weapons?  Cluster bombs kill just as many people at the target, with shrapnel instead of sarin.  The victims are just as dead.  Yes, we're appalled by chemical weapons, but they're not the same as nukes, which potentially can kill many many more people.  The issue is the targeting of civilians, which Assad was already doing before this attack, and which other tyrants are doing all over the world.
• Asking for congressional approval is a much better solution than just bombing away, and I like forcing the legislative branch to go on record rather than just carp from the sidelines.  But in the end they're probably going to vote in favor of a campaign, and the administration still will bear responsibility for leading us into another mess.

Musings on Economics from a non-Economist

I never studied economics in school, but I guess you could call me an amateur macro-economist now.  Or perhaps a pretend economist.  Anyway, the study of large economies interests me, and I'm particularly struck by the challenge of evaluating a particular government action or policy in light of the fact that so many things are happening at the same time.  How can we say that government stimulus worked in 2008-2009, when at the exact same time the Fed was doing all kinds of stuff, and taxes were being cut, and a new president was being elected, etc etc?

Compounding this, as my friend "N" keeps reminding me in our email correspondence, is the reality of confirmation bias.  It is built into our nature to look for evidence to support our preconceptions, rather than to follow the evidence wherever it leads.  When I'm surfing the net looking for politics articles to read, I am much quicker to click on headlines that confirm something I already believe than on a headline that challenges that belief.  Now I believe some people are more hung up on confirmation bias than others, and as a seeker of Truth it is the duty of all of us to fight against our tendencies in this area.

Anyway, when it comes to macroeconomics during modern times, the questions that are asked are these:

• Does Keynesian stimulus work?
• Do tax cuts make a significant difference in growth?
• When a central bank can't reduce interest rates any more, will "printing money" help the economy or will it cause inflation?

There are lots more of course, but I want to take the first two of these.

Does Stimulus Work?

We had a recent financial crisis and bad recession, which turned out to be worldwide.  In response in the US, the Obama administration pushed through stimulus measures in 2009 to save the economy from a bigger collapse.  Conservatives, who had previously loved stimulus, have grown much more conservative of late, and now pushed hard for Hooverite budget balance in the face of the recession.  As a result, a stimulus package (including spending hikes as well as tax cuts- both of those are stimulus measures) was passed in 2009, but it was smaller than liberal economists calculated was needed.  We then proceeded to get out of the recession in due time, but haven't had the kind of job growth we need to return to previous trends.  In other words, we've had a recovery (so it worked!) but the recovery has been disappoining (so it failed!).  We did stimulus (we tried it and it failed!), but that stimulus was too small to get us back to speed (we never really tried it!).

So how to measure whether stimulus worked? I think what makes the most sense, since the crisis was worldwide, is to look at similar places to ours and compare policy and outcomes.  That makes a good case for stimulus: in Europe they did much less stimulus than we did in the US and their continent-wide problems are much worse than the US right now.  Of course, those problems are really bad in particular countries (Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy), while in Germany things are going much better even though not much stimulus happened.  I think this is still a good case for stimulus though, as looking at Germany in isolation is kind of like looking at Massachusetts in isolation- they're part of a large monetary union, with stronger parts and weaker parts.  But others will point out that Euro area countries set lots of their own policies, and are separate entities much more than US states are, which is certainly true.

So there's still enough doubt about stimulus that sceptics won't be convinced.  BUT there's one thing I think you can say: US-style stimulus did not do any harm.  Interest rates remain low so borrowing is easy.  The stimulus program is over now, so there are not ongoing costs.  There was no double-dip recession.  European countries that stopped stimulus and tried to balance budgets earlier than us (like the UK) are doing much worse.  Maybe we can't prove the positive value of stimlus to a scepic's liking, but we certainly proved that their forecasts of doom from overspending was wrong.

Are high taxes stifling the economy?

I find the Republican fetish for tax cuts almost comical at this point.  It seems like their answer to any question is "tax cuts!".  But look at recent history:

• Taxes were cut way back by Reagan in his first term.  The economy did well, perhaps as a result of this, but the federal deficit ballooned. 
• In his second term and in the term of George HW Bush, taxes were increased (though never to the level they were in the 1970s).  The economy boomed in the 1990s.
• Under Clinton taxes were increased again; the economy boomed and the federal budget was in surplus by 2000.
• Under George W Bush, taxes were cut precipitously.  The economy performed sort-of OK from 2002 to 2007, growing but producing fewer jobs than most recoveries in the modern era. Then a financial crisis completely destroyed what little growth there had been (I blame the financial crisis on banking policy, not on tax rates; but those low taxes obviously didn't do much to push back against the crisis).
• In 2013 taxes were finally increased again, after a five year period of historically low taxes (the Bush tax cuts plus the stimulus tax cuts including social security tax cuts, passed by Obama).  So far in '13, the economy as a whole seems unaffected, continuing its recent growth.  Still growing, but not really fast enough.

Does this prove that higher taxes, particularly on the wealthy, are great for the economy?  No- Federal Reserve policy matters a lot, and I guess regulatory policy matters too.  But what is proved pretty clearly is that tax cuts are not the magic answer to all our economic questions.  Tax cuts probably goose the economy somewhat- but the Bush tax cuts definitely did not bring us the benefits that we were told it would.


So I guess in economics it's easier to prove negatives than positives.

Scandalmania!

I've been as riveted as everyone else by the trifecta of scandals, or perhaps "scandals" faced by the President.  A friend sent me an editorial from the Wall Street Journal that started out like this:

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.

Now it's hard to take an article seriously when it starts off like that.  More serious than Iran-Contra?  More serious than Monica Lewinsky (which I think was stupid, but it DID lead to an impeachment proceeding).  More serious than the US government approving torture of enemy combatants?

Let's just stick with Iran-Contra.  Remember that the Reagan administration blatantly broke the law by providing funding for rebels in Central America.  With full knowledge and leadership from the president.  At the same time, the president was selling arms secretly to the Iranian government, which was also against the law, and which was done with full knowledge of the president and his top advisors.  And there was never even a mention of possible impeachment.

 

So here we have three "scandals".  Let's look at them one at a time:

• Benghazi is a wholly partisan piece of manufactured drivel that makes no sense on even the most basic level.  The conspiracy theorists believe that President Obama and Hillary Clinton tried to cover up the fact that the attack was a terrorist operation, in order to... what? Never explained is why it would be that a terror attack hurts the President politically more than a mob attack.  As Hillary said during her testimony: "What difference does it make?!".  This whole thing blew up last week because of some emails that ABC news first reported seeing, which showed the administration covering up the terror connection in their talking points discussions.  But then it turned out that the emails were never seen by ABC, and in fact the disturbing lines quoted by the reporter were invented by the confidential source, as proven when the actual emails were released.  The source, of course, was a Republican staffer who has yet to be named.  Confusing?  Well, read about it here if you don't believe me.  There is absolutely zero scandal here.
• The IRS story is bad for the IRS, no doubt.  So far all the evidence suggests that low level staffers in the Cincinnati field office made a terrible judgment call.  The Right is darkly suggesting that the President will be shown to have had his fingerprints all over this.  That sounds like something that's pretty hard to hide with this level of scrutiny.  So far there's nothing linking the White House to it.
• The third leg of the stool is the Justice Department's use of extraordinary measures to try to find out who leaked confidential information to the Associated Press, including getting a huge swath of their phone records.  This is outrageous.  It's being done by a cabinet agency, run by a close friend of the President.  And it appears to be perfectly legal.  It shouldn't be legal... but it is.  Obama's record on civil liberties isn't very good, and this is a great example.  Gleen Greenwald and others have been killing the President for five years on things like this, and he continues to do so.  My favorite point here is made by Kirsten Powers at the Daily Beast: Republicans have been hammering the President up to now regarding his inability to plug these leaks, and calling for harsher measures.  So this scandal is bad, but it's bad in the way that Republicans should like!

Jon Stewart gets it right: Some people don't have the standing to criticize.

Deficit is Down!

I know blogging has been nonexistent for a while, but life has most definitely gotten in the way. Anyway, I have some time to kill now so I thought I'd expound on something.

The big econmic news lately is that the federal budget deficit is shrinking faster than predicted http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44144 . Apparently, the economic recovery, the 2013 tax hikes, spending cuts from recent years, and of course the Sequester have worked as intended by the deficit hawks, and we could have a balanced budget in a few years if all goes well (which it might not of course). So here we are again with the bizarre good news/ bad news positioning:

• This is great news for the Deficit Scolds! Right? Well, for some reason none of them seem to be thrilled about it. I guess it's because their whole existence requires constant hysteria about our mounting debt so that they can implement their actual agenda, which is cutting down government and the welfare state. They don't want to hear that, actually, we can afford to keep old people from dying of malnutrition and treatable diseases here in the richest country in the history of the world.
• OK, well it's great news for the Obama apologists who have stood firm against austerity in tough times, right? No, not really, because the economy is still in a depressed state, and in fact falling deficits are seen as a bad thing by the Keynesians, since the recovery will be slower due to the lack of demand in the private sector. It's true that liberals supported increased taxes on the wealthy which are a part of the reason for the good budget news, but what we really wanted was for those taxes to go up in a few years, when the economy was humming along again. And everything else that allowed this to happen was stuff we opposed like decreased social spending.
• Well, at least it's good news for the Tea Party right, whose victory in the Sequester fight is one of the big reasons for this outcome. No? My right wingnut correspondent and inveterate commenter on this blog keeps telling me that this is not even close to good news, because we still have a really big national debt we have to start paying down (where was this guy during the Reagan and Bush deficit years? Silent about that, naturally). Of course the real problem for this crowd is that they can't accept that anything good could possibly happen while Obama is at the controls.

Look, most of this is really about the economic recovery, which is slow but steady. I predicted a while ago that whoever was elected president in 2012 was going to get credit for the recovery, which was going to come almost no matter what policies were in place. The austerity policies of 2013 aren't severe enough to derail the recovery, so we're still on target for my prediction to work out. 

Responses to the Boston Marathon Bombing

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook; a criticism of Barney Frank for his response on TV to the Marathon Bombing in which he made the point that a well functioning government is crucial in dealing with tragedies like this.

In this terrible situation, let's be very grateful that we had a well-funded, functioning government. It is very fashionable in America, and has been for some time to criticize government, belittle public employees, talk about their pensions, talk about what people think ... of [their] health care. Here we saw government in two ways perform very well. ... I never was as a member of Congress one of the cheerleaders for less government, lower taxes. No tax cut would have helped us deal with this or will help us recover. This is very expensive.

The responses of conservative commenters were a torrent of nasty put-downs of Frank for politicizing the bombing. But when I clicked over to the video I was struck by the way Frank made his point- he didn't call out specific people, or the Republican party.  He didn't blame anyone for anything- he made what I think is an interesting and important point, that when we talk about how government spending is "out of control" we should think about things like government-funded first responders, who may often be sitting around twiddling thumbs on our dime, but are there when we need them, like on April 15.  Hey, he was nothing like this stuff on twitter.  Or this:

If you’re looking for an example of a politician cloaking his cowardice in principle, look no further than Rep. Steve King (R-IA).
On Tuesday, less than 24 hours after the Boston Marathon bombing that left three dead and more than 150 injured, King gave an interview to National Review Online where he used the attack to justify his opposition to immigration reform.
From the interview:

Representative Steve King of Iowa, a prominent House conservative, says Congress should be cautious about rushing immigration reform, especially after Monday’s bombing in Boston, where three people were killed.
“Some of the speculation that has come out is that yes, it was a foreign national and, speculating here, that it was potentially a person on a student visa,” King says. “If that’s the case, then we need to take a look at the big picture.”
On immigration, King says national security should be the focus now, and any talk about a path to legalization should be put on hold. “We need to be ever vigilant,” he says. “We need to go far deeper into our border crossings. . . .We need to take a look at the visa-waiver program and wonder what we’re doing. If we can’t background check people that are coming from Saudi Arabia, how do we think we are going to background check the 11 to 20 million people that are here from who knows where.”

I guess in a world with the internet and billions of people who feel really strongly about stuff, it will be easy to troll for outrageous comments on every side of an issue related to a terrible event like the Boston bombing.  In the twitter link above the Tea Party blames President Obama for the bombing, pointing out that President Bush kept us safe (I guess 9/11 doesn't count for them).

For the record, I don't think Boston demonstrates much of a lesson that benefits anyone's side in the political wars (if it had been an assault weapons attack, that might have been a different story).

All my condolences to the families of the victims.

Hello Again, Sorry for the Hiatus

Well, I've been a little busy lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about the latest political budget disputes.  I mysteriously can't sleep tonight, so here are my thoughts:

Most striking to me lately is the framing of President Obama's latest budget proposal, in which he puts in writing his offer last year to John Boehner, to cut benefits to Social Security and Medicare, in return for tax increases.  It's the "grand bargain" all the centrist pundits are keen on, and in fact it's not anything new- it seems that the administration has been continually frustrated by the mainstream media's framing of the budget issues, blaming both sides for the budget impasse while the administration proposes compromise after compromise and is rebuffed. 

This has been building as centrist pundits like David Brooks kept criticizing Obama for not reaching out to the GOP, while pushing him to propose exactly what he was already proposing.  Of course the real reason that no Grand Bargain is possible is that Republicans are totally unwilling to consider revenue increases under any circumstances, and thus have nothing to offer in any compromise that's better than the status quo to Democrats and liberals.  The right wing press is completely hysterical about the budget deficit, insisting that our out-of-control debt will destroy Ameerica, but they won't endorse raising taxes one nickel in order to combat it- which makes one wonder how serious a problem it really is in their minds.

But there's something else happening that doesn't seem to be getting noticed through all the carping: the budget deficit is actually going down already.  With the tax increases of 2013, the Sequester, the economic recovery, and previous budget cuts forced by Republicans, the deficit is down 47% in four years.  And that's while the US is among the lowest-taxing countries in the first world.

 

 



That's 2010, and this year's tax increases would change things a little, but not much. 

Now a sane Republican party would be bragging about how their tight-fisted spending has brought the deficit down even while taxes remain really low.  They have every right to brag about it!  Spending is certainly much lower because of the influence of the Tea Party.  But it seems like the Republican party is now temperamentally unable to celebrate victory if they have to share it with Obama or Democrats.  In some ways this is the biggest obstacle of all to productive lawmaking in a divided country- if Obama agrees to it, it's by definition a bad deal for them.

The Causes of Economic Crisis

This week's story is Cyprus- another European periphery country in economic crisis, requiring a bailout from the ECB or someone.  Natually this caused my right wingnut email correspondent to fire off a missive about Cyprus's fiscal profligacy and the Doom that awaits the US if we don't solve our deficit problem.



But why did Cyprus's banking industry implode?  Should we blame it on liberal government spending?

No.

OK, I admit it, I knew nothing about Cyprus.  Now I know next-to-nothing about Cyprus.  But I'm reading up online a little.  And the story isn't complicated- it's nearly the same as the Irish story and the Iceland story, with a few twists.  Banking sectors become incredibly large, investing lots of leveraged money poorly (in this case, I guess they invested in Greek government bonds- OOPS!).  In Cyprus, they had lots of money to invest because they were a banking haven where wealthy Russians could go to avoid taxes. (In Ireland and Iceland, the banks attracted investors from Germany and UK especially).  In all three places, the banks were about to go bust, and so the government had to step in, but the numbers were too massive for such small countries to fund the bailouts, so they were screwed.

But where does government incompetence and overspending come in?  Sorry, wingnuts, it doesn't.  Yes, yes, that story plays in Greece, and it plays to a lesser extent in Italy, but not here.  Not in Spain and Ireland, which were running budget surpluses before 2008.

 

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  For people who have decided that government deficits will be the death of us all, every problem can be explained by deficits if the shoehorn is flexible enough.  But when a country goes in the tank because the banking industry fails, where does the blame actually lie?  With the banking industry!  And with the governments' failure to adequately regulate the industry.  That's the real message.

 

I guess my critics will say I'm just a regulation-guy hammer, so regulation is the answer to everything.  But at least my argument follows a logical progression from problem back to cause.

 

And there's another reason that Cyprus is totally screwed: they don't print their own money, so they can't devalue, they can't increase the money supply, they can't cause inflation to rise.  The European monetary system is controlled by Germany, and is run for the benefit of the German economy and nobody else. 

Macro Economics is Complicated!

Scattergraph- showing the correlation between austerity and
GDP growth- from Krugman's blog

Although my readers who don't share my political philosophy may find this hard to believe, I actually think a lot about how to analyze the economy in a way that's objective and which filters out my confirmation bias.  In one sense this is a futile exercise for anyone who is passionate about politics and has a strong point of view- I'm drawn to arguments that bolster my pre-existing opinions, which is a natural human modus operandi.  But I'm trying.

So one way I try to hold myself intellectually accountable is to make predictions about the future and then see if events bear them out.  I want to try to be ready to change my views if events prove me wrong.

But this game is getting really hard these days, because so much is going on.  We can hang the whole economy on President Obama, and judge "liberal" policies based on how the economy responds to his leadership.  But now we have the Sequester- a clear win for the conservative fiscal hawks.  So I've predicted some economic slowdown because of the Sequester- but from what baseline?  If the economy keeps limping along but not crashing (which is my prediction), do we blame Obama and his liberal policies, or do we blame spending cuts of 2013?  For that matter, do we blame the tax increases that kicked in during January?

 

Now if the economy goes into recession and the bottom really falls out, conservatives will of course blame the president, and liberals will of course blame the austerity policies of the Republicans.  Here I think liberals have a better case- if conservatives are going to crow that they won the latest round of the Budget Wars, which they did, then they really need to own the results.

 

But to be fair, that means that if the economy takes off and has a surprisingly strong period of growth, conservatives get to own that too.  I'll want to crow about Obama's deft handling of things, but that won't really be fair, given that I just said he "lost" the 2013 Budget Battle.

 

So barring some new twist in these wars, I guess I'm saying this: we're testing out austerity budgeting now, in 2013.  Not the severe austerity of the UK or Spain, but relative austerity compared to the policies of 2009-2012.  Keynesian economics says that should mean slowed growth; conservatives say we'll have "expansionary austerity".  Let's see who's right!

You've Gotta Be Kidding Me...

I got this from Kevin Drum today.  A Democratic Senator is mad at the Republicans for continuing to filibuster even after the deal reached early in the year.  Jeff Merkley of Oregon says:

“Senate Republicans have demonstrated that they have absolutely no intention of ending their assault on the ability of the U.S. Senate to function,” Merkley told TPM, saying he had hoped the bipartisan rules change would ease gridlock. “Many of my colleagues are absolutely beside themselves with frustration, and that frustration is rapidly turning to fury.”
 

Now I guess Merkley is one of the Good Guys, who wanted filibuster reform to mean something.  But that any Democratic senator would be surprised that Republicans have continued to filibuster all business, including court nominees, just makes me want to scream.

As I've said before, Republicans are going to immediately change the filibuster rule as soon as they're in control of the Senate.  They're not going to put up with Democrats gumming up their agenda just because it's tradition.  And those oldtimer Democratic senators will howl in fury again; but they'll really have only themselves to blame.  They're just criminally naive.

Obama is a Very Bad Nerd

At President Obama's press conference last week, he said the following:

Now I am outraged that I voted twice for a president who doesn't know the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek.  As everyone knows, the Jedi do a "mind trick"

whereas the "Mind Meld" is done only by Vulcans

I'm just disgusted.

UPDATE: Of course I'm not exactly the first to pick up on this http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/03/obama-jedi-mind-meld/62672/

The Sequester is Implemented- Small Government Conservatives Rejoice

As predicted, no deal has been reached on the Sequester, and it will now go into effect.  This means that discretionary spending, including the military, will be cut very heavily- there will be furloughs, layoffs, contracts cancelled, and government bureaucracies unable to operate at full capacity.

But one way to look at this is a big win for fiscal conservatives, particularly for those who sneer at Keynesian economics and see the path to prosperity paved only with balanced budgets.  Liberal economists universally note that this will be bad for the economy as a whole in the short term, as it is fundamentally anti-stimulative.

So we have the beginnings of a natural experiment here.  If Freshwater Economists are right, then the recovery should continue apace and even accelerate now that government spending is down so much.  And if Saltwater Economists are right, then this will drag down growth.  Of course there are so many factors in economies, and we'll probably end up somewhere in the middle, but maybe not.  Certainly a big boom in the next year with the Sequester in place would have to make fools of the Keynesians. 

Another point here is who gets the credit/blame for the economy now.  I know the Republicans will continue to try to pin continued slow growth solely on Barack Obama, but fiscally they've just gotten what they want- austerity policies including no tax hikes.  The fact that half those cuts were to the military, which most Republicans don't like, is immaterial in terms of economic growth.  If the US is successfully invaded by a foreign country due to our weakened military, we can blame liberals.  But if unemployment ticks north of its current position in the next year, we need to acknowledge that it's because of conservative fiscal policies.

Sequestration and the Centrists

So it's looking like there won't be a deal to avert sequestration by March 1, though this is always subject to change, as the nature of "chicken" type negotiation is to wait until the last second to make concessions.  Still, in comparison to the Fiscal Cliff and Debt Ceiling standoffs, we're not hearing the same kinds of forecasts of Doom if sequestration happens, so the stakes don't seem as high.

And the prospects for compromise just don't look very good.  The Republican party continues its absolutist No New Taxes stance.  So all their offers are just to replace the cuts to defense and discretionary spending with..... even more cuts to discretionary spending and less to defense.  For liberals, these offers are worse than the sequester itself.  And of course Democrats' offers are all based on more revenue one way or another, and Republicans see that as worse than the sequester too.

Now in the past when the parties have been caught with no compromise to be made, the circle is squared by just increasing the deficit.  But now we have lots of people in the political center and on the right who would go bonkers if we did that, so it's not an option.  So we're left with the sequester ready to kick in.

Jonathan Chait has a wonderful framing of the problems in the political center, based on an awful David Brooks NYT column from last week. Brooks in his column blames both parties for the failure to reach a deal, and accuses the President of refusing to make a serious proposal, even though he has done so numerous times.  Ezra Klein follows up with an interview with Brooks in which he takes him down beautifully:

EK: On that point, one theme in your column, and in a lot of columns these days, is this idea that the president should, on the one hand, be putting forward centrist policies, and on the other hand, that if he’s putting forward policies that the Republican Party won’t agree to, those policies don’t count, as they’re nothing more than political ploys. But while I agree that some level of political realism should enter into any White House’s calculations, it seems a bit dangerous and strange to say the boundaries of the discussion should be set by the agenda that lost the last election.

 

DB: In my ideal world, the Obama administration would do something Clintonesque: They’d govern from the center; they’d have a budget policy that looked a lot more like what Robert Rubin would describe, and if the Republicans rejected that, moderates like me would say that’s awful, the White House really did come out with a centrist plan.

EK: But I’ve read Robert Rubin’s tax plan. He wants $1.8 trillion in new revenues. The White House, these days, is down to $1.2 trillion. I’m with Rubin on this one, but given our two political parties, the White House’s offer seems more centrist. And you see this a lot. People say the White House should do something centrist like Simpson-Bowles, even though their plan has less in tax hikes and less in defense cuts. So it often seems like a no-win for them.
 

He's polite to Brooks.  Many are more blunt: Brooks and other centrists keep complaining that somenone just needs to lead with a serious mix of revenue increases and entitlement cuts, but nobody will do this.  Meanwhile, President Obama keeps proposing exactly what the Centrists are begging for, and Republicans are turning him down. So why are "both sides" getting blamed?  Brooks, to his credit, actually publishes a postscript to his original column, something I've never seen in the NYT for a regular column (you see it plenty in blog posts, but not in op-eds):

The above column was written in a mood of justified frustration over the fiscal idiocy that is about to envelop the nation. But in at least one respect I let my frustration get the better of me. It is true, as the director of the Congressional Budget Office has testified, that the administration has not proposed a specific anti-sequester proposal that can be scored or passed into law. It is not fair to suggest, as I did, that tax hikes for the rich is the sole content of the president’s approach. The White House has proposed various constructive changes to spending levels and entitlement programs. These changes are not nearly adequate in my view, but they do exist, and I should have acknowledged the balanced and tough-minded elements in the president’s approach.

Weak tea, not an admissiont that the whole premise of the column is bogus, but I guess it's something.  Matt Yglesias has a good post on what he calls "BipartisanThink" too, if you want more of this.  Centrists are just so bought in to the "both sides need to come together" narrative, that they can't change their frame and see what's right in front of their faces: the real problem in US politics is that the Republican party has become extremely radical and rejects all compromise.  It's a very partisan statement, but it's true.

One more thing from Ezra Klein on this here.

Minimum Wage Arguments

So a friend sent me a few pieces on the minimum wage, arguing from a conservative perspective that we shouldn't have one at all, or at least should keep it low.  This is in response to the President's call to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour, which has been backed on the blogosphere by citations of studies that show (surprisingly) that moderate increases in the minimum apparently don't increase unemployment, as classical economics says it should.  After all, it's pretty basic to argue that if we artificially increase the price of labor, we will necessarily have less demand for that labor, as the "natural" price of it may be lower than the minimum wage.  But the studies linked above show that this effect doesn't seem to bear out in the real world for some reason, and therefore raising the minimum wouldn't really have a downside for the poor.

My friend thus sent me this by a writer named Don Boudreau:

Commenting on my recent open letter to Barack Obama – in which I asked, if government-mandated higher prices for imports discourage the purchase of imports, why do government-mandated higher prices for low-skilled labor not discourage the hiring of low-skilled labor? – John Burger writes that “there is ample evidence that increases in tariffs affect imports of said items,” but less-conclusive evidence that increases in the legislated minimum-wage affect employment rates.
Question: how many studies have been devoted to testing empirically the proposition that higher protective tariffs reduce imports? I’m not asking for studies that explore the question of how much an x-percent hike in protective tariffs lowers imports. Instead, I’m asking for studies that admit as reasonable the proposition that higher protective tariffs might in fact not reduce imports at all (or only by amounts too minuscule to detect). Put differently, I’m asking for pointers to studies whose authors begin by saying something like “Contrary to popular, textbook presumptions that rises in the prices of imports reduce the quantities demanded of imports, let’s look at the actual evidence to test this presumption scientifically. Perhaps it’s untrue.”
I know of no such studies, although perhaps they’re out there.
The evidence, to which Mr. Burger refers, on tariffs’ depressing effects on imports, seems to me to be established mostly from history and from common sense rather than from the sort of narrowly focused and tightly empirically controlled tests that are the stuff of minimum-wage studies. (History suggests to me that the minimum-wage hurts unskilled workers: look at the trend over the past 70 years in teenage unemployment, and especially that of the unemployment of black teenagers in America.)
The fact is that no one seriously doubts – and no one has it in his or her material interest to question – the proposition that higher protective tariffs reduce the quantities of imports demanded by domestic buyers. This straightforward proposition about the effects of government-mandated higher prices on the quantities demanded of imports is simply too obviously true to be the object of much controlled empirical testing. (If this proposition weren’t generally true, much – perhaps all – of the corpus of neoclassical economics would have to be discarded.)
Moreover, if someone did do a test and found that a higher protective tariff imposed by Uncle Sam on, say, fast-frozen french-fries imported from Canada over the years 2003-2007 in fact was followed by more imports of fast-frozen french-fries from Canada during this time span, I doubt that anyone would seize upon that finding as establishing a “new economics” of trade in which modest increases in protective tariffs have either no effect on imports or have even positive effects on imports. Everyone of sense would either question the study’s method or recognize that the ceteris in this particular historical instance wasn’t paribus. A handful of other studies reaching the same empirical result wouldn’t change matters.
...And yet, human labor somehow is exempt from this general attitude. Of all valuable goods and services bought and sold in markets, human labor is one of the few in which many people seriously believe that the law of demand – the proposition that, ceteris paribus, the higher is the cost of acquiring a unit of some given good or service, the fewer will be the units of that good or service sought to be acquired per period of time – does not necessarily apply.
 

I find this amazing- Boudreau seems to be saying that for economic questions to which he finds the answer obviously self-evident, we shouldn't pay attention to empirical studies!

Look, if well-designed studies showed that increasing a tariff modestly for fast-frozen french fries had no effect on imports, that would be very interesting, and maybe it would make economists question some of their bedrock assumptions about their discipline. At least, economists who aren't hacks would have to question things.

When confronted with an empirical study that runs contrary to conventional wisdom, such as the minimum wage studies, the response of economists should be to posit explanations and then test them. To intentionally ignore them seems, well, hackish. I'm ready to believe that those studies are flawed somehow, or leave out an important factor. But I'm also ready to believe that small increases in the minimum wage have only insignificant affects on employment. It's not a hard case to make theoretically: maybe it's just that other factors are much more important in determining employment, and a $2/hr increase in wages is insignificant in comparison.

 

But my friend wasn't done- next he sent me this, by Mark Perry at AEI:

1. Opponents of the minimum wage law generally support no minimum wage, i.e. a minimum wage of $0.00 per hour. To support a minimum wage of $0.00 per hour, the opponents can rely on economic theory, economic logic, scientific thinking, empirical evidence and cost-benefit analysis to support their position, which might be summarized as follows:
Increases in the minimum wage generate certain benefits (higher wages) for some workers, but generate costs (fewer entry-level jobs, fewer hours, fewer benefits, less-on-the-job training, reduced opportunities to acquire work skills, etc.) that outweigh the benefits, making unskilled workers as a group worse off on net from increases in the minimum wage. Further, a minimum wage of $0.00 per hour requires no regulatory mechanism and therefore no enforcement costs.
Bottom Line: A minimum wage of $0.00 is optimal because it generates net benefits to society that are greater than the net benefits of a mandated, artificially high minimum wage.
2. Proponents of the minimum wage law support periodic increases of the minimum wage, e.g. to $9.00 per hour, but never seem to provide any justification or analysis that would support a position that $9.00 per hour is somehow optimal for society. That is, why $9.00 per hour and not $9.25 or $8.75 per hour? Why not $8, $10 or $18 per hour? Why not $90 or $900? In other words, what is special or optimal about $9 per hour that justifies that hourly wage for unskilled workers? What theory, analysis, logic or rationale justifies $9 per hour over all other alternatives?
Bottom Line: If there is no economic theory or logic or cost-benefit analysis that justifies $9.00 per hour as an optimal wage for unskilled, entry-level workers, which seems to be the case, then a $9.00 minimum wage is exposed as being totally arbitrary and random. Unless and until Obama and other proponents of a $9 per hour minimum wage can provide some analysis to show that $9 is optimal and maximizes the net benefits to unskilled workers, then it’s a policy that really can’t be taken seriously. Further, the minimum wage requires a costly regulatory mechanism that administers and enforces the government-mandated wage, which is a cost that needs to be considered.
 

So here we have the opposite argument from the previous one. Whereas Boudreau studiously ignores empirical studies that challenge his assumptions, Perry essentially says that without empirical backup there can be no discussion of any minimum wage above $0.00.

But of course just because empirical information is difficult to come by at numbers above zero doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and give up. So economists have actually tried to put together studies about what happens when minimum wage is raised in one place and not in another, comparing results. That seems to show that at numbers in the $6-7 range in the '00s on the NJ-PA border, the effect is negligible.

Here's what we do know empirically: the American people are generally supportive of the current minimum wage according to polls, and even support by a majority, a higher wage. So whatever the negative job effects currently (if any), Americans are OK with those in favor of being guaranteed a bare livable wage if they're working. Now the president proposes returning that wage to have similar purchasing power to what it had when it was passed years ago, and to index it to inflation so we can stop having these battles (which help Democrats by the way, as raising the minimum wage is popular).

And once the minimum is raised to $9, economists like these guys can launch their empirical studies and see what effect it really has. Obviously we can't study a minimum wage that doesn't yet exist!

Thinking about Crazy Wayne and Quentin Tarantino

Wayne LaPierre is totally crazy, or at least he's playing someone who's totally crazy.  I have been forced to rethink my whole position on the gun debate in light of Newtown and the NRA's reaction to the renewed talk of gun laws.

My loyal readers will of course remember my comparison of the NRA to AIPAC, in the sense that both organizations represent points of view that are so settled in Washington that there is virtually no chance that either can lose.  Liberals had apparently given up on any hopes of enacting serious gun control since the Clinton years, and it's been nowhere on the agenda.

In one sense my analysis looks silly now, with the NRA locked in a real debate they may very well lose.  In another sense, however, we should keep in mind that there is absolutely zero suggestion of any legislation that would limit the ability of law-abiding citizens to purchase handguns and rifles.  In spite of the hysteria of the Gun Lobby, nobody is coming to take away anyone's guns.  The President starts off every proposal with a paean to gun ownership and how great it is that people love their guns.  For a liberal like me, who would favor serious prohibitions on gun ownership, there's no national politician even in my universe.

So we have the current proposals- closing the gun show loophole, tightening up background checks, banning assault rifles and large magazines that have no hunting or self-defense function- which are supported by most Americans and even most gun owners.  And we have the NRA's Director going on the Sunday talk shows with spittle-drenched rants about guns being taken away and about how "the only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun". 

This is so self-evidently crazy that I don't even know where to start.  But I think I understand where this fantasy- that if we just arm lots of people, the good guys will be able to outgun the bad guys and we'll be safer- comes from.  It's the movies!

 

I recently saw Django Unchained, the latest Quentin Tarantino movie, a blood-drenched slave revenge flick.  I want to make it clear that I liked it.  In the movie, an ex-slave in the pre-Civil War south becomes a bounty hunter and successfully manages to kill ridiculous numbers of "bad guys" while saving his wife.  I saw an interview with the director, and he said that he felt his movie was in many ways more realistic than previous Hollywood treatment of slavery in America (such as Roots), in that the slaves aren't magnanimous and forgiving but rather rageful and out for revenge.

 

But of course Django isn't the least bit realistic.  It's fantasy.  Fun, mind you, but in an escapist sort of way.  And Hollywood makes lots of action movies that are fun and absurd- the Die Hard franchise, any of the old Schwarzenegger movies, Star Wars, the list goes on and on.  Generally in these movies, bad guys are cartoonishly evil and have an amazing combination of high competence on one hand and the tendency to narrowly miss the hero with every shot on the other hand.  Bullets fly all over the place, and innocents almost always narrowly escape harm thanks to the hero.

 

But real life is not remotely like that.  When there are shootouts in public squares, innocent people get hit all the time, even by highly trained police.  It's not hard to imagine how many more people would be shot and killed if even more untrained civilians were packing heat in public, waiting for the chance to help take down a terrorist or common criminal.  I think Lapierre has watched too many Hollywood action movies, and actually believes the world works that way.

 

The thing is that the NRA has won every battle, and in fact there remains no threat whatsoever to the Second Amendment.  I guess that by fighting all-out against even very reasonable restrictions, there's even less chance that anything more draconian will be passed.  But meanwhile, people are being killed every day and it doesn't have to be that way.

OMG, This is Why I Can't Stand "Centrist" Media

This appeared in the Daily Beast today, and is egregious enough to be worthy of a full-blown fisking.  It's written by Mark McKinnon, who is a past Republican operative I've never heard of. Article is in plain type, my comments in italics.

War is often about making the least-worst decision. The same could be said about politics. But the stakes are higher in war, when the commander in chief is called upon to defend the nation. And make no mistake, al Qaeda is at war with us still. That is why I support the Obama administration’s policy on the use of unmanned drones to kill terrorists—even if those terrorists are U.S. citizens—even as I, like many Americans, find myself conflicted about its morality.

Al Qaeda will always be at war with us- there are tons of tiny groups that see themselves as being at war with the US.  The question is: are they a threat?  But this argument, that it's morally OK to kill "terrorists" with unmanned drones, elides the real issue, which is: how do we know that they're terrorists?

I will not argue about the hypocrisy of an administration that supports drone attacks on American citizens at war with us while calling for trials in the U.S. court system of captured foreign enemy combatants. And I will not dwell on the shocking silence of the media who would be “up in arms” if the Bush administration took a similar position. Nor will I linger on the likelihood that a presidential candidate Obama would not have supported the policy.

 

Actually, the Leftist media is quite up in arms about this issue.  The problem, of course, is that nobody in the mainstream Center Left or anywhere on the Right has any interest at all, because they all agree with the policy.

Instead I will argue that there is a rational and a moral case for the use of drone strikes—in general.

From a totally American perspective, I can think of three justifications. Drone strikes are less costly in terms of dollars. And budgets, we are told, are moral documents. So less money spent on war can go toward human needs, in education, in health care, even in foreign aid.

Well, I admire his honesty here.  Morality is complicated, and of course we always need to balance different moral pluses and minuses to make policy in a complicated world.  Mark McKinnon apparently puts lots of moral emphasis on our use of funds that could go to other purposes.  I think that's got some merit, but it's pretty far down the list in comparison to the much more important issues here, like whether or not we should be killing people without due process.
 

Second, drone strikes are less costly in terms of lives lost. In a drone warfare world, there is no GI returning with posttraumatic stress, none back with limbs missing. It means less of the kind of knocks on the door that every mother or father or husband or wife who has someone serving overseas dreads. And the technology of precision strikes means that fewer innocent lives are lost among foreign populations living near the field of battle.

True enough.  Drone strikes on foreign nationals doesn't subject us here to any danger at all, psychic or physical.  Obviously the danger to foreigners doesn't matter.  Hey, that gives me an idea!  If we just killed everyone else in the world, we could take all their stuff!  And if we can do it with drones, we won't be harmed at all!  We'd be rich, and we could go to lots of tropical islands for vacations for cheap money!
 

Which leads me to my third justification—that drone strikes are less costly in terms of objections in the court of public opinion. Insulated by technology, the strikes appear to us—and more important, to those around the world—on our TV screens as little more than a scene from 24.

That's right- it makes killing foreigners just like a video game to us.  I see that as a bug, not a feature- we're inured to the damage we're causing other people around the world, when we should be feeling tremendous guilt about it.
 

And I believe there is also a moral case for the use of drone strikes in many of the specific cases we have heard about, including that of American-born terrorists like Anwar al-Awlaki. By declaring himself an enemy of the state, calling for a violent jihad against the United States, I believe he ceded his rights to the protections of our legal system.

OK, how about al-Awlaki's 16 year old son, whom we killed two weeks later?  When exactly did he cede his rights as a US citizen?

While drone attacks fit within the view that America has a role to play in making the world a safer place for democracy, I believe there is also a moral case against the use of drone strikes. Drone attacks subvert the rule of law—we become judge, jury, and executioner—at the push of a button.

RIGHT! That's kind of a big deal, though.  Not a toss-off line at all.  Well, maybe you're going to now change your mind based on the obvious moral problems with this, particularly the fact that every non-authoritarian government in history asserts that people can't be punished by the state without due process....

This seems an acceptable risk right now, when the technology for drone strikes is ours, not the enemy’s. And when those strikes have not occurred on American soil. When that changes, so too do the arguments.

WOW. So drone strikes are totally moral, as long as we're the ones doing the killing and not the dying.  If anyone starts killing us, well then I guess it becomes less moral.  Does McKinnon have any empathetic synapse in his brain anywhere?  Are foreigners just bugs to him?  This is the most morally reprehensible statement I've ever read.
 

I would not wish this authority on a moral man—or an immoral man, for different reasons. But terror in the guise of nonstate actors creates terrifying new realities. And so we should have this debate as a nation.

What really steams me is the total inability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes.  Torture is fine when we waterboard Al Qaeda guys, but when they do it to us they're just barbarians.  And if we target terrorists, but happen to kill or maim dozens of Afghani villagers who have the bad fortune to be in the area, hey that's just the war we're in.  But when Muslims fly planes into buildings in New York, that's morally sickening.  What is wrong with these people? 

Our President is a War Criminal, Just Like the Last One

Now that an OLC memo has been released detailing the Obama administration's justification for murdering American citizens who may be members of Al Qaeda, it seems there's little doubt that this administration is guilty of war crimes.  The Bush administration was clearly guilty of them too, specifically because they initiated a torture regime with ludicrous legal reasoning from their version of the OLC.  While Obama's apparent ending of the torture program is an unalloyed good thing, he seems to have replaced that with targeted drone killings that are arguably even worse.

I'm no lawyer, but this is just as outrageous as anything coming out of John Woo's office:

The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.
 

So the US can kill anyone it sees as an operational leader of a terrorist organization, based on whatever intelligence it chooses to believe.  And we've seen over the years how reliable foreign intelligence is.

And let's keep in mind how far the administration has taken this.  They targeted and killed the 16 year old son of Anwar Al-Awaki, who had himself beeen killed by a drone two weeks earlier.  Think about that for a moment- a separate drone strike targeted a 16 year old boy who had been born in America and who had not himself committed any crime whatsoever.  That's a criminal act by the US government, and by its President, who reportedly approves all "targeted killings".

So how could I vote for Barack Obama for president, knowing he's a war criminal?  Well, it didn't help that his opponent's main criticism of the president's foreign policy was that he was insufficiently tough on the Bad Guys.  Didn't leave me many choices outside of a write-in for Ron Paul.

Anyway, Glenn Greenwald has the defnitive rant on this issue, as he always does on stuff like this.

Immigration Reform

Just a quick point about the plans hatched by a bipartisan group of Senators to reform immigration.  First of all, it's generally good to see something happening- I'm sure it won't be what I would want (which would be more open immigration for people who want to come here, especially educated people of all stripes), but it should be an improvement over the status quo anyway.

But I'm a little hung up on the stuff about how there has to be better enforcement of current laws before more immigrants will be allowed to come.  First of all, the GOP hysteria about our open borders leaves out one little detail: enforcement has already gotten way better, and illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle.  In a country as big as the US, with thousands of miles of borders, the current state is really about as good as it's going to get.  To demand hermetically sealed borders is not realistic, and is really just a way to block immigration reform.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that we could do more and close off the border even more effectively if we just had the Will to do so.  In fact, I believe it is possible to make the Mexican border even more secure.  But here's the thing: that's going to cost money- a lot of money.  Last time I checked, this country had a "spending problem" according to Republicans, who refuse to raise taxes for any reason, and lots of Very Serious People are concerned about our deficit and debt.  So how do we propose to fund all this spending on border agents and high-tech fences, etc?

I've not heard an answer to that question yet.  Let's stop the nonsense about enforcement.

A friend sent me this piece of Climate Change skepticism:

Climate models assume that atmospheric carbon emissions and other natural events directly and causally determine changes in earth’s climate. However, if we allow that some other variable might be causing the climate to change or if carbon dioxide levels are a result of, rather than the cause of, climate change, then the current climate models are critically deficient and our mystery remains unsolved.

Perhaps the earth would have cooled even more had carbon emissions not slowed or reversed the long-term cooling trend. Perhaps the real warming is just starting in earnest. While more research is needed, it is becoming clearer that there is no need to panic and there is no need to put a severe strain on the global economy by drastically restricting carbon emissions. Our planet is in the middle of a warm period, but people should learn to chill out.

My thoughts in response:

What stymies me a bit in the Global Climate Change debate is that it's based on hard science, and it's pretty hard for me to evaluate PhD level computer models made by climatologists- economics and political science are much more accessible to the layman. But I notice that this writer isn't a climatologist at all http://www.charleslhooper.com/bio/ , and is in fact trained as an engineer but is currently more of a business consultant to the pharmaceutical industry. He's not the most impressively trained spokesman for the Skeptics.

At the end of the day, without getting into weeds I don't fully understand, I'm left with the fact that the field of Climatology has reached a consensus about climate change, and it's of the alarmist variety. Let's not don't buy into the tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories about the venality of climatologists (mostly raised by people on the payroll of Big Oil). Of course, the whole field being wrong is certainly possible, and confirmation bias may be driving the field in the wrong direction, but I think we need to see it as unlikely that such a wrong consensus would persist.

Then at the end of the next day, I'm left with this: there's obviously a chance that the Earth is warming irrevocably in ways that would lead to devastating changes in our climate: sea-level places like Bangladesh could become uninhabitable, places that were bread baskets could become deserts, places that are now temperate could become unbearably hot, etc. Maybe this won't actually happen, but maybe it will. I put the odds of bad climate change occurring at 95%, maybe Mr. Hooper would say those odds are only 20%. Saying we should wait and see is a crazy response to this sort of problem. To illustrate this point, consider something like Iran's pursuit of a nuclear bomb. I would say that the chances of Iran successfully building a nuclear weapon and then actually using such a weapon when they know they'd be annihilated in response is low, perhaps only 10%. By the Skeptics' Climate Change logic, that means we should keep gathering information and letting it play out- after all, we don't have all the facts, and there are many facts that indicate Iran won't use a nuke! Of course we're not doing that in the case of Iran, because 10% is too big a chance to let alone- so we've initiated severe sanctions, we're actively using stuxnet viruses, we (or Israel) are assassinating their nuclear scientists, and we're talking about bombing their facilities. And Global Climate Change is potentially more devastating than Iran's nuclear bomb. I've seen no convincing answer to why we should not act.

It looks like President Obama is planning to take some initiative to deal with this issue- good for him.  If the Climatologists are right, then there's nothing more important he could do.