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.

Republicans are to Blame for the Lack of Cuts to Entitlements

Here's a really good point from Matt Yglesias, one of those truths that's obvious but that I hadn't considered with this framing:

One of the developments of the past few years that's so peculiar that few people have really gotten their heads around it is the way in which conservative members of the House of Representatives have emerged as the key institutional roadblock to large cuts in American social insurance programs.
 

I know, that sounds crazy- the Tea Party nuts in the House are the constituency that most wants to cut social insurance programs, so how can they be the key roadblock?

But it makes sense- the fact is that the centrists whom Paul Krugman calls the Very Serious People are all in favor of cuts to Social Security and Medicare.  Among the punditocracy, calling for modest cuts to benefits is the way to sell your bona fides as someone who's not a left wing nut. 

So Barack Obama, who has been very much in thrall to these VSPs, who pivoted to deficit reduction way too early in his effort to be a centrist, offered a Grand Bargain with lots of benefit cuts to social programs in exchange for very modest tax hikes.  And the Republicans couldn't accept it (remember the GOP primary presidential debate in which every candidate said that he/she would not trade any tax hikes for spending cuts, even in a 10:1 ratio?).  The GOP House members are holding out for a deal that is 100% spending cuts, and they won't accept anything else- No Compromise!

So in this case, when you don't compromise, you don't get anything you want.  Republicans will of course continue to blame the president, but think about what they're offering:

Unfortunately, the Republicans don't have quite as much muscle as the Corleone family.  Why should liberals give them their benefit cuts when they get nothing in return?

 

OK, so the Senate Will Continue to Suck

Oh, great, a bipartisan compromise on the Sentate filibuster reform.  Apparently, Harry Reid was intent on maintaining comity with the Republicans, and on top of that many of the more clubby, long-serving Democrats don't want to mess too much with the wonderful tradition of the Senate.  So filibuster reform is including only very minor changes that will continue to allow a minority party to grind the whole thing to a halt pretty much whenever they want.

As I've said before, when Republicans are again in charge of the Senate, particularly if they have a Republican president, the filibuster will immediately be emasculated with no attempt to gain Democratic party acceptance or agreeement.

Democrats being played for suckers, yet again. 

Inauguration Day- Just Playing Defense

That's How You Play Defense

President Obama's second inauguration speech is being hailed by liberals as an eloquent justification of the progressive agenda, and it is.  The Right seems to be criticizing it as an indicator of his outrageous radicalism, foretelling his long-awaited plans to move the US way over to the Left.

But I think the more appropriate framing is to see the speech as, yes, eloquent and inspiring from a liberal perspective, but not radical at all.  Look at this passage, for example:

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. (Applause.) For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.

We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us. (Applause.) They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great. (Applause.)

This isn't a clarion call for some new program to expand the welfare state!  It's just a ringing defense of the welfare state we already have.  The fact is that the Republican party has decided that they want to fundamentally change the welfare state in America, rolling back the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s.  They believe that the safety net has become too generous, and that we need to return to a time when those at the bottom have nowhere else to turn. 

Making Social Security and Medicare into voucherized or means-tested programs is a pretty radical agenda.  Obama is just opposing that change- he's for the status quo.  I wish people would stop calling that radical.

Follow Up On the NRA

So I feel like it's time to follow up on this piece I wrote a few months ago, about how the NRA and AIPAC are analagous in that they have both achieved policy victory and now seem to have difficulty honestly riling up their bases given that their positions are so entrenched in both parties.

On gun control, the Democrats have completely given up attempting to push any gun control legislation at the national level. A calculation has been made that the love of guns in the west and in rural appalachia is so strong that no legislation can pass and Democrats will lose if they do anything about this. So the NRA has taken to putting out dire warnings that President Obama has a secret plan to take your guns, because they can't find any evidence that there's an actual plan. The latest thing I just heard is the theory is that Fast and Furious project is really a secret plan to build justification for gun control through the back door. Crazy stuff.

But the NRA has to justify its existence- they don't want to pack up, declare victory, and leave Washington; so they have to find some reason to keep pushing.

Well, that was before Newtown, and now it looks like the ground is shifting suddenly in the debate on Gun Control.  The NRA has responded to calls for very minor gun laws (closing the Gun Show Loophole, background checks, banning high-capacity magazines) with absolutely crazy statements asserting that the only way for Americans to protect themselves is to go out and buy our own guns.  Rather than stop mass killers from getting assault weapons, they want to turn mass killing sites into pitched battles between various "good guys with guns" and the bad guy, hoping it will all work out OK.

So there is some momentum for these sensible gun proposals, all of a sudden, though the House may still block them all.  But in many ways, the overall situation still hasn't really changed.  We're talking about really small-bore actions to stop very specific purchases.  The basic tenets of the Second Amendment are not even slightly in danger.  In fact, maybe the NRA's cartoonish radicalization is really a Crazy-Like-A-Fox strategy to make us fight for obvious stuff like closing the Gun Show Loophole, so we never get anywhere near threatening basic gun ownership.  Maybe they're not so dumb after all..... but they sure are crazy.

School Testing

This post from Kevin Drum is right on target and I want to get the point out to all my readers too:

...the sheer magnitude of our test-taking culture has become breathtaking over the past couple of decades. Standardized tests should be a modest part of the school curriculum, not a frantic, neverending race that engulfs the entire culture of teaching.
 

Here in Massachusetts, school testing started out as just science and math, and just every couple of years.  Now it covers grades 3-10 with multiple full days of testing each year.  Twenty years ago there was no standardized testing at all; now we have a week or two taken out of each school year, and there are still only 180 days of school, same as there ever was.

I understand why testing is important; it allows for objective measurement of how students and schools are doing.  But every hour we spend testing is an hour we're not instructing.  Some of that is obviously worth it, but it seems to me we've gone overboard.  Educational testing doesn't come for free, and I think we've overdone testing to the detriment of our children.

Deficit Blame

Some email correspondence with my political opponents has led me to the following deficit thoughts:

 

Since 2010 President Obama has been rhetorically on board with closing the deficit, much to the chagrin of liberals who think he pivoted too soon. He's agreed to numerous cuts in spending in budget deals since then. He supports tax hikes that would help close the deficit. He is known to have offered, in 2011, even bigger cuts in exchange for tax increases (both sides of that deal would reduce the deficit), which pissed off liberals a lot; the deal was rejected by the House.

Obama is pretty clearly on record as being in favor of reducing the deficit, but only if "the rich pay their fair share", i.e. he won't make a deal that balances the budget only through screwing the Poor.... which is the only way Republicans will do it. So it hasn't gotten done.

Look at it this way- I think this puts it in a way that's fair to both sides- both Republican and Democrat leaders want to reduce the deficit. But Republicans are even more interested in low taxes. And Democrats are even more interested in making sure the Safety Net is retained. So for both parties, the deficit is priority number 2, not number 1. Since there are two parties that have to agree, and since both parties can get priority number 1 if they give up on number 2, the deficit hasn't gotten solved.

The Right wants to blame Obama for this. And I guess it's true that if Obama would agree to destroy the welfare state, the deficit would go down. But it's also true that if Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan would agree to raise revenues the deficit would go down too. I want to blame them, but as a Keynesian I'm OK with deficits right now so I don't stress about it.

 

If the Deficit Hawks want to stress about it, though, I wish they'd acknowledge the above context.  They can't have it both ways: if the deficit is to go down, tax revenue has to go up.  Otherwise liberals aren't going to sign on. 

Public Spending

With all the overheated rhetoric from Republicans about how "we have a spending problem" and not a revenue problem, it's easy to forget about facts like this:

This recovery has been exactly what conservatives wanted- with government jobs (that's combined federal-state-local I believe) down since 2009 in spite of significant population growth.  The private sector, meanwhile, has grown as one would expect during a recovery, though not fast enough to make up for the government job losses and population growth.

And yet, "we have a spending problem". So here's a chart of total federal spending in constant dollars per capita.



That's quite a rise in 2007-2009, which I think is due to increases in unemployment and stimulus measures.  Then at the end of the graph we see a leveling off, as soon as Obama came into office and Republicans discovered that they don't like to spend money after all (how about that steep rise in the '00s after level spending throughout the '90s?).  In fact, the trend is pretty clear: when Republicans are in charge (1980s, 2000s), federal spending goes through the roof.  When Democrats are in charge (1990s, 2010s so far), spending levels off.

It would be nice if the pundits would keep this in mind.

THE FISCAL CLIFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Fiscal Cliff saga was pretty tough to take for me.  I find it difficult to get energized by the constant forecasts of Doom engendered by every twist and turn.  Unfortunately, the hysteria of the Press seemed to lead to similar hysteria among politicians desperate to get a deal, and I just hope that when this all shakes out Democrats don't give away the store to get a few crumbs.  From what I read I guess they didn't, but I don't understand why the $250,000 threshold for tax hikes, which was all over the campaign, had to be adjusted upwards.

Nevertheless, the unstated Truth is that middle class taxes have to go up again for the welfare state to continue to function, but Obama can't propose that after campaigning on a promise not to raise taxes on the non-rich.  It's hard to see how we adequately fund all the things liberals want to do with the current tax base.

But it's the intensity of the conflict right now that is exhausting me.  It reminds me of a Hollywood action movie franchise, in which each sequel has to find a way to increase the intensity of the danger, to keep building and getting bigger than the last near-destruction.  First we almost destroyed Santa Monica!  Next we almost destroyed Los Angeles county!  Now it's the whole US! Now the Earth itself is in peril!

So now the Fiscal Cliff is almost behind us (though the House could still wreck the deal), and we're on to the Sequester/ Debt Ceiling standoff coming in just two months.  More forecasts of Doom!

Somehow the US Congress has to get past this level of drama.  Perhaps it's that they really have to settle on the nature of the Welfare State, i.e. Republicans have to accept that the Welfare State is not going away.  Or Republicans have to win an election and follow through on the destruction of the safety net.

I'd just like to get back to debating the levels of funding of various social and military programs, not questioning the basic legitimacy of their existence.  I'll keep hoping.