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.