Triangulations

Does Better Health Care Coverage Reduce Abortion?

2010-05-17T14:32:00.007-04:00

In his most recent column, T.R. Reid posits a connection between the absence of national health coverage in the United States and the unusually high number of abortions. Comparing the U.S. to other industrialized nations, Reid points out that the U.S. has a substantially higher rate of abortion than countries that have adopted national health care systems. The author uses this as evidence to suggest that opponents of abortion should be more willing to accept national health care as a way to advance their cause.

However, Reid’s argument ignores at least two other important points.

First, Reid fails to acknowledge the wide range of abortion rates among countries that have adopted national health care systems. The variation among states with universal health care is far greater than the variation between the United States and the United Kingdom. In Germany, for example, the number of abortions for women ages 15 to 44 is 7.8 per 1000 women, compared to 17 per 1000 women in the United Kingdom. (The rate in the United States is 20.8 per 1000 women.) This suggests that, when it comes to abortion rates, the health care system may not be as important as more subtle forces like culture.

Second, Reid does not take into account national teen pregnancy rates, which are far higher in the United States than in other industrialized countries. Because higher rates of teen pregnancy are likely connected to higher abortion rates, it seems plausible that there is a third variable – perhaps some measure of social responsibility – contributing to both the absence of a national health care system in the United States and the higher rates of teen pregnancy and abortion. Isn't it possible that American couples are less responsible about pregnancy because they have less of a sense of responsibility to society? Wouldn't this lack of social responsibility also make Americans less concerned about the uninsured?

Unfortunately, Reid chooses not to even consider this possibility. He simply asserts that there are “various reasons” why universal health care reduces the rate of abortion, acting as though correlation automatically implies causation.

As a supporter of national health care and abortion rights, I wish Reid’s contention were true. But wishing does not make it so. In his eagerness to connect national health care with lower rates of abortion, Reid overlooks essential details and relies far too extensively on testimonial evidence.

Is Kagan a Closed Book?

2010-05-11T17:07:00.004-04:00

I don't know much about Elena Kagan yet, but I intend to read as much as I can in the coming weeks. So far, the general consensus seems to be that she's suspiciously uncontroversial.

In his column today, David Brooks argues that Kagan has never taken any real 'intellectual risks' in the course of her legal career. She has cautiously -- strategically -- hidden her feelings from the public. (Andrew Sullivan follows up and makes similar comments here.)

While it's certainly fair to wonder about Kagan's stance on important issues and to speculate about these kinds of things, it strikes me as a little cynical to assume that she's been deliberately concealing her views all this time.

Isn't it possible that Kagan is just one of those rare individuals who is able to see many sides of an issue? Because, if that's the case, she's exactly the kind of person that I would want on the Supreme Court.

Trim the Beard, Andrew!

2010-05-07T14:53:00.003-04:00

Poor Andrew Sullivan. His readers have finally rebelled against his awful, unkempt beard.

My favorite dissent:

Was that a beard, or did a beaver die on your face? What am I saying? You'd never let a beaver anywhere near your face.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of beards. But come on, Andrew. This is just out of control . . .

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The Arizona Law: Why Rachel Maddow's Approach is Wrong

2010-05-03T09:17:00.010-04:00

Discussing the new Arizona immigration law in his NYT column today, Ross Douthat writes:

Critics of Arizona’s new immigration law have not been shy about impugning the motives of its supporters. The measure, which requires police to check the immigration status of people they question or detain, has been denounced as a “Nazi” or “near-fascist” law, a “police state” intervention, an imitation of “apartheid,” a “Juan Crow” regime that only a bigot could possibly support.

Faced with this kind of hyperbole, the supposed bigots have understandably returned the favor, dismissing opponents of the Arizona measure as limousine liberals who don’t understand the grim realities of life along an often-lawless border. And so the debate has become a storm of insults rather than an argument.

I think this is absolutely correct. Instead of an honest discussion over whether this legislation could lead to unequal treatment, we've seen a barrage of ad hominem attacks against those who supported it.

The other night on MSNBC, for example, Rachel Maddow spend an awful lot of time accusing members of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) organization -- a group that lobbied in favor of the Arizona law -- of racism:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I'm sure that Maddow is right on the specifics here. It certainly seems that Dan Stein, the president of FAIR, distorted the facts. And I have no doubt that some members of FAIR have made racist comments in the past.

But FAIR is a large organization, with members from many different backgrounds. Maddow's attempts to portray FAIR as some kind of hate group strike me quite a stretch. Though some left-wing groups have leveled similar charges against FAIR in the past, the organization has really been able to maintain its tax-exempt status because it's not all that radical, and it adheres to the strict legal guidelines that are imposed on all tax-exempt groups.

In 2005, it was FAIR that explicitly condemned a leading member of the Protect Arizona Now (PAN) committee for her unabashedly racist remarks. (That member, Virginia Abernethy, was ultimately expelled from PAN.)

FAIR has worked hard to reject the use of discriminatory language, but the sad truth is that FAIR is an anti-immigration organization, and it's not difficult to find some members in any anti-immigration organization who have racist views. There is clearly some ideological overlap between those who oppose immigration and those who support white nationalism.

But even if FAIR is a racist organization, what does this really tell us about the legitimacy of the Arizona law?

Today, you can find dozens of explicitly racist groups that support gun rights. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center -- which has identified FAIR as a "hate group" -- has often pointed to the strong political ties between pro-gun organizations and white supremacist groups.

Does this mean that any bill designed to protect gun rights that is strongly endorsed by white supremacist organizations should be dismissed as racist? Maybe. But lots of other people -- myself included -- strongly support gun rights for completely legitimate reasons. Proving that some supporters of a piece of legislation are racist does not prove that all supporters of the legislation are racist, or that the legislation itself is racist.

Instead of trying to show that the Arizona law is racist because some groups that supported it may have racist motives, why not just look at what the law does? These other debates quickly distract us from the point. It's not difficult to see why the Arizona law may lead to unequal treatment under the law. For those of us who oppose the legislation, that should really be our primary focus.

Calling people racists doesn't usually make them rethink their position. When you begin with these kinds of ad hominem attacks, the argument quickly becomes about the character of those who support or oppose the law, rather than the lives of those who are actually affected by it.

Christie Cuts Breakfast

2010-04-29T12:21:00.007-04:00

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is planning to reduce funding for school meal programs:

Christie wants to eliminate the state's $3 million for subsidized school breakfasts, which also run on $41.4 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For school lunches, which get $173.4 million in federal funding, Christie seeks to trim the state bill to $5.6 million from $8 million.

I'm no expert on this subject -- and I'm not even sure if this is possible -- but it seems to me that the state should cut funding to school meal programs to help close its budget gap. Schools can then increasing the price of meals for other students.

Right now, kids who pay for lunch are getting bargain-price meals for no apparent reason. But if higher-income students were made to pay more and the additional revenue were used to subsidize meals for low-income students, then the state might not need to contribute to these food programs.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has already recommended that the federal government try to increase regular meal prices, since the current price of a meal in most schools does not even cover the cost of preparation. CBPP's research also suggests that demand for school lunch is relatively inelastic over a certain price range, which makes sense since the prices are often dramatically lower than other available substitutes.

I don't think that we should be cutting funding for students who need free and reduced price meals. But we should be shifting more of the cost onto other students who don't need free and reduced price meals.

There is no reason for us to be subsidizing kids whose parents can afford to pay more.

Tea Party: Partisan Frauds or Racists?

2010-04-28T13:47:00.004-04:00

Andrew offers a pretty good description of how I've come to see the Tea Party Movement:

[O]n the fiscal front, they're total frauds. They have yet to propose any serious cuts in entitlements and want far more money poured into the military-imperial complex. In rallies, the largely white members in their fifties and older seem determined to get every penny of social security and Medicare. They are a kind of boomer revolt - but on the other side of that civil conflict, and no longer a silent majority. In fact, they're now the minority that won't shut up.
More and more, this feels to me like an essentially cultural revolt against what America is becoming: a multi-racial, multi-faith, gay-inclusive, women-friendly, majority-minority country. The "tea-party" analogy is not about restricting government as much as it is a form of almost pathological nostalgia. That's why there's much more lashing out than constructive proposals. And yes, a bi-racial president completes the picture.

He also offers this caveat, which I think is important:

And no, that doesn't mean they're all racists. Discomfort with social and cultural change is not racism. But it can express itself that way. [My emphasis.]

Is Twitter Making Reporters Lazy?

2010-04-28T11:04:00.005-04:00

As far as I can tell, the primary source for this CNN story is . . . a bunch of tweets from random Twitter users:

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized "profusely" on Wednesday after he was caught on microphone describing a woman who spoke to him on the election campaign trail as "bigoted."

. . .

One Twitter user, Thermalsocks, said: "Gordon Brown has created a total survailance society. Glad to see he got caught out, now he knows how we all feel."

Another user, urbantaoist85, said: "Anyone else up for making all politicians wear a microphone at all times?" Ririnyan added: "I wonder if that was the final nail in the coffin for Labour this time." Andy_Francis said: "I think GB has just kissed goodbye to any chances Labour had left."

However CupCate wrote: "I'd be more concerned if Brown had said, "What that brilliant woman said about all those damn immigrants, too right!"

. . .

But one Twitter user, SusanCalman, spoke for many when she said: "I feel sorry for Gordon Brown. If people I've met knew half the things I'd said about them when I left I would be stabbed and left for dead."

How has this become an acceptable method of reporting on overseas elections?

Update: Here is Andrew Sullivan's (non-Twitter) analysis:

Gillian Duffy is a life-long Labour voter. She doesn't like being called a racist because she worries about immigrants; she's fed up with the welfare state rewarding, as she sees it, the unworthy; she's working class; she's not alone. This is Brown's base. He has essentially attacked his own base in the most condescending two-faced manner possible, on a live microphone, on every broadcast. Imagine if Obama's gaffe about "clinging to guns and religion" had been uttered by John McCain, about his own base. With a week to go.

Two Must-Read Articles

2010-04-23T15:46:00.004-04:00

First, a newsletter(pdf) from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, rethinking the static way that we typically talk about the income distribution in the United States:

The Census Bureau essentially ranks all households by household income and then divides this distribution of households into quintiles. The highest-ranked household in each quintile provides the upper income limit for each quintile. Comparing changes in these upper income limits over time for different quintiles reveals that the income of wealthier households has been growing faster than the income of poorer households, thus giving the impression of an increasing “income gap” or “shrinking middle class.”One big problem with inferring income inequality from the census income statistics is that the census statistics provide only a snapshot of income distribution in the U.S., at a single point in time. The statistics do not reflect the reality that income for many households changes over time—i.e., incomes are mobile. For most people, income increases over time as they move from their first, low-paying job in high school to a better-paying job later in their lives. Also, some people lose income over time because of business-cycle contractions, demotions, career changes, retirement, etc. The implication of changing individual incomes is that individual households do not remain in the same income quintiles over time.

. . .

Another problem with drawing inferences from the census statistics is that the statistics do not include the noncash resources received by lower-income households—resources transferred to the households—and the tax payments made by wealthier households to fund these transfers. Lower-income households annually receive tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for housing, food and medical care. None of these are considered income by the Census Bureau. Thus the resources available to lower income households are actually greater than is suggested by the income of those households as reported in the census data. At the same time, these noncash payments to lower-income households are funded with taxpayer dollars—mostly from wealthier households, since they pay a majority of overall taxes. One research report estimates that the share of total income earned by the lowest income quintile increases roughly 50 percent—whereas the share of total income earned by the highest income quintile drops roughly 7 percent—when transfer payments andtaxes are considered.

Second, a great piece from Henry Louis Gates -- yes, that Henry Louis Gates -- on the question of slave reparations in the United States:

Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore [the] untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.

Is the SEC Reaching?

2010-04-20T16:04:00.006-04:00

Goldman Sachs offers a pretty thorough defense of its business practices:

We want to emphasize the following four critical points which were missing from the SEC's complaint.

-- Goldman Sachs Lost Money On The Transaction. Goldman Sachs, itself, lost more than $90 million. Our fee was $15 million. We were subject to losses and we did not structure a portfolio that was designed to lose money.

-- Extensive Disclosure Was Provided. IKB, a large German Bank and sophisticated CDO market participant and ACA Capital Management, the two investors, were provided extensive information about the underlying mortgage securities. The risk associated with the securities was known to these investors, who were among the most sophisticated mortgage investors in the world. These investors also understood that a synthetic CDO transaction necessarily included both a long and short side.

-- ACA, the Largest Investor, Selected The Portfolio. The portfolio of mortgage backed securities in this investment was selected by an independent and experienced portfolio selection agent after a series of discussions, including with Paulson & Co., which were entirely typical of these types of transactions. ACA had the largest exposure to the transaction, investing $951 million. It had an obligation and every incentive to select appropriate securities.

-- Goldman Sachs Never Represented to ACA That Paulson Was Going To Be A Long Investor. The SEC's complaint accuses the firm of fraud because it didn't disclose to one party of the transaction who was on the other side of that transaction. As normal business practice, market makers do not disclose the identities of a buyer to a seller and vice versa. Goldman Sachs never represented to ACA that Paulson was going to be a long investor.

Obviously, this is all pretty self-serving. Ezra describes the charges against Goldman this way:

Another way of think about it comes from the Washington Independent's Annie Lowrey, who analogizes it to a housing sale. Imagine a broker shows you a home. It looks good to you. Looks like the other homes, in fact. But when you buy it, it turns out that the foundation is cracked and the roof leaks and the neighborhood is full of crackhouses.

How can this be? You got the home appraised! And your broker knows all about homes!
Well, it turns out that your broker was working for the seller, who did the appraisal himself. And the seller had bet a bookie that whoever he sold the home to would move out within a year, which and your broker knew that but never told you. In this analogy, as you've already guessed, the broker is Goldman, the seller is Paulson, and the buyer is the counterparties.

But that's not a very fair presentation of the facts either. Since Goldman Sachs was also taking a long position on the CDO in question, the "broker" in this analogy would have had a much greater incentive to see the house appraised well. Goldman was gambling way more of its own money on the assumption that this CDO would pay off. The fees it was receiving from Paulson & Co. were paltry in comparison.

To me, this seems like a rather salient point. If the SEC is trying to prove that Goldman was engaging in some kind of nefarious deception, why did it work out so badly for them?

Update: Here is Felix Salmon's take on the whole thing, and here is the SEC's formal complaint.

The big question seems to be whether Fabrice Tourre -- the Goldman employee who helped structure the deal and market it to investors -- mislead ACA into believing that Paulson was taking a long equity position on the ABACUS 2007-AC1 CDO, when in fact Goldman knew all along that Paulson had intended to short it.

Here is the SEC's primary evidence:

On January 10, 2007, Tourre emailed ACA a “Transaction Summary” that included a description of Paulson as the “Transaction Sponsor” and referenced a “Contemplated Capital Structure” with a “[0]% - [9]%: pre-committed first loss” as part of the Paulson deal structure. The description of this [0]% - [9]% tranche at the bottom of the capital structure was consistent with the description of an equity tranche and ACA reasonably believed it to be a reference to the equity tranche. In fact, GS&Co never intended to market to anyone a “[0]% - [9]%” first loss equity tranche in this transaction.

As the key evidence against Tourre, this seems pretty weak. The SEC is essentially quoting one phrase from an email out of context. I suspect that the upshot of this case will depend largely on whether Tourre ever explicitly stated that Paulson would be investing in the CDO alongside ACA. The actual wording of this email matters immensely.

J.K. Rowling on Incentives and Single Mothers

2010-04-19T14:18:00.008-04:00

In a recent op-ed in the London Times, author J.K. Rowling slamed Tory leader David Cameron for his apparent hostility toward single mothers.

Rowling writes:

Yesterday’s Conservative manifesto makes it clear that the Tories aim for less governmental support for the needy, and more input from the “third sector”: charity. It also reiterates the flagship policy so proudly defended by David Cameron last weekend, that of “sticking up for marriage”. To this end, they promise a half-a-billion pound tax break for lower-income married couples, working out at £150 per annum.
I accept that my friends and I might be atypical. Maybe you know people who would legally bind themselves to another human being, for life, for an extra £150 a year? Perhaps you were contemplating leaving a loveless or abusive marriage, but underwent a change of heart on hearing about a possible £150 tax break? Anything is possible; but somehow, I doubt it.

Rowling goes on to detail the trials of single-motherhood, and portray Cameron as out of touch with the lower-class and ignorant of nontraditional family dynamics.

But what is Cameron really saying that’s so controversial?

There are a number of things that bother me about Rowling’s piece. While it’s true that some children suffer because of acrimonious marriages, the overwhelming amount of research suggests that – all other things being equal – kids are substantially better off in stable two-parent households. Asserting that two-parent households are better for children in the aggregate isn’t the same as demonizing single parents. It's simply acknowledging what seems to be the empirical reality. Rowling is wrong to misconstrue Cameron's statements as some sort of crusade to smear single moms.

The central complaint of Cameron's “sticking up for marriage” campaign is that the British welfare system provides a fiscal motive for single-parenthood, while the tax system fails to encourage matrimony in any meaningful way. Since we know that kids from two-parent households perform better – even when controlling for a range of other demographic factors – this makes little sense. Conservatives argue that we need to provide parents with more of an incentive to stay together for their children.

The real question, then, is whether you believe that people actually respond to economic incentives – even if those incentives seem relatively meager. Rowling is very skeptical, primarily because she doesn’t believe couples will stay together for such a trivial amount of money. Afterall, why would any woman base her decision to get married on the how much she would receive in tax breaks?

Of course, this is a pretty silly oversimplification. And whether she knows it or not, Rowling is actually challenging decades of microeconomic research (with broad theoretical underpinnings) that shows people do respond to these kinds of incentives, at least on the margin. Certainly, no one is expecting – or hoping – that an abused wife will remain with her husband so that she can take advantage of a small tax break. But what about a young couple that recently had a child out of wedlock and is wavering on the marriage issue? Or a couple that has lived together for years and never thought it was “worth it” to get married?

What bothers me most about Rowling’s piece is her ignorance of microeconomic theory – an ignorance that I believe is widespread. Microeconomic analysis rests on two primary assumptions: people respond to incentives, and those responses can be measured on the margin. This is the central thesis of books like Freakonomics.

To argue that people won’t respond to a tax incentive because you can’t picture them responding to it strikes me as a pretty weak and ineffectual argument, particularly when you're railing against such a widely-held and widely-supported proposition.

But, then again, Rowling has never been very good at economics.

Questioning the Tea Party's Motives

2010-04-17T14:34:00.003-04:00

Andrew Sullivan has a great piece on why he distrusts the Tea Party Movement:

[Tea Party members] have no genuine proposals to reduce spending and taxation. They seem very protective of Medicare and Social Security - and their older age bracket underlines this. They also seem primed for maximal neo-imperial reach, backing the nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, favoring war against Iran, etc. Only Ron Paul, peace be upon him, extends his big government critique to the military-industrial-ideological complex.

So they are truly not serious in policy terms, and it behooves the small government right to grapple with this honestly. They both support lower taxation and yet bemoan the fact that so many Americans do not pay any income tax. They want to cut spending on trivial matters while enabling the entitlement and defense behemoths to go on gobbling up Americans' wealth. And that lack of seriousness is complemented by a near-fanatical cultural alienation from the modern world.

. . .

When they propose cuts in Medicare, means-testing Social Security, a raising of the retirement age and a cut in defense spending, I'll take them seriously and wish them well.

Until then, I'll treat them with the condescending contempt they have thus far deserved.

Let me be the first to say: I propose cuts to Medicare, progressive price-indexing of Social Security benefits, a raising of the retirement age, and reductions in defense spending. And, also, higher taxes on both the middle class and the wealthy.

Yes, Andrew, there are people like me out there on the electoral fringes.

Taxes, Taxes, Taxes

2010-04-16T13:27:00.008-04:00

Ezra writes:

[W]hile it's true that we can't solve all our fiscal problems by taxing the rich, we can solve more of them than people realize, as inequality has made the rich a lot richer than people realize. In 2007, the top 1 percent of households accounted for 23.5 percent of the nation's income. That is to say, for every dollar of income in America, the top 1 percent got about a quarter and the rest of us split the other 76 cents.

What are the policy implications of continuing to solve our problems by taxing the top one percent? Of course we can set the top marginal rates as high was we want. The important question is whether this is a good idea.

Ezra is correct that the richest households accounted for 23.5 percent of the nation's income in 2007. But as the Tax Foundation points out, the top one percent of earners also paid 40.4 percent of all income taxes in 2007.

Is it really smart to have such a large portion of our federal income tax revenue coming from such a narrow base? Of course not. In fact, it's more dangerous than many people realize, since earners in top one percent tend to share many common characteristics.

The truth is that it's unwise for the federal government to get most of its revenue from such a narrow subset of the population for the same reason that it's unwise for an insurance company to cover mostly houses in a particular neighborhood. It's bad to have so many correlated risks. You need to diversify.

But how do you diversify when the wealthy have so much and the rest of us have so little?

Debates over tax policy are often framed in terms of rich versus poor. There are, as John Edwards insisted during the 2008 Democratic Primary, "two Americas." President Obama has arbitrarily decided that the division between these two Americas begins around the $200,000 income level. Anyone below this level should be exempt from federal tax increases, while anyone above this level should experience substantial rate increases.

Sounds good to most of us. But is it really fair that those making between, say, $30,000 and $199,000 should be insulated from any kind of federal tax hikes? Is it smart to tell so many people that they can have more services without having to pay more money? Is it good policy?

Politically, it may be wise to tell 95 percent of Americans that they should never expect to see their taxes raised. But, outside the world of electoral gimmickry, narrowing the tax base so dramatically isn't just stupid, it's essentially fiscal suicidal . . . .

Task of the Day

2010-04-15T08:56:00.003-04:00

If you read one thing today, read this.

So sad, but such a great piece . . .

Science and Morality

2010-04-07T11:27:00.015-04:00

Sean Carroll -- a prominent cosmologist at CalTech -- has written an excellent critique of Sam Harris's TED talk on science and human values.

In his comments at TED, Harris contends that the perceived distinction between science and moral judgment is "an illusion," which has led many secular thinkers to embrace a dangerous kind of moral relativism. According to Harris, scientific truths can tell us an awful lot about the well-being of conscious creatures and, as a result, inform our understanding of human morality. The "facts" will point to the superiority certain moral frameworks and tell us which system of morality fail to promote well-being.

Caroll takes exception to this view:

Morality and science operate in very different ways. In science, our judgments are ultimately grounded in data; when it comes to values we have no such recourse. If I believe in the Big Bang model and you believe in the Steady State cosmology, I can point to the successful predictions of the cosmic background radiation, light element nucleosynthesis, evolution of large-scale structure, and so on. Eventually you would either agree or be relegated to crackpot status. But what if I believe that the highest moral good is to be found in the autonomy of the individual, while you believe that the highest good is to maximize the utility of some societal group? What are the data we can point to in order to adjudicate this disagreement?

In his extended response to Carroll and other critics, Harris argues that morality must arise from a certain ethical premises regarding the value of "well-being," just as science must be premised on the value of logical coherence. Thus, we can and should dismiss as "imbeciles" those who argue against the premise that well-being the fundamental value upon which our moral judgments must be based.

As Carroll rightly points out in his second post, however, Harris seems to be straying off course. People clearly disagree over what constitutes human "well-being." Harris cleverly bypasses this point by assuming that there are - or can be - definitive measures of well-being.

The bigger problem with Harris's argument, though, is that he hasn't really solved the problem that he identifies: namely, that moral subjectivity leads to a dangerous kind of moral equivalence, which ultimately jusfies immoral actions.

My own view is that you generally can't convince people to change their minds on fundamental moral questions by simply asserting the objectivity of premises with which they disagree. You must convince people by finding common premises and deducing your conclusions therefrom. Telling your intellectual opponents that their morality is objectively wrong based on our scientific understanding of the world doesn't make the world less dangerous. Nor does it automatically lead to moral consensus.

Carroll explains:

The problem, obviously, is that we don’t all agree on the assumptions, as far as morality is concerned. Saying that everyone, or at least all right-thinking people, really want to increase human well-being seems pretty reasonable, but when you take the real world seriously it falls to pieces. And to see that, we don’t have to contrast the values of fine upstanding bourgeois Americans with those of Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer. There are plenty of fine upstanding people — you can easily find them on the [I]nternet! — who think that human well-being is maximized by an absolute respect for individual autonomy, where people have equal access to primary goods but are given the chance to succeed or fail in life on their own. Other people think that a more collective approach is called for, and it is appropriate for some people to cede part of their personal autonomy — for example, by paying higher taxes — in the name of the greater good.

I think the issue of redistributive taxation offers an excellent challenge to Harris's view of objective morality. After all, the most controversial moral questions often exist in the realm of the social sciences rather than the physical sciences.

In economics, there remains an important distinction between positive analysis and normative analysis. Positive analysis seeks to explain the world as it is, while normative analysis seeks to describe the world as it ought to look. (This distinction can be traced back to David Hume's is/ought problem.)

Nowhere is the barrier between positive analysis and normative analysis more apparent than in discussions of efficiency and equity. Economists often explain that positive economics can inform us about the efficiency trade-offs from redistributive taxation, but it cannot tell us anything about the appropriate level of equity in a society. Different economists will come different conclusions regarding the "best" level of taxation in a society based on their view of equity.

When we look at different kinds of policy interventions, each of us employs her our own evaluative criteria. You may be willing to accept more inequality in order to create more economic growth, while I may be willing to accept a lower level of growth in order to achieve greater equality. No matter how much data we collect - or how many econometric models we construct - empirical investigation can never tell us which of these moral preferences is correct in an objective sense.

The only thing that we can do is try to agree on certain ethical premises and go from there . . .

The Gender Wage Gap

2010-04-01T12:38:00.022-04:00

There has been an interesting discussion over at Andrew Sullivan's blog on individual choice and the gender wage gap, so I figured I'd add some context and some further thoughts.

There is no doubt that the gender wage gap has narrowed over the past several decades. Full-time working women now make 80 percent of what their male counterparts make -- a figure that is likely to increase as male-dominated manufacturing jobs become increasingly obsolete.

In spite of this progress, though, there remains an enormous income disparity between the sexes. What could be causing this inequality?

The challenge for social scientists has been determining what portion of the 20 percent wage gap is due to discrimination, and what portion is due to individual life decisions. A simple, side-by-side comparison doesn't tell you much about discrimination. It only tells you that there is a gender disparity, which could be explained by any number of things.

One way to address the discrimination question is to use a statistical technique called regression analysis that holds other variables constant in considering the impact of gender on wages. This technique is sometimes called gender-wage"decomposition." When social scientists use regression to control for other relevant job factors -- the number of hours worked, for example -- the wage gap between men and women narrows dramatically, but does not disappear.

The most reasonable conclusion to draw from this is that many individual-level choices contribute to wage differences between men and women in the aggregate. Discrimination may account for some small portion of that difference, but it certainly not all of it.

Of course, this doesn't quite settle the controversy.

A far more complicated question for policymakers is whether women's choices are really independent, or simply a function of the social pressures and cultural dynamics that unwittingly drive many of our actions. Do women who choose to work fewer hours so that they can spend more time at home with their children make this choice freely, or does society compel them to make it?

There are no easy answers to this question. People are is complex, and "society" is far from monolithic. We can't quantify the millions of subtle forces that influence our decisions and bias our perceptions. We don't know what causes some men to choose work over family and some women to choose family over work. We also don't know what causes some women to choose a work over family and some men to choose family over work.

One thing that we do know, however, is that men will never have to endure the months of physical and emotional misery associated with pregnancy. Men will never have to experience the pain of childbirth, or the stress of waking up night after night to breast-feed a newborn baby. And because of this -- ironically and unfairly -- men will always be paid higher wages.

No matter how much society progresses, the gender wage gap will never vanish completely. There will always be some women who choose to have children, and these women will have to make sacrifices for that child that a father will never have to make. This doesn't mean that men shouldn't take on more responsibility for raising children. But, in the aggregate, full-time working women who become pregnant will miss more workdays, be less productive, and see a marginal decline in wages as a result.

I'm not sure whether this is fair or not, but I simply can't see any fair way to correct the problem. We can give women the option not to have children, and attempt to remove any stigma that may be attached to the "career woman" or the stay-at-home dad. Beyond that, I don't know how to proceed without simply generating further inequity.

Any thoughts?

Violence Against Members of Congress?

2010-03-24T23:44:00.011-04:00

Let's hope this isn't actually what it looks like . . . the attempted murder of a congressman's brother.

In general, I think the portrayal of Tea Party protesters has been a bit exaggerated. From what I've seen, most of the people who attend the rallies just seem like run-of-the-mill partisan activists. A lot of the rhetoric that I've heard is outrageous, but most of it isn't bigoted or overtly threatening.

Of course, I don't work on the Hill, and many of the staffers with whom I've spoken have had to endure at least a few menacing telephone calls.

I realized that some Tea Party protesters have said and done things that are appalling. But I really do think that there is a way to condemn these few without asserting that the entire movement is composed of bigots and terrorists. Many of the protesters who I've seen strike me as frustrated partisans, who simply want to voice their disapproval with a Democratic government they regard as their ideological adversary.

In my view, they should be allowed to protest as loudly and fervently as they wish to, as long as their actions aren't directly causing or inciting violence. Writing something mean on a sign isn't the same as cutting someone's gas line. Protesters at anti-war rallies routinely wrote vicious, hateful, and even threatening things about President Bush. However, these rallies rarely provoked actual violence - and, unsurprisingly, they were rarely condemned by Democratic members of Congress.

This doesn't excuse any real act of violence or genuine threat of violence. But freedom of speech is essential, even if that speech strikes you as nasty and vitriolic.

What I'd really like to see is a bit more willingness on the part of Republicans to discourage violence and lawless conduct, and a bit more willingness on the part of Democrats to tolerate the anger displayed by members of the Tea Party movement.

They're allowed to be angry and say mean things and draw pictures of guns. They're not allowed to throw bricks through windows and cut people's gas lines.

Update: House Republican Eric Cantor says that someone shot a bullet through the window of his district office in Richmond, VA.

Cantor blames the Democratic leadership, arguing that they have used threats of violence against Democratic lawmakers to "fan the flames" of violence against Republican lawmakers.

This is getting very meta, isn't it?

I assume that the Democrats will soon respond that Cantor's wild accusations about the role that the Democratic leadership played in stirring up violence against Republican members could easily incite more violence against Democratic members . . . .

What's the Deal with CBO's Scoring?

2010-03-20T11:02:00.005-04:00

There's been a lot of wonky discussion about the CBO's scoring methods lately. The other day, Ezra Klein defended the CBO against conservative critics, insisting that the agency's costs estimates represent the "best guess of the town's most rigorous guesser."

Ezra writes:

[B]e very careful with any criticism of CBO that seems to be merited by a particular score rather than a particular methodological difficulty. To put that slightly differently, does anyone think that conservatives would be squawking if CBO had disappointed Democrats by saying the bill would save less money than either the House or Senate incarnations? If not, then keep in mind that this is a political, not technical, dispute. To establish my own credentials on this, here's the post I wrote defending the CBO when liberals were arguing that it was underestimating health-care reform's savings.

I think Ezra is a bit disingenuous when he pretends that he's never engaged in partisan attacks of specific CBO cost estimates. (See here, for example.) But there is a much bigger criticism of Ezra's point, which Greg Mankiw articulates very well here.

By convention, the CBO uses something called "static" budget scoring to determine a bill's impact on the federal budget. This kind of scoring essentially disregards the macroeconomic implications of federal actions.

Here is how former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin explained it:

For every piece of legislation . . . the budgetary impacts are estimated using the same, unchanging baseline projections of overall gross domestic product (GDP) and its aggregate income components. Specifically, the estimates do not include the effects of legislation on the supply of labor or on saving (and hence on overall economic growth); they do not include effects on income that might result from the influence outlays and taxes, say, may have on technological progress; they do not include the increases or decreases in output that are caused by the way subsidies or taxes reallocate resources among various activities; they do not include the effects on national saving and other incentive effects that result from the government’s financing of the budget change; and they do not include the income and employment effects that arise from the impact of fiscal policy on aggregate spending in the economy in a recession.

To steal a premise from Paul Ryan, this means that the CBO's current scoring methods would assume no macroeconomic impact if the federal government increased spending by, say, 50 trillion dollars . . . just as long as that new spending was offset by 50 trillion dollars in tax increases.

The alternative to static scoring is some kind of "dynamic" budget analysis, which would account for macroeconomic feedback effects rather than simply holding baselines GDP estimates constant. This would give us a much more accurate cost estimate for large policy changes.

Under the current assumptions, we're virtually guaranteed to get an faulty score.

Saletan Makes a Strange Argument

2010-03-15T22:15:00.008-04:00

I love Will Saletan, but this doesn't make any sense to me:

Democracy isn't about doing what might sell in the next election. It's about doing what you promised in the last one. If you're in Congress, and if you think this bill is good for the country, vote for it. Even if it costs you your job.

Losing your job is a scary idea. It's natural to look for a way out. It's also natural to rationalize your self-preservation. You aren't really caving; you're just serving the public by heeding the polls. Isn't that a legislator's job?

No. It isn't. Your job description is in the nation's founding documents. The Constitution specifies representative democracy, not direct democracy. The Declaration of Independence explains that to secure citizens' rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." The consent authorizes powers, not bills. And it precedes the exercise of those powers. Your job now is to use your powers wisely.

This is the only time I've ever heard anyone use the phrase "deriving their . . . powers from the consent of the governed" to justify passing legislation that flies in the face of public opinion. By Saletan's logic, "consent" must only be given at the ballot box. Once the voters have chosen a representative, public involvement becomes immaterial. Representatives should be ruled by their individual consciences, not the whims of the people.

But if that's true, why did the the Founders see fit to draw up a Bill of Rights which - among other things - guarantees the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances? And why has the Supreme Court repeatedly interpreted this clause to mean the right to lobby your legislators? Further, why is this right considered among the "fundamental rights" which have been selectively incorporated to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?

I think Saletan's argument is a little silly. We have a representative democracy, sure, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be a participatory democracy. People should be involved at every stage of the process because the decisions that their government makes affect their daily lives.

Sullivan Defends Beck?

2010-03-15T12:08:00.003-04:00

Andrew Sullivan offers a heavily qualified defense of Glenn Beck's pronouncement that Christians should reject their church if it preaches "social justice" or "economic justice."

Money quote:

I have to say I'm going to side a tiny bit with Beck on this matter.

It seems to me that although helping the poor is obviously a critical facet of Jesus' teaching, it is a legitimate matter of debate how to help the poor.

Socialism, for example, clearly does not help the poor: it just makes everyone poorer. It can spring from envy, not charity. It can instill dependency, not self-respect. And charity is not something anyone can delegate to an institution. A state cannot feel love and cannot be redeemed. Only a human being can. Sometimes, an over-weening welfare state can actually remove the capacity of many people to be personally generous by taxing their worldly goods before they have a chance to give them away.

My own view is that there should be a collective and strong safety net for the poor, combined with, for Christians, a very powerful, indeed binding, injunction to give and give generously to others, and to take a personal interest in the needs of others. There's a balance here, in other words, between social justice and statist redistributionism. And while Beck is obviously out of line - the Catholic Church's teachings on social justice could not be further removed from Ayn Rand - I'm suspicious of the dangers of taking the virtue of social justice and turning it into the system of socialism.

Amen.

Beck's statement is, I think, verifiably false. But the response to Beck has been a little overstated. Saying that Beck is wrong isn't quite the same as saying that free-market ideology is fundamentally un-Christian. I'm certainly not a Biblical scholar, but I think the conservative position on social justice is fully reconcilable with the message of Jesus.

A person can support social justice, while still opposing federal policies that seek to mandate social justice through income redistribution or price controls.

Pornography on the Left and the Right

2010-03-15T09:31:00.005-04:00

Ryan Sager at True/Slant looks at the research on pornography and social depravation:

While the question of free speech is philosophical, the question of whether porn does any social harm is an empirical one. And the data is pretty clear: Pornography either reduces sex crime by giving males a non-violent outlet for excess sexual impulses, or it has no effect.

I find this result pretty unsurprising, but of course I tend toward a libertarian perspective on social issues.

The debate over pornography has always made for strange bedfellows. Feminists usually oppose it, arguing that sexual objectification of women leads to violence against women. Social conservatives typically see it as a gateway to infidelity and a threat to strong families. For years, both groups have maintained that the research bolsters their argument, pointing to (among other things) the methodologically flawed Meese Report as evidence of the connection between porn and various social ills. But most of the recent research suggests quite the opposite.

While it’s impossible to produce a perfect study on the subject, it seems fairly clear at this point that pornography is not the evil that many on the left and right insisted it was.

The implications for feminism are quite profound. If pornography reduces violence against women, isn’t it something that should be promoted? Should visceral opposition to sexual objectification really trump empirical reality?

Social conservatives confront a similar dilemma. The crime rate has long been an important metric for those on the right. Many conservatives have argued that pornography leads to antisocial behavior, which ultimately leads to higher incidents of crime. But if the opposite is true – if pornography actually reduces crime – shouldn’t social conservatives rethink their position?

I realize that there are broader points of opposition among feminists and conservatives, but at the very least, I think that both groups need to seriously wrestle with their ideological preconceptions on this issue.

The Politics of Good and Evil

2010-03-15T08:06:00.002-04:00

This might just be Ross's best column yet.

Read it, read it, read it.

Krugman on Health Care Myths

2010-03-12T08:18:00.010-05:00

Paul Krugman had a good op-ed in yesterday's NYT.

He rails against what he deems the three big "myths" about the health care bill, namely: that it's a government take-over of the the health care sector, that it does nothing to control costs, and that it's fiscally irresponsible.

I agree with the first two points, but the third is kind of a bait-and-switch. It's true that the bill would not be anything like a "government take-over." And certainly there are some cost-control measures in the bill, even though it's unclear whether the most important measures will really be inserted into the final version.

In regard to fiscal responsibility, Krugman argues that even some of the more cynical projections show that reform would only raise total health care spending by about one percent, while expanding coverage to tens of millions of Americans. This, he suggests, is a "good deal."

Covering tens of millions of Americans while only adding one percent to total health care spending does sound like a pretty amazing bargain. The problem is that, if the projections are even remotely accurate, we're already on an unsustainable path. What we need to do is bend the cost curve down dramatically.

One percent would be fine if health care spending weren't expected to envelop the federal budget and substantially weaken our economy over the next several decades. According to CBO's intermediate projections, health care spending could reach nearly 50 percent of GDP by 2080.

Telling people that, after reform, health care spending would only reach 50.5 percent of GDP is not very comforting.

An Open Letter to Andrew Sullivan

2010-03-11T16:41:00.003-05:00

Andrew,

You recently wrote:

The explosion in medical costs since 2000 or 2003, along with the brutal recession, and a greater awareness of the real suffering this has created, has also convinced me that systematic reform is necessary, as long as it is fiscally responsible.

This comes after a long string of posts in which you've encouraged Congress to "pass the damn bill." I understand the sentiment, but it still seems like you’re missing the point.

I agree that any genuine conservative should support a “fiscally responsible” health care reform plan that expands health coverage to millions of Americans. You’re right to criticize congressional Republicans who – in spite of their protestations to the contrary – seem to be aligned against any kind of meaningful reform.

But there are legitimate concerns as to whether this bill would actually be deficit-reducing or even deficit-neutral. Many of the key cost-saving provisions will likely be excluded (or diluted) if the bill is pushed through in reconciliation. And even in its current form, the Senate bill seems to contain an awful lot of cost-saving gimmickry that was thrown in to achieve an attractive score from CBO.

I’m not sure how you can read David’s latest column without at least pausing to consider whether the kind of systematic reform that we’re likely to get is truly going to control costs or simply create another large, unsustainable entitlement.

You continue to assert that the bill is “fiscally responsible” without – as far as I can tell – seriously addressing the concerns of those who suspect otherwise.

What's the deal?

Update: Is Andrew becoming an ideologue on this issue?

This response to Megan McArdle's criticism makes absolutely no sense to me. Are we looking at the same scatter plots?

Maybe I'm missing something . . .

Ezra Klein v. Paul Ryan

2010-03-05T16:19:00.002-05:00

Ezra Klein and Paul Ryan recently had an excellent back-and-forth on the health care bill.

f you're looking for some seriously wonky discussion of Paul Ryan's comments at the Blair House Summit, see Ezra's critism and Ryan's response.

Ross Douthat also offers his thoughts here.

Will Repealing DADT Damage Our Military Readiness?

2010-03-05T11:16:00.016-05:00

I've written before about what I see as the proper way to think about Don't Ask, Don't Tell:

It's undeniable that DADT has had an effect on and recruitment rates. However, if this is a primary concern for policymakers, then the real question is: How would repealing DADT impact retention and recruitment rates?

Today, the NYT offers a well-reasoned op-ed by retired Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak.

McPeak makes a similar point regarding recruitment and retention, but goes a bit further to make his case. If anti-discrimination legislation applies to the military, he asks, must exclusions based on physical or mental characteristics -- weight, height, IQ -- also be overturned?

I'm not sure of the legalities here, but practically I think McPeak is taking his argument too far. There is a big difference between denying homosexuals the right to serve openly and waiving weight and height requirements. (In fact, it's important to note that the military has eased its standards in recent years because of declining recruitment.)

Homosexuality may impact unit cohesion, but it's not akin to severe asthma, for example, which might make the soldier unfit for duty. Being a homosexual does not make an individual any less qualified to serve.

Over the past few year, the military has issued more waivers for things like criminal conduct than ever before -- without, to my knowledge, seriously considering the impact on unit morale. If we're interested in consistency, why hasn't the military put more effort into studying whether soldiers with criminal records could potentially undermine unit cohesion or reduce military readiness? McPeak makes no mention of this.

I do think that McPeak is correct to suggest that the method of cost accounting employed by advocates of repeal is extremely one-sided. He also makes the important point that "many . . . removals would have occurred in any case, since they were the result of unacceptable conduct and not just a declaration of sexual orientation." But he's simply wrong to imply that standards on sexuality are comparable to other kinds of enlistment standards.

McPeak's second argument focuses on the history of desegregation in the military:

There is also some misunderstanding about President Harry Truman’s executive order of 1948, calling for equality in the armed forces, which is often cited as a model that President Obama should follow. No doubt Truman’s action was a landmark in the civil rights struggle. However, the order was not actually sufficient inducement for the armed forces to do the right thing.
At the time, the Air Force had prepared itself for racial integration and its leadership pushed hard to make it work. As a consequence, the integration of blacks in the Air Force is one of the great success stories of the civil rights movement.

The Army and Navy, however, were models of passive resistance. The Air Force had nearly completed integration before the Army really started. Technically, Truman’s order made no reference to ending segregation, speaking only of equality of opportunity and treatment regardless of “race, color, religion or national origin.” And the Army, at first, argued it was in full compliance. Its subsequent integration was largely forced on it by combat losses in all-white units during the first months of the Korean War. The Navy continued much of its policy of tokenism into the 1960s, with a black steward corps still waiting tables 10 years after the executive order.

Harry Truman did not simply pass his hand over the Pentagon and bring about racial justice. Only after the leaders of each service committed their institutions did we make real progress.
Thus allowing an openly gay presence in ranks will be very difficult until we have committed leadership for it. I certainly had trouble figuring out how to provide such leadership in 1993. While I believed all people are created equal, I did not believe such equality extended to all ideas or all cultures. And since I didn’t know how to advocate the assimilation of this particular form of diversity, I saw no way to prevent it from undermining unit cohesion.

I think this is key argument in favor of caution, and one of the reasons why an incremental approach -- perhaps selectively repealing aspects of DADT and gauging the impact on unit cohesion -- may be more prudent than immediately scrapping the entire policy.

Overall, I think that McPeak makes some important points that advocates of repeal have to seriously grapple with. I've said before that I think opponents of DADT should stick to making the moral argument. I still believe that, but perhaps some honest consideration of the policy implications might also help to create common ground on this issue.

Have Americans become more liberal?

2010-03-03T23:48:00.005-05:00

The truth is, I don't know if Americans are becoming more liberal or more conservative. But I think one major miscalculation on the left has been interpreting Americans’ dissatisfaction with the Bush administration as resentment toward “conservatism” writ large. In fact, the opposite seems to hold true.

Whether they knew it or not, I believe that many Americans were reacting against the large-scale changes imposed by a Republican administration that was anything but conservative. It wasn’t a liberal impulse that caused Americans to become disenchanted with the Iraq War. It was genuine conservatism – a distrust of government power and large-scale foreign interventions – that ultimately compelled so many of us to abandon our support for President Bush.

“Change” was the theme of the 2008 campaign, but the underlying message was much simpler: putting things back to normal. The lesson that should be gleaned is not that Americans favor progressive – rather than “conservative” – policy solutions, but that Americans are skeptical of dramatic shifts in policy.

I think this is a big part of the reason why we’ve see support for many of the individual provisions in the health care reform bills that have been proposed in Congress, but an overall sense of opposition to comprehensive approach that would generate such sweeping legislation. Incremental reforms are fine, but package them together and you’ve gone too far.

In an era of change, conservatism makes sense. We are, after all, creatures of memory.

To quote Andrew Sullivan:

[I]n those moments of confrontation with time, we are all conservatives. Sure, we all move on. In America, the future is always more imperative than the past. But the past lingers; and America, for all its restlessness, or perhaps because of its restlessness, is a very conservative place. . . . Intrinsic to the human experience – what separates us from animals –is the memory of things past, and the fashioning of that memory into a self-conscious identity. So loss imprints itself on our minds and souls and forms us. It’s part of what we are.

There's a lot more to this, of course. In many ways, America is also a deeply progressive place. We've always had a complex political culture, and we've always tried to have it both ways.

Anyway, just thought I'd think "outloud" for a bit. I'll try to write more on this later.

Update: In his column today, David Brooks makes a similar point about the Tea Party movement:

[B]oth the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.
That idea was rejected in the 1960s by people who put their faith in unrestrained passion and zealotry. The New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the left, now the right.

As I recently explained to a friend, modern-day conservatism traces its roots to Edmund Burke. But Burkean conservatism is nothing like today's Movement Conservatism, which seems to have spawned the Tea Parties. Burke was skeptical of large-scale policy changes, favoring an incremental approach. Many contemporary conservatives seem to have abandoned this skepticism, as they routinely employ reactionary language and endorse dramatic policy shifts. Today, congressional Republicans appear to be far more focused on achieving specific ideological priorities, even when that requires massive federal legislation or massive changes in the status quo. It's not conservative to totally dismantle the Social Security system, for example.

I think it's good to be skeptical of sweeping policy changes, but it's also important to acknowledge that even that skepticism must be questioned regularly. For example, would slow, incremental changes have been appropriate during the Civil Rights Era, or are there some issues so morally pressing that we need to push for immediate, broad-based changes in society?

Belated Thoughts on the Health Care Summit

2010-02-27T10:25:00.011-05:00

FactCheck has a rundown of some of the more egregious errors and distortions here.

I think the president came off looking pretty bad in his dust up with John McCain. I was particularly taken aback by this response:

We can have a debate about process or we can have a debate about how we're going to help the American people at this point. And the latter debate is the one I think they care about a little bit more.

I don't know whether the "American people" concerned about product more than process at this point, but the president's snarky dismissal of McCain's point set me on edge.

One of the reasons that I voted for Senator Obama was because he seemed to actually care about the process. Transparency was one of the central planks in his platform. He continually railed against special-interests and backroom deal-making. He called for honesty and integrity in politics. And he eschewed the Machiavellian tactics of the Clinton campaign.

For him to now play the world-wise pragmatist is a bit disconcerting. Process is, in my view, just as essential as product.

And McCain is right -- there was no justification for provisions like the "Cornhusker Kickback" or any of the myriad of exemptions and special privileges that Democratic lawmakers carved out for their individual states.

But it's not just the sweetheat deals. I also have to agree with Ross Douthat here:

I look at liberal commentators and see a group that’s intent on being on-side against Republicans, and that’s willing to downplay significant weaknesses in major legislation (be it the stimulus, cap-and-trade, or now health care) in the quest to get things done.

I understand the frustration that most progressives feel. This has been a long, drawn-out debate, and many of the Republican attacks have been unjustified and unsportsmanlike. John Boehner's remarks toward the end of the Summit -- which seemed to begin magnanimously, but quickly descended into fear-mongering -- perfectly illustrate why so many on the left want to see health care reform forced through in reconciliation.

But I fear that, while Republicans appear to be balking at everything, Democrats remain single-mindedly focused on passing something -- regardless of whether it's good policy. Both parties deserve immense criticism here. The Republican antics are despicable, but the response from Democrats has been shameful . . . and politically troubling to those of us who actually care about how things get done.

It's just as dangerous to be overzealous as obstructionist.

On Rape and False Reporting

2010-02-19T10:48:00.005-05:00

This is probably the best and most balanced article I've read on the subject of false rape accusations:

But isn't the rate of false rape charges an empirical question, with a specific answer that isn't vulnerable to ideological twisting? Yes and no. There has been a burst of research on this subject. Some of it is careful, but much of it is questionable. While most of the good studies converge at a rate of about 8 percent to 10 percent for false rape charges, the literature isn't quite definitive enough to stamp out the far higher estimates. And even if we go by the lower numbers, there's the question of interpretation. If one in 10 charges of rape is made up, is that a dangerously high rate or an acceptably low one? To put this in perspective, if we use the Bureau of Justice Statistics that show about 200,000 rapes in 2008, we could be looking at as many as 20,000 false accusations.

. . .

We're left to draw the following conclusion: False allegations of rape aren't rampant. But they don't have to be to cause terrible trouble. This is a problem that a men's rights movement shouldn't trump up. And also one that feminists can't dismiss.

Hat tip: Connor Friedersdorf.

Olbermann, Race, and the Right

2010-02-18T16:45:00.013-05:00

I'm sometimes asked why I spend my time criticising Keith Olbermann when conservative commentators like Sean Hannity are much more belligerent and over-the-top. The truth is that I can't help but hold pundits on the left to a higher standard of integrity.

To me, a man like Sean Hannity is an obvious parody. His irrationalism is so transparent that it's just not worth illuminating. I don't know anyone who thinks that Sean Hannity is reasonable or intelligent, and perhaps more importantly, I don't know anyone who takes any of his arguments seriously. Even if I did, pointing out that a public option is not socialism would quickly get tiresome, just as the constant run-down of Sarah Palin's distortions came to occupy far too much of Andrew Sullivan's blogging time.

Of course, this doesn't mean that there aren't members of the electorate who eat up every morsel that Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin spit out. It just means that I don't willingly associate with any of those people.

I do, however, routinely associate with people who believe that Keith Olbermann is both intelligent and reasonable. Many of my friends and classmates seem to find Olbermann's arguments extremely seductive. Some even contend that Olbermann's points are "irrefutable."

The clip above -- in which Olbermann casually remarks that "the whole of the anger against government movement" is predicated solely on racism -- illustrates why I continue to go after Olbermann.

Is it really fair to charge that everyone who is angry with the Obama administration -- everyone attending the Tea Party rallies -- is motivated by racism? Does Olbermann really provide the evidence to substantiate such a sweeping charge?

Olbermann's conclusion rests on three central propositions. First, there are undeniably racist sentiments being voiced during many of the Tea Party rallies. Second, the concerns of the those in the Tea Party movement are largely illegitimate. Third, black faces are virtually absent from these protests.

The initial premise obviously does not, on its own, support the conclusion. (This would be an example of the fallacy of composition.)

The second premise is a bit more enticing. Why weren't the people who are now clamoring for deficit reduction acting out during the Bush administration? Does this apparent hypocrisy on its own suggest that racism is lurking beneath the surface? There are a number of sensible reponses to this. You could argue that the deficits during the Bush administration were not even remotely comparable to the projected deficits under President Obama. You could argue that conservatives were more comfortable with wartime deficits than with deficits brought on by stimulus spending and entitlement extensions. But I think the most practical response is that partisan hypocrisy simply does not imply racism. In fact, if partisan double standards are evidence of bigotry, then Keith Olbermann is doesn't come off looking so good.

The final premise is facially absurd. The Tea Party Movement is clearly dominated by conservatives. And while it's true that many black Americans tend to be socially conservative, there hasn't been a strong black presence in the conservative movement for well over two decades. Would anyone expect to see black faces at an anti-Clinton rally during the 1990s? While it may be legitimate to criticize the lack of diversity on the right, there are many reasons why black voters' preferences are no longer aligned with the Republican Party, only some of which have to do with past racial discrimination. Either way, this does not offer any thing like the kind of evidence that Olbermann would need to substantiate his across-the-board accusation.

Olbermann's comments begin sensibly, but ultimately devolve into an unfair assault on an entire group of people. The basic problem is that Olbermann can't seem to bring himself to root out racism where it may exist -- and I believe that it clearly does exists in some corners of the Tea Party Movement -- without extrapolating his arguments far beyond reason. Certainly, we should be condemning the vicious attacks against the president. But is it fair to smear all those who engage in peaceful protests against the administration as racists?

I obviously can't read Olbermann's mind, but I think Olbermann legitimately believes that the right has no meaningful arguments. Olbermann may be smarter than Sean Hannity, but like Sean Hannity, Olbermann believes that he has the One Truth on his side.

It's easy to see why he can't seem to bring himself to acknowledge that any of those who disagree with him could possibly be acting in good faith.

Krugman Gets Nostalgic

2010-02-08T09:17:00.007-05:00

Paul Krugman has a good column today railing against secret holds -- a procedure that enables a small number of Senators to temporarily (and anonymously) block a motion from reaching the floor.

No one really seems to be too fond of holds . . . until they're in the minority:

What gives individual senators this kind of power? Much of the Senate’s business relies on unanimous consent: it’s difficult to get anything done unless everyone agrees on procedure. And a tradition has grown up under which senators, in return for not gumming up everything, get the right to block nominees they don’t like.

Krugman's point is well-taken. But, of course, he couldn't resist throwing in some partisan hackery:

Readers may recall that in 1995 Mr. Gingrich, then speaker of the House, cut off the federal government’s funding and forced a temporary government shutdown. It was ugly and extreme, but at least Mr. Gingrich had specific demands: he wanted Bill Clinton to agree to sharp cuts in Medicare.

Today, by contrast, the Republican leaders refuse to offer any specific proposals. They inveigh against the deficit — and last month their senators voted in lockstep against any increase in the federal debt limit, a move that would have precipitated another government shutdown if Democrats hadn’t had 60 votes. But they also denounce anything that might actually reduce the deficit, including, ironically, any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely.

This seems a little unfair. The key feature of the Republican alternative health care proposal is tort reform, and the CBO examined this aspect of the Republican proposal in detail:

[I]mplementing a typical package of tort reform proposals nationwide would reduce total U.S. health care spending by about 0.5 percent (about $11 billion in 2009). That figure is the sum of a direct reduction in spending of 0.2 percent from lower medical liability premiums and an additional indirect reduction of 0.3 percent from slightly less utilization of health care services. (Those estimates take into account the fact that because many states have already implemented some of the changes in the package, a significant fraction of the potential cost savings has already been realized.)
Enacting a typical set of proposals would reduce federal budget deficits by roughly $54 billion over the next 10 years, according to estimates by CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee of Taxation. That figure includes savings of roughly $41 billion from Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, as well as an increase in tax revenues of roughly $13 billion from a reduction in private health care costs that would lead to higher taxable wages. [My emphasis]

These aren't huge savings, but if Democrats were really interested in bipartisan compromise, why did they exclude any meaningful tort reform provisions from the final version of their bill? There doesn't seem to be any good reason for this. A clear majority of American support caps on medical malpractice lawsuits, and these caps would reduce the deficit and curb health care inflation.

Refusing to incorporate the Republicans' central idea into the health care bill -- even when that idea is popular and sensible -- seems just as petty as anything the Republicans have done.

Update: Ruth Marcus has a wonderful op-ed on this subject:

[A] summit aspiring to be more than show would require Obama to deliver his promised break from politics as usual. A cardinal rule of political negotiation is never to give something for nothing. But what if the president were to offer Republicans an inducement -- say tort reform? He has pointed to defensive medicine as one contributor to rising health costs. If "that's a real issue," as Obama told doctors last June, why not add it to the existing Democratic plans?
I can see them in the White House now, snickering. Would this kind of preemptive strike entice Republicans to cooperate? Not en masse, but enough such flexibility might pick off a few. It would show a Democratic Party willing to stand up to its own special interests for the public good, and a Republican Party -- assuming it balks -- unwilling to compromise.
If you're going to serve chicken soup, Mr. President, you might as well ladle some meat into the bowl.

Ezra Klein scoffs:

Indeed, one of the notable elements of this process is that at no time has a Republican or a group of Republicans released a specific list of policies that Democrats could add to the bill to ensure their vote. Concessions might be good for PR purposes -- unilateral bipartisanship and all that -- but that's all they seem able to do in this process.

This makes almost no sense. Maybe Democrats could, uh, look at the Republican alternative health care proposal to get some sense of the specific policies that they endorse? Or maybe they could listen to what Mitch McConnell said on Meet the Press. It's pretty clear what the Republicans want: tort reform and interstate competition.

There is no question that most Republicans are being deliberately defiant. And it's probably true that many Republican senators will not vote for a health care reform bill, even if clear concessions are made. But the majority doesn't need many Republicans. They need one or two.

Making sensible concessions could easily sway some more moderate Republicans.

Defending Larry Summers

2010-02-06T12:04:00.003-05:00

GMU's Alex Tabarrok has an interesting post on the sex ratio on U.S. campuses, which led me to this older post defending Larry Summers:

For the past week or so the newspapers have been trumpeting a new study showing no difference in average math ability between males and females. Few people who have looked at the data thought that there were big differences in average ability but many media reports also said that the study showed no differences in high ability.

The LA Times, for example, wrote:

"The study also undermined the assumption -- infamously espoused by former Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers in 2005 -- that boys are more likely than girls to be math geniuses."

Scientific American said:

"So the team checked out the most gifted children. Again, no difference. From any angle, girls measured up to boys. Still, there’s a lack of women in the highest levels of professional math, engineering and physics. Some have said that’s because of an innate difference in math ability. But the new research shows that that explanation just doesn’t add up."

The Chronicle of Higher Education said:

"The research team also studied if there were gender discrepancies at the highest levels of mathematical ability and how well boys and girls resolved complex problems. Again they found no significant differences."

All of these reports and many more like them are false. In fact, consistent with many earlier studies (JSTOR), what this study found was that the ratio of male to female variance in ability was positive and significant, in other words we can expect that there will be more math geniuses and more dullards, among males than among females.

. . .

Does this mean that discrimination is not a problem? Certainly not but we need the media and academia to accurately present the data on ability if we are to understand how large a role other issues may play.

Andrew Sullivan's more polemical defense of Summers can be found here.

Tancredo Lays on the Crazy

2010-02-05T09:52:00.003-05:00

I don't think that all of the people attending the tea-party rallies are ignorant and crazy.

But it's hard to avoid applying the "crazy" label when the opening act at the Tea Party Convention begins by issuing these remarks:

"[P]eople who could not even spell the word 'vote', or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama."
. . .
"So the race for America is on right now. The president and his left-wing allies in Congress are going to look at every opportunity to destroy the Constitution before we have a chance to save it. So put your running shoes on. Because I'll tell you, I've heard we need a revolution. My friends, we already had it. We lost. I mean, what happened to us in that last election was a revolution . . . ."

Quick Thought on Repealing DADT

2010-02-03T13:36:00.016-05:00

The moral case for repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell is pretty straightforward: It is a discriminatory policy and discrimination is inherently wrong, regardless of its practical necessity.

There is also a more nuanced ethical argument in favor of repealing DADT, which Hilzoy outlines pretty effectively here:

It has always seemed obvious to me that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is immoral and discriminatory. But I've never understood why it isn't clear that it's also an insult to the professionalism of the military. The very idea that our soldiers should not be quite capable of subordinating their personal beliefs to the needs of their unit is as insulting. The idea that if some of them can't, we should fire the people they object to rather than the ones who cannot be counted on to put their jobs first, is just bizarre.

I'm sympathetic to both of these arguments. In addition, I think that calling on some members of the armed forces to lie about their sexuality seems to (at least) violate the spirit of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

But there is another case for repealing DADT of which I'm far more suspicious. Over the past few years, many left-wing pundits have argued that DADT is simply bad policy because it turns away good soldiers for no sensible reason. In other words, DADT has made our country less safe by effectively decreasing the size of our military.

The problem with this argument is that it doesn't allow for any consideration of the counterfactual scenario. It's undeniable that DADT has had an effect on and recruitment rates. However, if this is a primary concern for policymakers, then the real question is: How would repealing DADT impact retention and recruitment rates?

Are the kinds of men who join the military disproportionately likely to be ultramasculine homophobes? Or religious zealots? Or perhaps just strong social conservatives? If so, would these men be less likely to sign up for duty if DADT is overturned?

It's difficult to foresee a circumstance in which repealing DADT wouldn't cause at least a mild decline in retention and recruitment among certain demographic groups. But would repealing DADT make the military worse off than under current law?

I think that opponents of DADT should stick to making the moral case. Because the answers to these practical policy questions are far less clear than advocates might suggest.

Dumb Controversy of the Week

2010-02-02T21:31:00.002-05:00

Are people really griping about this?

From AP:

Nevada lawmakers lashed out at President Barack Obama on Tuesday after he made another reference to Las Vegas while explaining how people should make tough choices on spending.

The issue is sensitive to Sin City because its economy is largely based on tourism, and several lawmakers said they were shocked that Obama singled out Las Vegas again after commenting one year ago about bailed-out banks holding meetings here.

"When times are tough, you tighten your belts," Obama said, according to a White House transcript of his appearance Tuesday at a high school in North Nashua, N.H.

"You don't go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage," Obama said. "You don't blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you're trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices."

The comments quickly sparked a flurry of reaction from federal, state and local lawmakers in the Silver State, which had an unemployment rate of 13 percent in December.

"I'll do everything I can to give him the boot," Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said during a hastily called news conference, adding that he was incensed when he heard about the comments and said he would no longer welcome the president here if he visits.

"This president is a real slow learner," said Goodman, who is not affiliated with a political party.

"Enough is enough!" Democratic Congresswoman Shelley Berkley said in a statement. "President Obama needs to stop picking on Las Vegas and he needs to let Americans decide for themselves how and where to spend their hard-earned vacation dollars."

Nevada's economy has been hit hard with foreclosures, unemployment and bankruptcies during the past two years as consumers everywhere tighten leisure spending and companies spend less on meetings and conventions.

Harry Reid, Democratic Senate majority leader and one of Obama's closest allies, issued a statement headlined "Reid to Obama: 'Lay off Las Vegas'" and was unusually blunt in his reaction.

"The President needs to lay off Las Vegas and stop making it the poster child for where people shouldn't be spending their money," Reid said. "I would much rather tourists and business travelers spend their money in Las Vegas than spend it overseas."

Can the president say anything without being attacked? This is beyond ridiculous.

Stewart Slams Olbermann

2010-02-02T12:37:00.004-05:00

Since I've sort of gone after the Daily Show before, it's only fair that I show Jon Stewart some love for this:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Special Comment - Keith Olbermann's Name-Calling

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

Daily Show
Full Episodes

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I'm glad that someone on the left finally had the guts to point out how absurd, over-the-top, and - at times - downright hypocritical Olbermann's rants have become. (While I'm at it, I should also give belated props to PetPluto for this post.)

Maybe Olbermann will take a hint from Jon Stewart. But if this doesn't do it, perhaps a 44 percent drop in ratings among 25 to 54 year-olds will.

Abstinence-Only Education Doesn't Work . . . Any Better Than Comprehensive Sex Education

2010-02-01T18:44:00.010-05:00

Ross has another wonderful opinion piece in today's NYT on the debate over abstinence-only education:

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication. On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate. The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.

. . .

If the federal government wants to invest in the fight against teenage pregnancy, the funds should be available to states and localities without any ideological strings attached. (And yes, this goes for the dollars that currently flow to Planned Parenthood as well as the money that supports abstinence programs.) Don’t try to encourage Berkeley values in Alabama, or vice versa.

America’s competing visions of sexuality — permissive and traditional, naturalist and sacralist — have been in conflict since the 1960s. They’ll probably be in conflict for generations yet to come.

As far as I know, the only independent longitudinal study comparing abstinence-only education to comprehensive sex education was carried out by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. The study found no statistically significant differences between students in abstinence-only programs and comprehensive sex education programs. (The final report can be read here.)

The sample groups were randomly assigned. In addition, the researchers used a data-analytic approach (looking at regression-adjusted means) to statistically control for various "individual demographic and background characteristics."

The study's conclusion:

Findings indicate that youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age. Contrary to concerns raised by some critics of the Title V, Section 510 abstinence funding, however, program group youth were no more likely to have engaged in unprotected sex thancontrol group youth. [My emphasis]

I'm not opposed to comprehensive sex education -- if nothing else, I think kids should be exposed to information -- but I think Ross makes an excellent point. There doesn't seem to be any sensible reason to force more socially conservative communities to teach their children about contraception.

On this issue, at least, we should stay out of each other's backyards.

Update: A coworker directed me to this recently-published study, which was highlighted in the Washington Post today. The findings suggest that some carefully-crafted abstinence-only programs may, in fact, be significantly more effective than certain comprehensive sex education programs.

I think this only bolsters Ross's point. Different communities should be able to try different things.

Update II: Ross responds to this post by Hanna Rosin, and offers his views on the study that was featured in the Washington Post:

Does this prove that abstinence-based education always lowers teen sexual activity? No — it proves that one abstinence program designed in a particular way, implemented by a particular group of teachers, and aimed at a particular age group in a particularly area was considerably more effective than a contraception-based approach. And that’s all that any controlled experiment is likely to prove. The data on this question are necessarily deeply particular, and partisans on both sides will probably always be able to find studies that “prove” the superiority of their preferred approach. (Here’s a recent entry for the pro-comprehensive sex ed side, for instance.) Which suggests, to my mind, the virtues of both widespread experimentation and local control, rather than an inevitably polarizing quest for a one-size-fits-all solution.

. . .

The idea that only a federally-mandated health curriculum can save America’s teens from sexual ignorance strikes me as a vast overstatement of the federal government’s power. And the dream of constructing a program that’s somehow perfectly “neutral” on such a deeply fraught, inherently values-laden subject seems like a recipe for endless controversy, and little real progress.

Maddow on the Spending Freeze, Continued . . .

2010-01-29T10:49:00.009-05:00

The exchange between Rachel Maddow and Jared Bernstein is still bothering me, so I thought I'd offer some additional comments.

First, while I understand that Maddow is a strong-minded progressive, it's infuriating to hear someone -- even a left-wing television host -- assert the correctness of Keynesian theory without even acknowledging the opposition.

If Maddow had suggested that "many economists believe" that the Roosevelt Recession of 1937 and the Japanese Lost Decade were the result of contractionary fiscal policy, she would've been on much sounder footing. But Maddow didn't qualify her statements at all.

This kind of provincial thinking is exactly the reason liberals criticize conservative pundits, who seem unable to accept that there are often many legitimate views when it comes to complex economic problems. But for some on the left, fiscal stimulus seems to have become the liberal substitute for conservative tax-cutting ideology.

Second, Maddow's interpretation of both these events is, at best, extremely narrow-minded.

A more nuanced reading of the Japanese crisis provides a dramatically different story of the potential problems with a poorly-designed fiscal stimulus package:

For many, the moral of the story isn't that Japan erred in deciding to use fiscal policy to fix their economy -- its failure was in the execution.

For one thing, there was dubious logic behind too many of Japan's infrastructure projects. "It was the epitome of bridges to nowhere," says economist Ed Lincoln, director of the Center for Japan-U.S. Business and Economic Studies at New York University. "There was apparently a $2 billion bridge built to an island of 800 people."

. . .

Lincoln adds that at its peak in the 1990s, the government was spending 8% of GDP on public works projects. By comparison, the United States now spends about 3% - even several hundred billion dollars in proposed projects would not get the United States to Japan's peak.

. . .

Finally, any action by the government needs to be done swiftly and decisively.

The Japanese government's efforts were spread over several years but it was as if its leaders couldn't pick one strategy and stick to it. After passing a series of stimulus packages in the early 1990s, the economy showed signs of improving; by 1995, GDP was growing at roughly an annual rate of 2.5%.

And then the government took a fateful step. Worried about its growing debt, Japan raised its consumption tax two percentage points, to 5%, in 1997. And the economy, by now also hobbled with deflation, sunk into a recession.

"When you look at the Japanese crisis, you really don't see the drama of a collapsing economy and a big contraction of the economy and sharp increase in unemployment," says Reinhart. "What you see is this lingering malaise in which a very rapidly growing, buoyant economy becomes one that's limping along."

The trouble with any debate over Japan's stimulus in the 1990s is that it's impossible to know what would've happened if the government had taken lesser action. Many argue the situation would've been worse.

One thing is certain: Japan still faces a mountain of debt from all its spending; debt is now around 200% of GDP, vs. 45% for the U.S. And the U.S. can count on a similar situation if it embarks on more big-government spending.

In the end, though, looking to history can yield only so many lessons. Very few other countries have faced a comparable crisis followed by a huge government stimulus, and Japan is only one scenario. "I think it is extremely dangerous...to draw large lessons from one observation," says Reinhart. "Using the Japan example to make a bold statement about whether stimulus packages work or not I think is on very shaky ground."

Interpreting the cause of the Roosevelt Recession is an equally complicated business, and there are a number of different theories. Many economists attribute the rapid decline in 1937 to a contraction of the money supply, in addition to Roosevelt's dramatic reductions in the deficit spending. This was Milton Friedman's view of the problem, and those who took an introductory macroeconomics class may also remember that he wrote a whole book criticizing the Keynesian interpretation of the Great Depression.

Either way, Obama's proposed spending freeze -- which targets only non-defense discretionary funds, and is specifically designed to avoid impacting jobs -- is not remotely comparable to Roosevelt's large-scale reversal in federal spending, including vast reductions in funding to the WPA and other public works agencies.

Even some on the left have been savvy enough to criticise Maddow's faulty analogy. The more I watch Rachel Maddow, the more frustrated I become with her apparent lack of consideration for the other side.

Alito, Obama, and the STOU

2010-01-28T22:13:00.003-05:00

Two good pieces to read after last nights' State of the Union address . . . .

First, Dahlia Lithwick has nice take on Justice Alito's now infamous head-nod:

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the president’s criticism of the court’s decision, although as Linda Greenhouse points out, he was less than precise in his description of the holding. But there was also absolutely nothing inappropriate about the justice’s reaction to him. Both the president and the justices are political actors, and all are entitled to screw up their faces and grumble in public as they see fit. Anyone who’s watched Alito at oral argument at the high court knows that he screws up his face and mutters to himself all the time. The suggestion that he was showboating or grandstanding last night is spectacularly unfair. Unlike several of his colleagues, Alito is meticulously polite, balanced, and measured on the bench, and goes out of his way to shun big drama. I’m sure if Alito could take it back this morning he would. I’m equally sure that if he attends the next SOTU at all, he won’t move so much as a muscle.

Second, Ilyad Somin has a great post over at Volokh, attacking the idea that the Bush administration pursued free-market reforms:

In the State of the Union, Obama continued to blame Bush and the Republicans for our current economic problems. This is understandable for two reasons. First, the GOP does deserve a good deal of blame, though my list of their misdeeds would probably look different from Obama’s. Second, pretty much any president in Obama’s position would do the same thing.

Much less defensible is Obama’s attempt to claim that the Republicans purused free market policies during the last eight years, and thereby caused the economic crisis:

"From some on the right, I expect we’ll hear a different argument — that if we just make fewer investments in our people, extend tax cuts including those for the wealthier Americans, eliminate more regulations, maintain the status quo on health care, our deficits will go away. The problem is that’s what we did for eight years. That’s what helped us into this crisis. It’s what helped lead to these deficits. We can’t do it again."

In reality, of course, the Bush-era GOP greatly expanded government control of the economy, including major increases in spending, regulation, and federal “investment” in education. I discussed this at some length here, here, and here. Far from “maintain[ing] the status quo in health care,” Bush established the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the biggest new government program since the 1960s. Ironically, Obama referred to the prescription drug program and other Bush-era spending increases as contributing to the deficit earlier in this very same speech.

Stimulus and the Spending Freeze

2010-01-26T13:17:00.005-05:00

Rachel Maddow chastises the President for his supposed plan to freeze federal spending:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Maddow argues that anyone who's taken an introductory macroeconomics course knows that you don't reduce federal spending during a recession. And, certainly, that seems to be the prevailing wisdom these days.

But it's not the only perspective. Perhaps Maddow should watch the second half of this video:

Here's another point that Maddow may be loath to acknowledge:

While it's true that two-thirds of economists surveyed by USA Today seem to favor a second stimulus, one third of those surveyed also said that they prefer tax cuts as the primary stimulus method.

Incremental Reform and Path Dependency

2010-01-25T12:37:00.005-05:00

Ross Douthat has a brilliant piece in today's NYT:

Under Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, liberals created a federal leviathan that taxes, regulates and redistributes across every walk of American life. In the process, though, they bound the hands of future generations of reformers. Programs became entrenched. Bureaucracies proliferated. Subsidies became “entitlements,” tax breaks became part of the informal social contract. And our government was transformed, slowly but irreversibly, into a “large, incoherent, often incomprehensible mass that is solicitous of its clients but impervious to any broad, coherent program of reform.”

In other words, the problem with big governmental reforms is that earlier decisions create public interest groups that dramatically constrain later decisions. This ultimately leads to path dependence. Large public interest groups that benefit from earlier decisions become resistant to change. So, bad public policy decisions that affect large groups of people -- like the deduction for employer-based health insurance -- become nearly impossible to reverse.

This isn't a new theory, but Ross lays the argument out very well.

For anyone who's interested in this subject, I'd recommend reading Rauch's book, Government's End, as well as Jacob Hacker's The Divided Welfare State.

What's Going On?

2010-01-20T10:07:00.012-05:00

Is health care reform dead on arrival?

Perhaps the most important question about the game-changing election returns in Massachusetts is how they reflect on the Democratic-controlled Congress and on the president.

It's true that Martha Coakley was a rather uninspiring candidate, and if she were running in any other state -- or for any other Senate seat -- her failure may be explained away fairly easily. But the pre-election polling seemed to suggest that many Massachusetts residents were deeply opposed to the health care reform bill, worried about the cost of health care reform generally, and doubtful that Coakley would have shown any political independence in representing her constituents.

Even as Scott Brown charged ahead of Coakley in the polls, Coakley's positives continued to outweighed her negatives. This suggests that Coakley's lackluster campaign was not her only electoral problem. National issues likely had a large influence on the final results.

So, what's really going on here? Was this a referendum on the president's agenda?

Hard to say. It's true that President Obama still maintains majority approval in Massachusetts, but many aspects of his platform are rapidly losing support in the Bay State and in the country as a whole. Nationally, the president's approval ratings are slipping as Americans on both sides of the political divide seem to be disillusioned with his performance.

(Although, it's still important to look at Obama's approval ratings in historical context.)

Conor Friedersdorf considers the reasons why President Obama seems to be losing support:

On the campaign trail . . . Obama didn’t campaign as an establishment pragmatist. He didn’t say, “Health care reform is important, so I’ll hold my nose, cut deals with a lot of special interests, and get more Americans covered in a very imperfect way.” Nor did he try to communicate that message in more politically palatable language. Instead he made being a change agent the foundation of his appeal. He talked, as they all do, about a broken system in Washington DC, noting that issues like health care reform were too important to be addressed in the same old way. Again, I didn’t particularly believe any of this, but having my cynicism justified isn’t winning President Obama any points.

Perhaps a down economy is the biggest reason that President Obama’s numbers are down, but I cannot help but wonder if his slip isn’t also due to a lie at the heart of his campaign. This man is calculating politico, as comfortable as anyone we’ve got at navigating Washington DC as it exists today. It’s a style of leadership that is perfectly defensible. But he sold himself as an idealistic agent of change whose special contribution would be fixing a broken status quo.

When you’re talking approval ratings, overall impressions like this one are far more important than most specific issues, and Obama supporters who took the man’s rhetoric seriously have reason to feel misled on everything from Gitmo to gay rights to bank bailouts to health care deals cut with industry players to courting special interests generally. That they’d still prefer him to McCain/Palin, Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck eventually begins to register as damning with the faint praise that it is. Obama defenders are perfectly within their rights to point out that sane alternatives to the president’s agenda haven’t many GOP champions. But let’s raise the bar a bit. Is there anything President Obama has accomplished that we couldn’t have expected from a President George H.W. Bush or a Bill Clinton?

Exceptional rhetoric + mediocre performance = falling approval ratings. So it goes.

I think Conor makes a good point. But I also believe that the problem is much larger, and has a lot more to do with human psychology.

Ross Douthat argues that President Obama's aggressive pursuance of a liberal agenda has turned some Americans against him. But on any given day, a Daily Kos blogger will argue that the President's conservative agenda -- or, at least, his deference to conservatives -- is what's causing all our problems.

Many party-line Democrats with whom I talk are extremely frustrated with the president for failing to deliver on what they viewed as his promise to transform the United States into a more progressive country. Meanwhile, conservatives seem convinced that President Obama is the most liberal president in history, and is actively transforming the United States into a more progressive country.

So, what's the real issue? Why do Americans on both sides seem to be rebelling against President Obama? Is all of this hostility toward the president really just a reflection of intellectual biases run wild?

As Morton Hunt once wrote in The Universe Within:

Most human beings earn a failing grade in elementary logic. We're not just frequently incompetent [in thinking logically], we're also willfully and skillfully illogical. When a piece of deductive reasoning leads to a conclusion we don't like, we often rebut it with irrelevancies and sophistries of which, instead of being ashamed, we act proud.

In my view, it's not just logical reasoning that we need. It's the ability to tell ourselves that we are biased creatures. The world is far more complex than our perceptions allow us to grasp.

I think we need to stop convincing ourselves that our intellectual opponents have nothing to offer but discredited ideals. We need to stop convincing ourselves that we're always right.

Does Flextime Work for Workers?

2010-01-18T10:50:00.010-05:00

A few days ago, the First Lady came to my job to talk about, among other things, work-life balance. She highlighted the success of flextime programs, which give most federal employees broad discretion in setting their own hours.

Without citing any specific studies, the First Lady exclaimed that we now have the "evidence" that flextime "works." That comment received thunderous applause. But what does it really mean for a program like this to be effective?

Studies of flextime typically find positive effects in terms of individual-level productivity, but to my knowledge there is still a limited body of research examining the impact of flextime programs on overall workplace efficiency.

As a full-time student, I'm pretty happy to work on a flextime schedule. If I have to run errands or finish up some schoolwork, I can always come into work early and leave early. If I'm feeling tired one day, I can come in later without having to endure a passive-aggressive interrogation from my boss. The Department of Labor also allows its employees to work overtime and build up "credit" hours, which will likely be extremely helpful in the weeks prior to final exams. Does all of this increase my productivity? Maybe. But I tend to doubt that flextime programs actually enhance workplace efficiency.

In my experience, there are clear trade-offs. While my job doesn't require a lot of interpersonal interaction, I do work with a "team" and I do sometimes need some guidance from coworkers. Flextime can make this much more difficult. For managers, it is often challenging to administer a group of employees with dramatically different schedules. It's also hard to monitor abuses and direct joint activity. My division still uses sign-in sheets, and it's easy to consistently shave a few hours off of your workday.

More importantly, I think, flextime programs are very difficult to repeal if they are not working. Employees come to see these programs as a sort of fringe benefit, rather than an a way for the company to enhance productivity and promote loyalty.

I'm sure that these criticisms aren't new, and I know that studies of flextime have been ongoing for decades. What I'd like to see is a more comprehensive assessment of flextime programs. I haven't been able to find a meta-analysis of the various studies on flextime and worker productivity, but I'm sure that someone has tried to do a systematic review of the literature. I'd love to read it.

There are many other issues related to flextime. Does it make families stronger? Does it make workers happier? Does it improve employee health? Unfortunately, serious selection problems (and Hawthorne effects) make studies like this less than compelling.

I think it's only fair to say that the jury is still out on flextime. With programs like this, the benefits are often readily apparent, while the costs are less visible. There are still a number of concerns that have yet to be considered.

Any thoughts?

G-Subjectivity?

2010-01-10T11:22:00.003-05:00

Can G-Spot really rock the G-spot?

Maybe not . . . .

Lindesy Graham's Racist Comment?

2009-12-23T10:30:00.007-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates considers Lindsey Graham's comments on Medicaid, and decides that they are offensive to white people.

Coates writes:

The charitable interpretation rests on the invisibility of white suffering. It rests on the erasure of Clay County. It rests on the notion that the white poor are not merely the white poor, but white trash. It's a formula [that] makes an anchor of black America, straps it to a larger population of poor white Americans and then drops them in the Mississippi. It's a con that asks large swaths of white folks to suffer poverty in shame and silence.

No black person can end this alone, nor should we have to. The NAACP shouldn't say a word to Lindsey Graham. We can not purify people. We can't stop those who are set on blinding themselves. Ignorance is the burden of the ignorant.

I agree, but doesn't the NAACP do exactly the same thing?

Pick any issue -- the mortgage crisis, student loans, credit debt, Social Security reform. The primary function of the NAACP over the past decade has been to portray black Americans as economically disadvantaged. Typically, this means arguing that black citizens will be disproportionately harmed by various policy initiatives because of the disproportionately high poverty rates in the black community.

Maybe Graham should've qualified his statement -- or maybe we should all avoid conflating race and poverty -- but it seems like Coates is applying a double standard when it comes to the NAACP.

Avatar Misses the Mark

2009-12-22T00:15:00.004-05:00

I would like to second every bit of this critique.

Ross is absolutely right: Avatar may be a visual masterpiece, but the hackneyed premise was pretty disappointing. It was not a particularly good movie, but it was certainly amazing to watch.

One of the few times I've walked away from a movie feeling both awe and indignation.

Political Incentives and the Problem of Special Interests

2009-12-20T12:06:00.003-05:00

George Mason University professor Russ Roberts has a brilliant piece on political incentives:

Bruce Yandle uses bootleggers and Baptists to explain what happens when a good cause collides with special interests.

When the city council bans liquor sales on Sundays, the Baptists rejoice—it's wrong to drink on the Lord's day. The bootleggers, rejoice, too. It increases the demand for their services.

The Baptists give the politicians cover for doing what the bootleggers want. No politicians says we should ban liquor sales on Sunday in order to enrich the bootleggers who support his campaign. The politician holds up one hand to heaven and talk about his devotion to morality. With the other hand, he collects campaign contributions (or bribes) from the bootleggers.

Yandle points out that virtually every well-intentioned regulation has a bunch of bootleggers along for the ride—special interests who profit from the idealism of the activists and altruists.
If that's all there was to Yandle's theory, you'd say that politics makes for strange bedfellows. But it's actually much more depressing than that. What often happens is that the public asks for regulation but inevitably doesn't pay much attention to how that regulation gets structured. Why would we? We have lives to lead. We're simply too busy. Not so with the bootleggers. They have an enormous stake in the way the legislation is structured. The devil is in the details. And a lot of the time, politicians give bootleggers the details that serve the bootleggers rather than the public
interest.

Please, please read the whole thing.

Is Ezra Missing the Point?

2009-12-18T14:41:00.006-05:00

Ezra Klein is continuing to hurl ad hominem attacks at Joe Lieberman, some of which are reasonable and fair and some of which are absurd and speculative. Regardless of how you feel about Lieberman, I think it's clear that there is something missing from this critique:

[T]ake the public option. Lieberman has cycled through a variety of explanations, none of which made the slightest lick of sense. First, he said the public option would increase the deficit. That's flatly untrue. Not only did CBO say the exact opposite, projecting savings of $25 to more than $100 billion, depending on the construction, but the idea didn't even make conceptual sense -- the cost of health-care reform comes from the subsidies, which apply to private and public insurance equally.

Well, sort of.

Regardless of its construction, the public plan would have probably attracted more people who received federally subsidized care. So, while the subsidies would technically "apply to private and public insurance equally," it's unlikely that they would be allocated equally. The public plan would get an unequal share of the subsidies, but this probably wouldn't be enough to make up for the adverse selection problem.

As Ezra himself explained:

[B]ecause the public option is, well, public, it won't want to do the unpopular things that insurers do to save money, like manage care or aggressively review treatments. It also, presumably, won't try to drive out the sick or the unhealthy. That means the public option will spend more, and could, over time, develop a reputation as a good home for bad health risks, which would mean its average premium will increase because its average member will cost more.

The nightmare scenario, then, is that private insurers cotton onto this and accelerate the process, implicitly or explicitly guiding bad risks to the public option. In theory, the exchanges are risk-adjusted, and the public option will be given more money if it ends up with bad risks, but it's hard to say how that will function in practice.

If this is true, can the "level-playing field" public plan really survive in a competitive exchange without a government backstop? If it can't, will the government attempt bail it out? This would undoubtedly increase the federal deficit.

Moreover, despite what the CBO says, some of the cost-saving provisions in the Senate health care bill are unlikely to actually reduce the deficit because they're not going to be implemented.

Here is what David Brooks wrote in today's NYT:

The bill is not really deficit-neutral. It’s politically inconceivable that Congress will really make all the spending cuts that are there on paper. But the bill won’t explode the deficit, and that’s an accomplishment.

Back in September, CBO director Doug Elmendorf acknowledged this point:

These projections assume that the proposals are enacted and remain unchanged throughout the next two decades, which is often not the case for major legislation. For example, the sustainable growth rate (SGR) mechanism governing Medicare’s payments to physicians has frequently been modified (either through legislation or administrative action) to avoid reductions in those payments. The projected savings for the Chairman’s proposal reflect the cumulative impact of a number of specifications that would constrain payment rates for providers of Medicare services. The long-term budgetary impact could be quite different if those provisions were ultimately changed or not fully implemented.

There is fundamental disconnect between the CBO projections and political reality.

Are Corporations Conservative?

2009-12-17T15:09:00.006-05:00

Ross Douthat responds to this (characteristically overdone) tirade from Keith Olbermann:

Ross makes the obvious point that large corporations are not "conservative" by nature. Rather, they have a rent-seeking agenda that is politically ambiguous:

Such rent-seeking doesn’t always translate into support for the administration’s policies. The business/government nexus is more potent on some issues than on others, and the “business community” is hardly a monolith. (Different industries have different interests, and rival companies often want different things from Washington.) Corporate America has been divided on cap and trade, for instance, and the health insurance industry has played a double game on health care reform (now trying to shape the bill to their liking, now trying to stir up public anxiety about it) that’s so complicated I’m not sure even they understand it.

. . .

But still: The hand-in-glove relationship between a Democratic administration and certain precincts of corporate America is one of the major stories of the Obama era. And if you want to know why the Department of Energy has become a venture capital firm, or what happened to Barack Obama’s pledge to allow American consumers to buy their drugs from overseas, or why the health care bill looks, well, the way it looks, [Tim] Carney’s book is a good place to start.
Carney is more stringently libertarian than I am — more anti-TARP, for instance, and more thoroughgoingly critical of the welfare state in general. But his kind of libertarian populism is a important counterweight to what’s been happening in Washington across the last twelve months. His analysis represents the cogent version of the inchoate angst that’s gripped the conservative base of late. And both conservatism and the country would be better off if it enjoyed [as] wide an audience as say, Glenn Beck’s nightly forays into performance art.

McCaskill on Costs

2009-12-14T21:16:00.007-05:00

Megan McArdle wonders about this statement by Claire McCaskill:

"The whole reason we're doing this bill is to bring down cost, first for the American people in health care, and secondly for the deficit," said Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri. "So until we get the numbers back from the Congressional Budget Office, we're all on hold."

Asked if she would vote against the bill if it raised health care costs
overall, she said, "Absolutely."

As I've said before, I'm a big fan of Claire McCaskill. I think she's sensible and fair-minded -- much like the president. I also think she's absolutely right in this case. What's the point of health care reform if we're not bringing down costs? Certainly, increasing access is a key priority, but expanding health care coverage without addressing health care inflation is a no-win situation:

CBO projects that if current laws do not change, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid combined will grow from roughly 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent by 2035. By 2080, the government would be spending almost as much, as a share of the economy, on just its two major health care programs as it has spent on all of its programs and services in recent years.

Victim-Blaming?

2009-12-12T21:30:00.009-05:00

A friend directed me to this post criticizing advice columnist Amy Dickinson for apparently 'chastising' a woman who who wrote in describing an alleged rape.

The post is entitled "Idiot Advice Columnist Calls Raped Girl 'Victim of Her Own Judgment'":

We guess they'll let anybody write advice columns these days. Take, for instance, Amy Dickinson, who recently chastised a rape victim in her syndicated Tribune Media column "Ask Amy," calling the young woman a "victim of her own judgment."

. . .

While Dickinson goes on to admit that a crime was committed, her first impulse is to blame the victim. Which we find, frankly, despicable.
. . .
Also reprehensible? Characterizing all frat guys as potential rapists. Fraternities are social organizations with group housing, and their members are just as morally diverse as any pool of human beings.

This is what Dickinson actually said:

Were you a victim? Yes.

First, you were a victim of your own awful judgment. Getting drunk at a frat house is a hazardous choice for anyone to make because of the risk (some might say a likelihood) that you will engage in unwise or unwanted sexual contact.

You don't say whether the guy was also drunk. If so, his judgment was also impaired.

No matter what -- no means no. If you say no beforehand, then the sex shouldn't happen. If you say no while its happening, then the sex should stop.

According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network Web site (rainn.org):"Alcohol and drugs are not an excuse -- or an alibi. The key question is still: Did you consent or not? Regardless of whether you were drunk or sober, if the sex is nonconsensual, it is rape. However, because each state has different definitions of "nonconsensual," please contact your local center or local police if you have questions about this. (If you were so drunk or drugged that you passed out and were unable to consent, it was rape. Both people must be conscious and willing participants.)"

Go to your college's health department to be tested for STDs and pregnancy. See a counselor to determine how you want to approach this. You must involve the guy in question in order to determine what happened and because he absolutely must take responsibility and face the consequences for his actions, just as you are prepared to do. He may have done this before.

In her letter, the alleged victim initially states that she "made some mistakes." And, based on her story, she's right. Despite what Dickinson's critics say, it is risky for a girl to get drunk at a fraternity party and go off with a fellow she doesn't know very well. This decision reflects poor judgment.

Simply acknowledging this obvious point is not equivalent to "blaming" the victim for being raped. The girl in this account is partly a victim of her own bad judgment -- and she is also a victim of events totally beyond her control, for which she bears no responsibility. Both of these things are true, and neither of them implies that the she deserved to be raped.

One of major problems that I have with what Katie Roiphe deemed "rape crisis feminism" is that even the most sensible advice -- like cautioning young girls against becoming intoxicated and returning home with strange men -- is often misconstrued as victim-blaming. The unavoidable impression is that good judgment simply doesn't matter, and risky decisions can be wholly divorced from their negative outcomes.

Rape is never the victim's fault, but that doesn't mean that the victim's prior decisions are always value-neutral.

Update: Amy Dickinson qualifies her statement:

Unfortunately, I started my answer by expressing frustration at her judgment to get drunk at a frat house, calling it "awful." This is the part of my answer that has enraged readers, who have accused me of "blaming the victim."As a mother (and stepmother) to five daughters -- four in college -- I have counseled (and worry about) all of my many daughters because of how vulnerable they are if they choose to drink.

Drinking to intoxication poses very serious security issues for our daughters and sons, because being drunk impairs judgment and the ability to discern risk.

Because "Victim" wondered where the line was, I tried to draw it for her. My intent was to urge her (as I often urge readers) to take responsibility for the only thing she could control -- her own choices and actions -- but I regret how harshly I expressed this.

I certainly didn't intend to offend or blame her for what happened, and I hope she will do everything possible to stay safe in the future. I'm grateful that she chose to share her question with all of us, because talking about it will help others.

Is Keynesian Stimulus the Best Approach?

2009-12-12T18:31:00.004-05:00

Greg Mankiw tackles Keynes, and the Obama administration's fiscal policy:

When devising its fiscal package, the Obama administration relied on conventional economic models based in part on ideas of John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian theory says that government spending is more potent than tax policy for jump-starting a stalled economy.

The report in January put numbers to this conclusion. It says that an extra dollar of government spending raises G.D.P. by $1.57, while a dollar of tax cuts raises G.D.P. by only 99 cents. The implication is that if we are going to increase the budget deficit to promote growth and jobs, it is better to spend more than tax less.

But various recent studies suggest that conventional wisdom is backward.

. . .

Like [a] doctor facing a mysterious illness, economists should remain humble and
open-minded when considering how best to fix an ailing economy. A growing body of evidence suggests that traditional Keynesian nostrums might not
be the best medicine.

I await Paul Krugman's response.

Can We Say Goodbye to the Public Option Now?

2009-12-08T23:57:00.005-05:00

It seems like the public option is going to be left out of the final version of the Senate health care bill in favor of some sort of nationally regulated not-for-profit private insurance option. Frankly, I think all insurance should be regulated at the federal level.

Anyway, I've previously been a bit too rash in saying goodbye to the public option, so maybe we should just wait and see how this turns out.

There could always be some last-minute changes . . . .

Bill O'Reilly's Presidential Report Card

2009-12-08T17:50:00.005-05:00

Bill O'Reilly offers his Presidential Report Card:

Actually, I don't think he's too far off, although I'd probably give President Obama a bit more credit on health care reform.

Quote for the Day

2009-12-08T16:14:00.002-05:00

Look, no one’s history, no one’s character that you look at like Barack Obama’s – agree with his policies or disagree with them – he is a thoroughly decent human being. To call that thoroughly decent human being –who’s trying to bring people together, as I believe he is – a 'racist' is just disgusting.

- Andrew Sullivan, on The Joy Behar Show.

We're All Entitled to Our Own Facts (About Global Warming)

2009-12-07T12:08:00.013-05:00

David Frum has a thoughtful piece on political polarization and the global warming debate.

He writes:

Everything important about global warming remains disputed:
How fast is it happening? How much of it is attributable to human activity? How dangerous is it? How much should we pay to avert or mitigate it? Who should do the paying?
How are to begin to reach conclusions if we cannot even agree on the rules of discussion? The most famous public document on global warming calls itself "An Inconvenient Truth" -- and yet that document itself is filled with untruths, on every subject from sea levels to polar bears. (The bears are doing fine, populations at record levels in the Canadian Arctic.)
. . .
The global warming controversy has been pervaded from the start by the human instinct to divide the world into "us" and "them" -- and then believe only the news we hear from "us."

Global warming advocates can see this weakness in their opponents. It was the same weakness in themselves that led the advocates . . . to cheat and twist and betray scientific standards and public trust.

It's easy for progressives to be frustrated with Rush Limbaugh and other hard-line conservatives. There's a serious lack of intellectual honesty on the right, and genuine contempt for science. But it's far more difficult for progressives to seriously consider the moral failings of the those with whom they agree.

To me, one of the most distressing things about the global warming debate is the notion that science can be used to circumvent value judgments. I continually hear climate change advocates insisting that scientific research inevitably points to specific political choices.

From a policy perspective, however, the goal of science is simply to meet the intelligence needs of decision-makers. Science is supposed to be value-neutral. It cannot answer Frum's final questions: How much should we pay to avert or mitigate global warming, and who should do the paying?

If we want to agree on some rules for the discussion, I'd say that people on the right should stop pretending that science is a liberal conspiracy, and people on the left should stop using science as a blunt instrument, and acknowledge both the complexity of scientific investigation and the role of values in decision-making.

Update: By the way, I don't know anything about polar bear populations -- and Frum doesn't offer any evidence to support his claim.

But, for anyone who's interested, here is the American Enterprise Institute's take, and here is an old article from Science Daily, which seems to bolster Frum's point. I suspect there is an awful lot of counter-evidence to support Gore's claim, too.

Update II: Here is a really good piece from Reason's Ronald Bailey on "The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate."

Misunderstanding the Public Option

2009-12-07T01:43:00.008-05:00

As I've said before, it's a bit disingenuous for so many liberal bloggers -- including Ezra Klein -- to assert that the public option is the most popular aspect of health care reform.

While that it may be true that polling data shows Americans respond positively to the term "public option," that doesn't really tell us much about the kinds of reforms that have genuine public support. Calling a government-run insurance plan a "public option" is simply a way of framing the debate. People tend to like "options."

The important question is: Do most people really understand the public option?

Finally, we have a pretty clear answer to that question.

Update: One of Ezra Klein's readers opines (via Andrew Sullivan):

I have a slight problem with the graph in this post. You have biased this graph to over exaggerate the relative size of 'No' response by starting the graph at 20. Thus it appears as if the No's outweigh Yes's by almost a factor of 8. When in reality it's only about 2.5. (66 vs 26)

Sadly the number of Americans incapable of explaining the public option is so large that there was hardly a need to graphically exaggerate it to make your point.

I agree. I hate when people truncate the Y-axis . . . but, in this case, it's still a pretty huge disparity.

Amanda Knox Found Guilty

2009-12-05T00:06:00.003-05:00

Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were found guilty of murder.

I don't know whether Knox is innocent, but I do know that she did not receive a fair trial. It's absolutely appalling that she was convicted on such scant evidence.

Timothy Egan had an excellent post on the pure absurdity of this case:

In closing arguments, Knox was described as a “Luciferina” and “a dirty-minded she-devil.” Preposterous, made-up sexual motives were ascribed to her. One prosecutor speculated before the jury what Knox may have said to Meredith Kercher before, he claimed, forcing an orgy that resulted in her death:

“You are always behaving like a little saint. Now we will show you. Now we will make you have sex.”

Nobody alleges that Knox said this to Kercher. But prosecutors asked the jury to imagine her saying such a thing.

What century is this? Didn’t Joan of Arc, the Inquisition and our own American Salem witch trials teach civilized nations a thing or two about contrived sexual hysteria with a devil twist?

Public Issues, Poor Decisions

2009-12-03T21:36:00.005-05:00

Tyler Cowen offers some words of wisdom:

Breaking a three-day stalemate, the Senate approved an amendment to its health care legislation that would require insurance companies to offer free mammograms and other preventive services to women.

The vote was 61 to 39, with three Republicans joining 56 Democrats and the two independents in favor.
This happened directly after the release of evidence showing that many mammograms do not pass a comparative effectiveness test. Once the test became a public issue at all . . . well, now you see what happens. CBO, take note.

In fact, as I've noted before, the Congressional Budget Office has already weighed in on the issue of preventative services:

Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.

I'm sure that President Obama sincerely believes in comparative effectiveness research as a vehicle for cost-control. But the president doesn't rule by fiat.

Unfortunately, Members of Congress are beholden to ill-informed, self-interested constituents, who demand ineffective services . . . especially when they don't have to pay for those services directly.

What Does Climategate Have to Do With O.J. Simpson?

2009-12-01T21:17:00.011-05:00

Clive Crook offers an incisive post on on the Climategate controversy.

Crook writes:

I admire expertise, and scientific expertise especially; like any intelligent citizen I am willing to defer to it. But that puts a great obligation on science. The people whose instinct is to respect and admire science should be the ones most disturbed by these revelations. The scientists have let them down, and made the anti-science crowd look wise. That is outrageous.

. . .

Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods--notably, peer review--that underwrite the integrity of their discipline. Is this really business as usual in science these days?

I can't seem to escape a bizarre mental association here: Crook's point strikes me as remarkably similar to O.J. Simpson's court defense in the mid-1990s.

Let me explain . . .

From the outset, there was an enormous amount of DNA evidence piled up against O.J. Simpson. The prosecution assumed that no reasonable juror would be able to dispute the hard science. After all, Simpson's blood was found at the scene of the crime.

As the Simpson case unfolded, however, it became clear that Mark Fuhrman -- the detective who had compiled most of the inculpatory evidence -- was not an objective authority. Furhman was, in fact, deeply racist and highly unprofessional. He also later copped to perjury. The defense argued that if Fuhramn could not be trusted -- if his apparent racial bias had undermined his credibility -- then all the evidence that he'd produced should be rejected.

This seems like a sensible argument to me. So, if climate scientists at the IPCC aren't credible -- if they've become so wedded to the cause that they've abandoned objectivity -- why should we continue to believe the evidence that they present?

As Simpson's lawyers rightly pointed out, you cannot divorce the evidence from the evidence-gatherers . . . .

Untruths and Half-truths from the Left on Health Care Reform

2009-11-25T13:57:00.006-05:00

First, it's frustrating to hear people on the left continually invoking the public plan as the key to expanding health care coverage.

It's true that a "strong" public option would be able to offer lower premiums than its private competitors. However, a "weak" public option -- one that competes on a level playing field with private insurers -- probably wouldn't. Here is how the Congressional Budget Office describes that public plan that would be set up under the health care legislation that recently passed the House:

[A] public plan paying negotiated rates would attract a broad network of providers but would typically have premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges. The rates the public plan pays to providers would, on average, probably be comparable to the rates paid by private insurers participating in the
exchanges. The public plan would have lower administrative costs than those private plans but would probably engage in less management of utilization by its enrollees and attract a less healthy pool of enrollees.

A public plan does not automatically expand coverage. Federal subsidies expand coverage, and those subsidies are not tied to the public option, unless it is a "strong" public option.

Second, it's not clear that a majority of Americans favor the public option. Unfortunately, polling on this subject is very complicated. Some respondents who voice support for the public option probably couldn't tell you what it is. In fact, many Americans cannot even connect the term "public option" to health care. All we can really say for certain is that people respond positively to the word "option," but less positively to terms like "government-run" or "government-controlled" health care.

Third, as Peter Suderman points out, the health care legislation under consideration is unlikely to "reduce" the national debt, as many on the left claim. The CBO (typically) only makes cost projections within a 10-year period, and the spending in this bill is extremely back-loaded.

Suderman writes:

When the Congressional Budget Office scores a bill, its looks at the budgetary effects over the immediate ten year window. So on the health care bill, the headline cost of $849 billion covers the period between 2010 and 2019. Problem is, it's a misleading figure since most of the new programs don't actually kick in until 2014, and, as a result, most of the spending—99 percent, according to the CBO—doesn't occur until the final six years. That means it's not actually a very good reflection of how much it's going to cost to run the bill's new programs over a decade-long period.

I've given up on expecting honesty from the right . . . but a little more honesty from the left would be nice.

Sullivan and Public Policy Polling

2009-11-19T22:51:00.009-05:00

Today, Andrew Sullivan linked to this survey from Public Policy Polling, which seems to show that 52 percent of Republicans believe ACORN stole the election for President Obama. I've written to Sullivan before criticizing the results of another survey from Public Policy Polling.

A few points:

First, Public Policy Polling isn't exactly an independent polling agency. Josh Krausharr of Politico writes:

Though there’s little to indicate the firm’s Democratic affiliation on its website — clients are listed, but without partisan identification — [pollster Tom Jensen] said PPP makes no secret of its politics.

This certainly doesn't mean that Public Policy Polling is doing anything nefarious. But shouldn't this conflict of interest be noted? What if the situation were reversed, and a Republican Party-affiliated pollster found that 52 percent of Democrats believed that the Republican National Committee manipulated the election results?

Second, Public Policy Polling often gets results that are out of line with other mainstream pollsters.

For example, in the very same survey that Sullivan links to, Public Policy Polling reports that only 77 percent of African-Americans approve of the job that President Obama is doing. Gallup currently puts the figure at 95 percent for this demographic group (with a monthly average of approximately 92 percent, and a comparable yearly average).

Third, only 33 percent of the 1066 respondents in this survey identified themselves as Republicans. Thus, the sample size for Republicans is about 352, and the sampling error around 52 percent is +/- 5 percentage points. Public Policy Polling notes that "[o]ter factors, such as refusal to be interviewed and weighting, may introduce additional error that is more difficult to quantify." So, the overall margin of error around the 52 percent figure could potentially be quite high.

Perhaps more importantly, Public Policy Polling uses Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology to conduct its telephone interviews. As Brian Schaffner of Pollster points out, the use of IVR technology in polling is still quite controversial.

Schaffner explains:

[O]ne of the reasons for concerns with IVR polling is that citizens with only a cell phone cannot be reached by these pollsters and these citizens now comprise at least one-fifth of the population. Yet, while the cell-only problem may generally be an issue for IVR technology (and for live interview pollsters who aren't calling cell phones), it is less of a problem for polling on elections, and particularly in low turnout elections.

. . .

Where these polls may run into greater challenges is when they attempt to make inferences about the American public rather than registered (or likely) voters.

I think Sullivan should really consider some of these points before he links to another survey from Public Policy Polling without providing any context.

Update: The NYT will not publish the results of IVR polls.

He's Back, Baby

2009-11-17T15:32:00.004-05:00

Ross Douthat has a new blog -- "Evaluations" -- which I'll be adding to my blog roll.

I'm glad that Ross has finally started blogging again. We need more intelligent conservative voices in the blogosphere. (I'm sure that Conor Friedersdorf is ecstatic, as well.)

Here is a taste:

I’ve argued before that while the eventual health care legislation is likely to be a boondoggle, it at least holds out the hope of partially remedying the present system’s worst injustice: Namely, the way the current mix of semi-free markets, tax breaks and government subsidies interact to price millions of Americans — some of them lower-middle class, some of them sick, some of them employees of small businesses, some of them self-employed — out of the insurance market entirely. Obamacare, in whatever form it eventually takes, will pile further regulations, subsidies and perverse incentives atop the existing mess, and probably make our already-dysfunctional system more byzantine and more expensive. But it does promise to make it more equitable along the way.

For some people, at least. The trouble is that for millions of uninsured Americans, the reforms will make the system seem more unjust, not less. So, for instance, while the coverage of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’s assessment of the House health care bill has mainly focused, understandably, on the memo’s predictions about the impact of the projected cuts to Medicare, to my mind the more damning figure is the one that Keith Hennessey flags here — the projection that in 2019, the bill will leave 18 million Americans uninsured and paying a penalty for the privilege.

Request For the Day

2009-11-16T15:06:00.005-05:00

If anybody has any interesting ideas on how to reform Social Security that do not involve a) transitioning to private accounts or b) mass murder, I'd love to hear them . . . .

What is Paul Krugman Talking About?

2009-11-13T18:10:00.004-05:00

I just reread Paul Krugman's old post on why there is no problem with the Social Security Trust Fund assets.

His argument:

The Social Security system won’t be in trouble: it will, in fact, still have a growing trust fund, because of the interest that the trust earns on its accumulated surplus. The only way Social Security gets in trouble is if Congress votes not to honor U.S. government bonds held by Social Security. That’s not going to happen. So legally, mechanically, 2018 has no meaning.

. . .

What we really have is a looming crisis in the General Fund. Social Security, with its own dedicated tax, has been run responsibly; the rest of the government has not. So why are we talking about a Social Security crisis?

To be honest, I don't really understand Krugman's point.

The assets in the Social Security Trust Funds represent a claim against the United States Treasury. In other words, Treasury has borrowed from the Social Security Trust Funds to finance its current spending, and it will eventually have to repay that debt.

When the Social Security program begins to cash in those assets (probably some time in 2016), Congress has three (potentially interchangeable) options to finance the repayment of its debt: raise taxes, cut spending, or add to the already unsustainable deficit.

None of these options is particuarly appealing. The combined Trust Funds contain approximately $2.6 trillion in assets, which means that the federal government will have to find $2.6 trillion in revenue over the next few decades.

Krugman wants to reframe the problem as a crisis in the General Fund rather than the Social Security Trust Fund itself. And, technically, he's probably right. But how does this really change anything? The federal government still has to make a series of difficult choices ahead. Choosing the wrong path could still place the Social Security system and the entire federal budget in jeopardy.

Viewing the problem this way may be politically appealing to Krugman, but it's not exactly helpful.

Are Black Republicans 'Sellouts'?

2009-11-13T17:14:00.005-05:00

CNN's Roland Martin defends black Republicans against charges that they are traitors to their race:

As someone who has voted for Democrats, Republicans and independents, I’m focused on the issues.

. . .

Listening to one another and making a determination on what a person is saying, as opposed to depending on labels, is vital. So I would hope that black voters in Texas actually listen to Michael Williams, chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, as he campaigns as a Republican for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. He deserves an audience, just like anyone else.

It's a shame that CNN is getting destroyed in the ratings by its partisan rivals, Fox News and MSNBC. CNN really is the superior cable news network, and it has the most sensible commentators.

Time To Move On . . .

2009-11-13T11:46:00.004-05:00

I went to Wordle today to get an idea of what I've been talking about for the past week:

[Click to enlarge]

I think I need to move on to a new topic . . .

Carrie Prejean

2009-11-12T12:59:00.004-05:00

I'm ashamed of myself for watching this, but it's kind of fascinating.

I hate to be so mean, but Carrie Prejean has to be among the dumbest people I've ever seen on television.

Stupak and the NYT

2009-11-11T10:13:00.006-05:00

In criticizing the Stupak Amendment this past Monday, the NYT Editorial Board wrote:

The bill brought to the floor already included a careful compromise that should have satisfied reasonable legislators on both sides of the abortion issue. The vast majority of people expected to buy policies on the new exchanges would pay part of the premium and receive government tax credits to pay for the rest. The compromise would have prohibited the use of the tax subsidies to pay for almost all abortions, but it would have allowed the segregation and use of premium contributions and co-payments to pay for such coverage.

I'm opposed to the Stupak Amendment and broadly in favor of abortion rights, but I don’t see how this original compromise could be considered “reasonable.” Money is fungible. There is no way to 'segregate' the tax subsidies from the abortion coverage. Either the federal government funds abortion or it doesn't.

This seems a rather obvious point. In fact, read what the NYT Editorial Board wrote just over a year ago in its commentary ('Money Really is Fungible') on executive pay caps:

Just weeks after the Treasury Department gave nine of the nation’s top banks $125 billion in taxpayer dollars to save them from unprecedented calamity, bank executives are salting money away in billionaire bonus pools to reward themselves for their performance.
Outraged? The bankers (who didn’t anticipate the subprime crisis) were ready for that. So they are assuring everyone that this self-directed largess won’t be paid with the same dollars they got from taxpayers. They’ll use other ones.
What we want to know is will they be marking the bills so they can be sure which is which?

Is there any real difference between these two situations, other than the fact that the former involves abortion and the latter involves greedy bank executives? How can you recognize the absurdity of one scenario, and consider the other “reasonable”?

If the NYT Editorial Board was honest, it would make the case that abortions should be publically funded. Instead, it has decided to chastise abortion opponents who refused to accept an illogical compromise.

Update: Conor Friedersdorf responds to Ann Friedman's post on the Stupak Amendment:

There are many women in the United States who oppose abortion, and if asked would agree that federal money shouldn’t fund it, so the assertion that the amendment throws 50 percent of the population under the bus isn’t accurate, unless one takes the position that these anti-abortion women are suffering from false consciousness.

Friedman's reply:

Actually, no matter what their beliefs about abortion, every woman in this country is indeed screwed over by this amendment. Many, many women who are opposed abortion rights have exercised those rights themselves -- whether for health reasons or because, when it came right down to it, they simply found themselves making a different choice than they thought they would in that situation.

Megan McArdle is concerned with Friedman's argument:

[A]s a response, this seems to trivialize the preferences of pro-life women in a way that I find pretty disturbing from feminists. In what other area of life is it okay to pat the little lady on the head and tell her that she doesn't really want what she says she wants, because she might regret it later?
. . .
Obviously, since I'm pro-choice, I think you can argue against abortion control in many effective ways. But this is not one of them--at least not if you hew to the feminist notion that women are entitled to their own choices and preferences as individuals, not lumped in with some vast undifferentiated mass of women who all want the same thing.

A Politically Serious Nation?

2009-11-10T15:04:00.006-05:00

David Brooks at his best:

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan [murdered 13 people] in Fort Hood, Tex., last week, many Americans had an understandable and, in some ways, admirable reaction. They didn’t want the horror to become a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry.

So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people’s stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility. He didn’t have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Abortion Amendment

2009-11-08T14:21:00.008-05:00

A few thoughts on the recently-passed Stupak Amendment, which limits federally-subsidized abortion coverage . . . .

First, President Obama feverishly (and, at the time, disingenuously) denied allegations that the health care reform bills before Congress would allow for any federal funding of abortions. This was essentially the status quo under the Hyde Amendment and subsequent legislation. No one should be surprised that this amendment passed, since the president had promised as much.

Second, the amendment does not prohibit federal funding for all abortions. There are exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the mother. These exceptions fit with the mainstream view on abortion rights.

Third, a strong plurality of Americans believe that abortion should be "legal only in a few circumstances." This is reflected in the composition of the House of Representatives, where a majority of legislators supported the amendment. Those who are broadly in favor of abortion rights (myself included) must acknowledge that we live in a democracy where relatively few Americans support a universal right to abortion. Most people have complex views on the subject.

Fourth, a person's stance on abortion is not strongly associated with gender. In fact, most studies I've seen show no statistically significant difference between men and women on this issue. Today, women are more likely to call themselves "pro-life" than "pro-choice."

Update: Ezra Klein makes an interesting point:

[T]he biggest federal subsidy for private insurance coverage is untouched by Stupak's amendment. It's the $250 billion the government spends each year making employer-sponsored health-care insurance tax-free.
That money, however, subsidizes the insurance of 157 million Americans, many of them quite affluent. Imagine if Stupak had attempted to expand his amendment to their coverage. It would, after all, have been the same principle: Federal policy should not subsidize insurance that offers abortion coverage.

This is certainly how economists and policy analysts would view the situation. Although, I suspect most ordinary Americans would recognize a slight difference between providing a direct federal subsidy for health insurance and merely lifting the tax on employer-provided insurance.

I wonder if Ezra shares Greg Mankiw's fears about marginal tax rates . . . .

Gay Marriage Bigotry

2009-11-04T17:33:00.009-05:00

Rod Dreher over at Beliefnet writes:

Unless I'm missing something, in the 31 states in which voters had a say on whether or not gay marriage was going to be the law of the land, they all rejected it. Every single state.

. . .

[U]nless you're prepared to call more than half the country bigots -- and I have no doubt that many, perhaps most, gay marriage supporters are, and let that self-serving explanation suffice -- maybe, just maybe, you ought to ask yourself if there's something else going on here. And that maybe, just maybe, serious attention should be paid, instead of paying attention long enough to insult people who disagree with you as evil people who deserved to be excoriated and harassed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates responds:

I probably wouldn't use the word "bigot." I don't think, for instance, that half this country thinks hate crimes against gays is a good thing. But I have no problem believing that half the country--maybe more--is deeply prejudiced against gays. This generally fits into my view of all -isms. I think prejudice is part of who we are as humans, and thus as Americans. Following from that, I think prejudice is one of the many forces that influence how we vote. Hence the notion that half this country is deeply prejudiced against gays really doesn't shock me.

I'm sympathetic to Coates's argument. In my experience, people who strongly oppose gay marriage do tend to be animated by some form of prejudice. However, I think this debate is extremely counterproductive. Charging your opponents with bigotry -- or even the lesser offense of "prejudice" -- is a surefire way to lose the argument.

Even some social conservatives would admit that the secular case against gay marriage isn't very strong. Those of us who support marriage equality should be engaging with that argument and trying to expose its tortured logic, not hurling ad hominem attacks at our opponents.

We can accept prejudice as a given, but it doesn't serve our purpose to use it as a trump card when we're in the minority. Instead, why don't we just call on our opponents to defend their position?

It shouldn't be hard to point out the illegitimacy of that position.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Pulling for Daggett

2009-11-03T15:06:00.005-05:00

I realize that, barring an act of divine intervention, Chis Daggett is not going to win the New Jersey gubernatorial race. But I really do hope that he garners a reasonably large share of the vote.

Daggett is clearly the best candidate. He's also the only one who could introduce any real reform. I agree with this Star-Ledger endorsement of Daggett (follow-up here):

The lamentable fact is that the two parties are, themselves, little more than narrow special interests. Their competition for short-term political and/or monetary gain has jeopardized the state’s long-term economic health and left it with a tarnished national reputation. Where the major parties have differed, their differences have been inconsequential. Where they’ve been the same, their similarities have been destructive.

They have contributed equally to gross overspending in Trenton by consistently pandering to the pay, pension and retirement policies demanded by powerful public employee unions. Democrats have financed the spree with tax hikes, Republicans with borrowed money, and both with pension-fund raids.

How do we now signal them that this has got to stop if not by rejecting their anointed candidates? How if not by electing Chris Daggett?

I would also second David Frum's comments:

I interviewed Daggett this past weekend, and I can attest – this independent too is a much more attractive candidate than his official Republican rival.

His proposals for balancing the state’s books are detailed and workable. He’d extend the state’s 7% sales to cover services as well as goods. He’d end the hodge-podge of property tax rebates. He’d then use the money gained to finance an across-the-board property tax cut and also reductions in corporate income taxes. (A fuller statement of the plan can be read here.)

Daggett emphasizes New Jersey’s most important environmental issue: the preservation of open spaces from urban sprawl. He’d use state funds to buy and preserve open land. He favors major ethics reform to try to clean up New Jersey’s notoriously corrupt political culture.

Like most New Jersey Republicans, he is unexcited by social issues, accepting the status quo on abortion, guns, and gay rights. (On that last, he says he’ll leave the issue to the legislature. If they pass same-sex marriage, he’ll sign it.) And make no mistake: Daggett has been a Republican almost all his life. A protégé of former Governor Thomas Kean, he was appointed as state Environmental Protection Agency administrator by Ronald Reagan.

Daggett would make a very good governor.

Sometimes the two-party system can be so frustrating . . . .

Update: Chris Christie is the projected winner. It doesn't look like Daggett made much of a dent in the end.

Kind of depressing.

Update II: In hindsight, maybe I should've voted for Gary Stein for governor. Check out his awesome ballot statement (pdf).

How Do We Gauge the Stimulus?

2009-11-02T23:29:00.006-05:00

Greg Mankiw responds to Paul Krugman's self-righteous assault on "conservative economists" who question the veracity of the administration's stimulus numbers.

Mankiw writes:

I do not object to claims such as,
A: "Based on our models of the economy, we believe there would be X million fewer jobs today without the stimulus."
But it is absurd to suggest that you can say,
B: "We have measured how many jobs the stimulus has saved or created, and the number is X."

Economists are capable of making statements such as A, but it is beyond our ken to make statements such as B. Statement B is, of course, much stronger than statement A, as it purports to be based on data rather than on models. Unfortunately, we are hearing statements like B much too often from administration officials. A good example is here, where can you "learn" that 110,185.36 jobs have been created or saved in California alone.

Marginal Tax Rates and Health Care Reform

2009-11-01T11:11:00.004-05:00

In his latest NYT op-ed, Greg Mankiw argues that the current health care proposals will substantially raise marginal tax rates on middle-income earners. This has a lot to do with how economists (and policy analysts) view taxes, which isn't necessarily the way everyone else views taxes.

For example, Mankiw explains:

A family of four with an income, say, of $54,000 would pay $9,900 for health care. That covers only about half the actual cost. Uncle Sam would pick up the rest.
Now suppose that the same family earns an additional $12,000 by, for example, having the primary earner work overtime or sending a secondary worker into the labor force. In that case, the federal subsidy shrinks, so the family’s cost of health care rises to $12,700.
In other words, $2,800 of the $12,000 of extra income, or 23 percent, would be effectively taxed away by the government’s new health care system.

Will this dramatically damaged economic productivity? I'm not sure, but Mankiw's point should be taken seriously.

Will the Public Plan Cost More?

2009-10-30T15:36:00.005-04:00

The CBO projects that the public option will likely have higher premiums than private insurance options.

Ezra Klein explains:

[T]he public plan will pay prices equivalent to those of private insurers and may save a bit of money on administrative efficiencies. But because the public option is, well, public, it won't want to do the unpopular things that insurers do to save money, like manage care or aggressively review treatments. It also, presumably, won't try to drive out the sick or the unhealthy. That means the public option will spend more, and could, over time, develop a reputation as a good home for bad health risks, which would mean its average premium will increase because its average member will cost more. The public option will be a good deal for these relatively sick people, but the presence of sick people will make it look like a bad deal to everyone else, which could in turn make it a bad deal for everyone else.

The nightmare scenario, then, is that private insurers cotton onto this and accelerate the process, implicitly or explicitly guiding bad risks to the public option. In theory, the exchanges are risk-adjusted, and the public option will be given more money if it ends up with bad risks, but it's hard to say how that will function in practice.

This also illuminates one of the more problematic inconsistencies in the health-care debate. Insurers have been blamed for, among other things, doing too much to discriminate against bad health-care risks and refusing to pay for care far too often. They've been blamed, in other words, for saying "no." But they've also been blamed for doing too little to control costs.

But that is how they control costs. We saw this in the late-'90s, when tightly managed care brought cost growth down to the 4 percent range but also triggered a public backlash (it did not, however, appear to hurt health outcomes).

I agree with every word of that.

Sullivan Goes Overboard, and Young Follows

2009-10-28T20:49:00.011-04:00

I was just reading through some of Cathy Young's old posts and I came across this bizarre assault on Andrew Sullivan:

As I said in my previous post, I have limited sympathy for Sarah Palin.

However, this, from Andrew Sullivan (on top of the never-ending flogging of Trig Palin conspiracy theories), is outrageous. I saw the reference to the “white trash concupiscence” Palin-slam in Douthat’s column and wondered who could have written that. Despite my knowledge of Andrew’s raging PDS, I was shocked . . . . I fully intend for this to be my last visit to The Daily Dish, and I have to say that at this point, if someone started a campaign to get The Atlantic website to drop Andrew, I’d back it. Imagine the reaction if a journalist/blogger writing about a black politician referred to “ghetto concupiscence”, without even using the word “black.” [Emphasis mine]

While I agree that Andrew Sullivan's criticisms of Sarah Palin during the election were often over-the-top (and sometimes downright nasty), I don't quite understand why Young finds this particular comment so uniquely offensive. How else would you describe the Palin Family's never-ending psychodrama? To me, the Levi Johnston affair alone seems like it could easily be described as "white-trash concupiscence" . . . .

Honestly, I wouldn't have expected this kind of politically correct nonsense from Young. In my opinion, she remains one of the most insightful and fair-minded feminist writers out there.

During the Kobe Bryant trial, Young penned a brilliant and well-reasoned op-ed on "rape shield laws." It's probably the most intelligent consideration of the subject that I've ever read.

An excerpt:

Like many such cases, the Kobe Bryant case is primarily a "he said, she said" matter, with ambiguous corroborating evidence that county judge Frederick Gannett characterized as weak even as he sent the case to trial. The woman's sexual activities prior to the alleged rape may well be relevant to the physical evidence; if, as the defense has hinted, she engaged in consensual sex shortly after her encounter with Bryant, it may well be relevant to the question of whether she was raped; if she is mentally unstable, it may well be relevant to her credibility.

These are wrenching questions. Obviously, a woman with a history of mental illness or substance abuse could still be a rape victim. Obviously, the prospect of having embarrassing personal details exposed in court (let alone paraded in the media) may discourage victims from coming forward. Just as obviously, suppressing relevant evidence may result in sending an innocent person to jail. And if it's frightening to put oneself in the place of a sexual assault victim who finds herself on trial in the courtroom, it is no less terrifying to imagine that you -- or your husband or brother or son -- could be accused of rape and denied access to evidence that could exonerate him.

For some feminists, the dogma that "women never lie" means that there is, for all intents and purposes, no presumption of innocence for the defendant. After the 1997 trial of sportscaster Marv Albert, defending the judge's decision to admit compromising information about Albert's sexual past but not about his accuser's, attorney Gloria Allred decried "the notion that there's some sort of moral equivalency between the defendant and the victim" -- forgetting that as long as the defendant hasn't been convicted, he and his accuser are indeed moral equals in the eyes of the law. Wendy Murphy has blasted Kobe Bryant's attorneys for feeding uncorroborated rumors about the alleged victim to the media maw. Yet, appearing on Fox News, she made the claim, highly prejudicial to Bryant and so far untested in a court of law, that the woman "suffered pretty terrible injuries" the likes of which she had not seen despite having prosecuted "hundreds of sex crimes cases."

Doubting Brooks

2009-10-27T09:55:00.006-04:00

In his column today, David Brooks trumpets epistemological uncertainty in government decision-making:

Up until recently, people in the financial world bathed in the warm glow of their own self-approval. Hubris in that world always takes the same form: The geniuses there come to believe that they have mastered risk. The future is an algorithm and they’ve cracked the code.
Over the past year, the bonfire of overconfidence has shifted to Washington. Since the masters of finance have been exposed as idiots, the masters of government have concluded (somewhat illogically) that they must be really smart.

Overconfidence in government also has a characteristic form: that of highly rational Olympians who attempt to stand above problems and solve them in a finely tuned and impartial manner. In moments of government overconfidence, officials come to see society not as a dynamic and complex organism, but as a machine, which can be rebuilt. In such moments, governance and engineering merge into one.

If I do become a highly rational Olympian, hopefully I'll be able to maintain some level of humility . . . .

The Moral Certitude of Modernity

2009-10-25T16:59:00.008-04:00

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers writes:

I've been reading Marilynne Robinson's book of essays, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Her essay entitled “Puritans and Prigs” sets out to defend the Puritans and contrast them to a group she calls prigs, the sort of politically correct thought police that the right used to rail against in the 1990s. I think her argument also has a lot in common with your indictments of fundamentalism and movement conservatism.

The Puritans' belief that we are all sinners, Robinson says, gives "excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms the standards all of us fail to attain." However, she argues that modernity, of which prigs are emblematic, is essentially Stalinist, in that it believes that society "can and should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilize the society in its goodness so that it produces more good people, and so on. First the bad ideas must be weeded out and socially useful ones put in their place. Then the bad people must be identified, especially those that are carriers of bad ideas."

. . .

Indeed, much the same could be said of today’s right. For my part, it seems all such prigs (left and right) stem from the fundamental epistemological arrogance of modernity--that all things can be known. This is as true of Darwinism as it is of Biblical fundamentalism. The older I get, the more folly such claims seem to contain. This is not a new insight: one need only look at Ecclesiastes. Efforts such as political correctness and movement conservatism are destructive of civil society and are based on nothing more than a chasing after the wind.

I think this is a brilliant summation of the problem with both the contemporary right and the contemporary left. Forgiveness and understanding are no longer virtues.

They've been replaced by self-righteousness and moral certitude . . .

Cowen on Mandates

2009-10-25T10:30:00.003-04:00

Tyler Cowen comes out against health insurance mandates:

The paradox is this: Reform advocates start with anecdotes about the underprivileged who are uninsured, then turn around and propose something that would hurt at least some members of that group.

Right-Wing Extremism Again

2009-10-24T22:54:00.005-04:00

I just re-read two excellent posts from Conor Friedersdorf, tearing down Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. So good.

Check them out: here and here.

International Health Care Comparisons

2009-10-22T16:23:00.005-04:00

A friend (who blogs at Dissection and Introspection) directed me to this article in the WSJ, which reflects on the difficulty of international health care comparisons. Very insightful.

I've commented on this previously here and here.

Confronting Empirical Reality in the Health Care Debate

2009-10-22T13:05:00.001-04:00

Ezra Klein delivers the bad news.

Does Social Security Create Poverty?

2009-10-21T18:48:00.007-04:00

I recently came across this piece by Edgar Browning -- the author of my microeconomics textbook -- in which he suggests that Social Security actually increases poverty rates among elderly Americans by crowding out private investment.

It's an interesting contention, though I'm not quite convinced by it.

Putting Browning's argument aside, though, I think there's a pretty obvious problem with a Social Security system that simply collects taxes and disburses benefits without affording Americans the opportunity to make their own financial decisions.

Today, financial literacy in the United States is pretty dismal. I can't help but feel that most Americans would be a bit more savvy if they actually had more personal control over their money . . . and if their retirement really depended on them making good decisions.

(Interestingly, a strong plurality of Baby Boomers may be collecting Social Security income at age 62, rather than the "normal retirement age," due in part to financial necessity.)

Update: Freakonomics's Stephen Dubner points to this study on financial literacy:

[F]ewer than one-third of young adults possess basic knowledge of interest rates, inflation, and risk diversification. Financial literacy is strongly related to sociodemographic characteristics and family financial sophistication. Specifically, a college-educated male whose parents had stocks and retirement savings is about 50 percentage points more likely to know about risk diversification than a female with less than a high school education whose parents were not wealthy.

The Basic Problem of Social Security Reform

2009-10-20T13:38:00.004-04:00

A brief primer, for anyone who's interested:

For more than 70 years, the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program (OASDI) – commonly known as Social Security – has provided social insurance to a substantial number of American citizens. Though it was initially envisioned as a safety net for elderly retirees, the program has been expanded intermittently since its inception to include additional categories of Americans. In 2005, the Social Security Administration (SSA) disbursed benefit payments to more than 47 million Americans, with retirees still composing the largest group of beneficiaries (28 million).

The OASDI program is financed through a dedicated federal payroll tax, and its revenue stream depends entirely on current wage earners. In recent decades, the ratio of wage earners to retirees has narrowed substantially as birthrates have declined and life expectancies have increased. With the Baby Boom Generation beginning to collect benefits, this “dependency ratio” will continue to tighten, further diminishing the program’s revenue base in the upcoming years. By 2016, the OASDI program’s outlays to beneficiaries are expected to exceed revenues. Thus, if current trends continue, the Social Security program will likely face a long-term deficit in the coming decades.

Reforms passed in the early 1980s have enabled to the OASDI program to move away from its original pay-as-you-go structure and build up a substantial revenue surplus. These additional monies have been invested in U.S. securities and placed in trust. While the assets in the Social Security Trust Fund will help to maintain payments to beneficiaries after OASDI outlays begin to exceed revenues, these assets can only fill the revenue gap for a short time. According to best-guess assumptions, the Trust Fund will be depleted as early as 2037. After this point, projected receipts from payroll taxes will only cover approximately 76 percent of all benefit payments.

The goal for policymakers and other interested parties is to address this looming deficit crisis, and to confront the trade-offs among different reform options. There are a number of important considerations in crafting a solution to the problem of Social Security reform. Those who seek to resolve the deficit crisis must first develop a set of evaluative criteria to assess the impact of various policy options. Applying these criteria to different options will enable decision-makers to systematically assess the merits of each approach, and then choose the most appealing alternative.

Is Rush Limbaugh the Problem?

2009-10-15T13:39:00.003-04:00

This is a really great commentary from LZ Granderson.

I'm not a big fan of professional sports, so I've never read Granderson's ESPN column. But he's a great writer.

Oh, and just for the record, Rush Limbaugh is a racist . . . .

Hate Crime Legislation

2009-10-14T16:11:00.006-04:00

Today, Andrew Sullivan linked to an old piece that he had written for the New York Times Magazine ("What's So Bad About Hate?"). It's a brilliant exploration of hate crime legislation and the standard concept of "hate." Definitely worth reading.

Here's a short excerpt:

So the concept of "homophobia," like that of "sexism" and "racism," is often a crude one. All three are essentially cookie-cutter formulas that try to understand human impulses merely through the one-dimensional identity of the victims, rather than through the thoughts and feelings of the haters and hated.

This is deliberate. The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all blame to one group in society — the "oppressors" — and render specific others — the "victims" — completely blameless. And they want to do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people — white straight males for example — purely because of the color of their skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity. And it postures morally over the result.

In reality, human beings and human acts are far more complex, which is why these isms and the laws they have fomented are continually coming under strain and challenge. Once again, hate wriggles free of its definers. It knows no monolithic groups of haters and hated. Like a river, it has many eddies, backwaters and rapids. So there are anti-Semites who actually admire what they think of as Jewish power, and there are gay-haters who look up to homosexuals and some who want to sleep with them. And there are black racists, racist Jews, sexist women and anti-Semitic homosexuals. Of course there are.

The PWC Report and the Tax on High-Cost Health Plans

2009-10-13T14:03:00.014-04:00

Ezra Klein rips into Megan McArdle for her long-winded defense of the PWC report (pdf) that was comissioned by AHIP, a political advocacy group for the American health insurance industry.

He writes:

McArdle goes to bat for the most indefensible element of the analysis: the decision to avoid estimating the response to the tax on high-cost insurance plans (which is, in fact, the whole point of the tax), and simply pretend that everything will remain unchanged except that a lot of people will pay a large new tax that they don't have to pay. Moreover, she conscripts the Congressional Budget Office to help with the argument: "You might think that everyone is going to structure their benefits to get around this tax," McArdle writes. "But the CBO expects us to collect quite a bit of money from this tax."

Not quite. The Congressional Budget Office projections (which are, in this case, the Joint Committee on Taxation's projections, as the CBO doesn't estimate tax revenues) actually suggest that the bulk of the tax's revenues will come from the response to the tax, not the payment of the tax. As the New York Times reports, the JCT believes that "about $142 billion of the 10-year total of $201 billion to be raised by the [excise tax] would come from increased income and payroll taxes." In other words, the vast majority of the revenues would come because employers would "structure their benefits to get around this tax." Workers would receive more of their compensation in wages and less in health-care benefits, and because wages are taxable and health benefits aren't, tax revenues would go up.

(Megan did, in fact, acknowledge this error prior to Ezra's post.)

There is at least one broader issue with Ezra's point. Common sense tells you that a tax on "Cadillac" health insurance plans will encourage employers to offer cheaper benefits packages. It's ridiculous to argue otherwise, unless you have strong empirical evidence to back up your claim. Pigovian taxes are, after all, designed to alter behavior in exactly this way. So Ezra is clearly right on the merits here.

But, if Ezra is right, isn't this a huge problem for the administration? If workers with good health benefits will likely be forced into cheaper plans, how can the president continually claim that those who like their health insurance can keep what they have?

FactCheck has already called out the president for this canard, but his argument seems particularly disingenuous now that JCT is actually basing its revenue projections on the idea that some employers will offer cheaper benefits packages if the America's Healthy Future Act (pdf) passes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of taxing health insurance -- especially Cadillac plans. I think it's good policy, and it's a step away from the employer-based health insurance system. What frustrates me is the president's insistence that we can have our cake and eat it, too.

If we want to control health care costs, we have to discourage overuse of the system. That means pushing people away from big benefits packages, not telling them that they can always keep their current health insurance.

Update: One more point about Ezra's previous post on the PWC report. Ezra apparently takes exception to the authors' assumption of "full cost-shifting of cuts to public programs." This is another way of saying that doctors and hospitals will try to make up for cuts to their reimbursement rates from public programs by increasing their reimbursement rates form private programs.

He writes:

Have you ever heard of that before, in any industry? If Blockbuster decides to cut costs to consumers by negotiating lower payments to movie studios, does Netflix send out a sorrowful e-mail explaining that it will have to increase its membership fee because it now needs to make higher payments to movie studios?

Well, no. But that analogy makes absolutely no sense. The health care industry is different from the movie rental industry -- and pretty much every other industry -- for a number of reasons. (I would again encourage you to listen to the latest episode of This American Life.)

Ezra must know this. Paul Krugman -- whom Ezra once interviewed -- has repeatedly argued that the health care market is like no other market . . . and, in fact, shouldn't be treated as a market at all.

So why is Ezra suddenly trying to pretend that buying health care is in any way equivalent to renting videos? Maybe he's right that cost-shifting won't be a problem, but this comparison is totally spurious.

Update II: Ezra takes a more nuanced position on cost-shifting:

To be clear on my position here, I think there's probably some level of cost-shifting that's between the zero percent that some advocates would like and the 100 percent that the insurance industry suggests. The Lewin Group estimated (pdf) 40 percent, and that sounds reasonable enough to me, though I'd be open to further evidence.

He also makes another rather obvious point:

It's true that a hospital's costs are relatively inelastic on a year-to-year basis, but they're more elastic over time: if they had to adjust to less revenue than they'd like, they'd make certain changes to the way they do business.

Well, yeah. Isn't that, like, the definition of the long-run?

Incentive Problems and the American Health Care System

2009-10-12T21:57:00.003-04:00

If you're willing to spare an hour to consider some of the incentive problems inherent in the American health care system, I'd recommend listening to the most recent episode of This American Life.

The episode is called "More is Less." And it's actually very, very interesting.

Public School Song in Praise of Obama

2009-10-11T22:29:00.009-04:00

There are two things that strike me about this video of New Jersey public school children singing songs in praise of President Obama's agenda and accomplishments.

First, it's not that big a deal.

This is a relatively trivial issue that conservatives have been eager to exploit for political gain. Rush Limbaugh has been pounding away at this story for more than a week, and Fox News has been feverishly churning out exposés and airing clips about the incident.

In some cases, the hysteria from right-wing pundits has been extremely offensive. Tucker Carlson, for example, recently likened the song lyrics to Khmer Rouge tactics. We should all be extremely concerned about this kind of hyperbole in our political discourse.

Second, some of the lyrics to these songs were inappropriate, and I can't believe that anyone on the left is trying to argue otherwise.

Here's a good example:

Hooray, Mr. President we honor your great plans, To make this country's economy number one again!

Whether or not you personally believe that President Obama's economic policies are admirable, public school children should not be 'honoring' the president's "great plans" to "make this country's economy number one again." Many of the president's fiscal plans are highly controversial, and instructing young students to honor his plans amounts to political and intellectual coaching. If these same public school children were expected to sing songs 'honoring' the economic plans of Ronald Reagan, many parents on the political left would be justifiably upset.

Elementary school teachers should never give the impression that they are endorsing a sitting president's plans in a specific policy area. Yes, Tucker Carlson is wrong, but that doesn't make the teachers in this story right . . . .

Is the Baucus Plan the Way to Go?

2009-10-09T22:33:00.005-04:00

David Brooks has another brilliant column in today's NYT.

Please, please read it.

Has the Nobel Peace Prize Jumped the Shark?

2009-10-09T11:58:00.016-04:00

According to Alex Massie, it has.

I like President Obama and I admire what he's trying to do, but after less than ten months in office, this seems a bit premature.

Can Obama already be "the person who [has] done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses"?

Slate's John Dickerson says no.

The Peace Prize Committee has suggested that it's merely trying to encourage the president to hold fast on his commitments to diplomacy and nuclear arms reduction. Thorbjoern Jagland, the head of the Committee, said today, "It was because we would like to support what he is trying to achieve."

This seems like a well-intentioned argument -- we certainly should support many of the goals that the president has outlined -- but I think earning a Nobel Prize makes the president's job more difficult in ways both practical and political.

WaPo's Glenn Kessler has a good analysis of the problems that could arise from awarding this kind of "aspirational" Peace Prize so early into President Obama's first term.

Update: The president strikes the right tone:

"Let me be clear: I do not view it a recognition of my own accomplishments but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations," he said.

“To be honest, I do not feel I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honoured by this prize."

Update II: I think Megan McArdle is right:

I guess I must hate America, but I actually think it's kind of ludicrous that anyone is even trying to argue that Barack Obama truly deserves this Nobel Peace Prize. Could he have deserved it, after he'd had more than nine months in office? Easily. But he hasn't had time to, y'know, accomplish anything. Unless they're giving out the Prize these days for stimulus bills and banking sector interventions. The committee claims they awarded it for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples"? Can even his most ardent supporters come up with any effort he's made that really qualifies as more extraordinary than those of everyone else in the world?

It's not like I want to take the prize away, and I'm certainly not angry about it . . . but I'd rather have seen Barack Obama honored for something besides not being George W. Bush.

I couldn't agree more.

Certainly, the reaction from many conservatives has been overstated (and in some cases, down right offensive), but it's absurd for some on the left to suggest that questioning whether President Obama actually deserves this award amounts to being unpatriotic.

I assume this criticism would also apply to the president himself?

Update III: NPR political commentators E.J. Dionne and David Brooks discuss whether the president should have accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

Update IV: Peter Beinart, who blogs for The Daily Beast, writes:

The Nobel Prize Committee should be in the business of conferring celebrity on unknown human-rights and peace activists toiling in the most god-forsaken parts of the world; the people who really need the attention (and even the money). It should be in the business of angering powerful tyrants by giving their victims a moment in the sun. Choosing Barack Obama, who practically orbits the sun already, accomplishes the exact opposite of that. Let’s hope Obama eventually deserves this award. And let’s hope the Nobel Committee’s decision meets with such a deafening chorus of chortles and jeers that it never does something this stupid again.

Ezra Swallows His Pride

2009-10-08T22:18:00.005-04:00

This is why I respect Ezra Klein:

I've been a big proponent of affixing calorie counts to menus. There's substantial evidence suggesting that people wildly underestimate the calorie content of dishes at restaurants, and have a lot of trouble reliably guessing whether one dish is lighter than another dish. There's also evidence that people want to eat better than they do. It seemed like the sort of situation where information could result in action.

The first big study out of New York City, however, suggests that menu labeling has been a bit of a bust in changing ordering habits at fast food restaurants in low-income neighborhoods. The researchers identified 14 outlets and, using Newark (where there's no calorie labeling) as a control group, conducted interviews and receipt checks to see how ordering patterns changed. The answer? They didn't. If anything, the calories per order went up a smidge.
. . .

I'm still a supporter of calorie labeling on the simple grounds that people should have this information, no matter how they choose to use it. But so far, the evidence suggests that it's not going to make a dent in obesity rates.

Why Doesn't Ken Conrad Support the Public Option?

2009-10-07T12:53:00.007-04:00

In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Ken Conrad explained:

I don't think a government-run plan best fits this culture. A plan that's not government-run has the best chance of succeeding in being passed into law.

Second, and this is very important to my thinking, the public option as defined by the committee of jurisdiction in the House, the Ways and Means Committee, is tied to Medicare levels of reimbursement. My state has the second-lowest level of Medicare reimbursement in the country. If my state is tied to that reimbursement, every hospital goes broke. People say, "Just fix it." I've been on the Finance Committee more than 15 years. I've been trying to fix the unfair aspects of Medicare reimbursement all the time. We run into the House. Membership is determined by population, and the big population states write levels of reimbursement that unfairly treat hospitals in states like mine. My hospitals get one-half as much as urban hospitals to treat the same illnesses.

A key argument against the "strong" public option -- one that would pay Medicare reimbursement rates -- is that we already have an enormous degree of cost shifting onto private insurance plans. Another Medicare-like plan could potentially widen the gap between government reimbursement rates and private reimbursement rates, and ultimately do little to reduce aggregate health care costs.

Conrad's position is quite different, and I think far more interesting. He's doesn't seem to be concerned about the cost shifting. Instead, he's focused on the regional variations that we've seen among Medicare reimbursement rates.

According to Conrad, these variations are impossible to correct because the membership in the House of Representatives is, by Constitutional design, proportional. Thus, hospitals in states with larger populations -- and more Congressional representation -- will always see relatively decent Medicare reimbursement rates, while hospitals in states with smaller populations will always get shafted.

The senator suspects that we would see a similar pattern with a "strong" public option that offered a Medicare-like payment scheme.

But what about the "level-playing field" public option proposed by Chuck Schumer, which would not be empowered to dramatically undercut private insurance rates? Why did Ken Conrad vote against this version of the public plan?

My guess would be that Conrad simply doesn't trust the claims of his big-state party members . . . .

What do you think?

Moore's Immoderation

2009-10-06T22:28:00.006-04:00

Judith Warner questions Michael Moore's approach to activism:

I listened to Moore talk, in the morning, of “us.” (“I know where you come from,” he addressed an absent Barack Obama, his tone oddly menacing. “You come from us.”) I listened, in the evening, to him talk of “them”: “the rich … the Goldman boys.” I heard him threaten Blue Dog Democrats (“We will come after you, and we will remove you from office”), watched him whack a meaty fist into his palm — thwack! — as he recalled the hardball tactics of health care reform’s most stalwart opponents, and as he reveled in the thought of bringing down those who now oppose a public option: “It will make what was going on at those town meetings in August look like a tea party!”

“This is why some of us admire the other side,” he said. “Because they’re relentless. They never stop.”
. . .

And I found myself thinking, over and over again, of Molly Melching, the founder and executive director of the nongovernmental organization Tostan, which works to teach human rights and democracy and has helped more than 4,000 communities in Africa end the traditional cutting of girls. Melching, who has succeeded where any number of other women’s rights and global health organizations have failed, explained to me in an interview this summer that the secret to her group’s success lay in the fact that she had learned, through years of trial and error, that to reach people you had to meet them where they were. Respect them. Acknowledge their social norms, beliefs and practices. Find common ground. Build on shared human aspirations — for safety, for dignity, for a better life for one’s children — then discover how those shared aspirations might reasonably translate into ending practices that cause suffering. “If you come in and say, ‘You are awful people,’ people tune out and say, ‘Who do you think you are?’” she told me, speaking first from Senegal, where she has lived for the past 35 years. “Making people feel bad about what they’re doing doesn’t work; they only get defensive. What does work is getting people to discuss together what are their rights and what they mean. It’s not just a question of blaming and shaming people but educating and empowering them.”
“It’s a question,” she elaborated in her D.C. office last month, “of changing the script.”
. . .

These thoughts came back strongly while listening to Moore chuckle and brag, and while sitting through his new 127-minute opus of vilification. Moore’s script is the farthest thing possible from Melching’s truly radical — and, as it turns out, effective — vision of change. In fact, watching “Capitalism,” it felt as though he’d dusted off an old playbook, as though he was reliving the battles of the beleaguered Bush/Cheney years, just for the sheer fun of it.

Evolving African-American Studies

2009-10-06T15:24:00.004-04:00

John McWhorter -- whom you may recognize from some of his brilliant commentaries on NPR -- has written an excellent piece on "What African-American Studies Could Be" (via Andrew Sullivan).

McWhorter summarizes his argument here:

It’s time that African-American Studies departments let go of the sixties imperative to defend blacks as eternal victims of racism. Black people can do their best even under imperfect conditions--and if that reality is irrelevant to an African-American Studies curriculum, then we must question the value of said curricula to those whom they purport to speak up for: real people in this real world. This real world which will never be perfect--even for descendants of African slaves.

In 2009, the study of blackness must be the study of a race most of whose members are now victors, not victims. Certainly the victims must be studied--but only within a genuine commitment to saving them, not chronicling them as helpless until America turns upside down in a fashion no one could seriously imagine will ever happen.

Two things are crucial in my piece at Minding the Campus.

First, I do not argue that African-American Studies departments should not exist. Any claims that this piece is “against Black Studies” will be, as Obama said in his speech on health care not long ago, lies.

Second, I do not assail teachers within them as charlatans or anarchists. At all. I know they are all working at the top of their abilities. I just question what the guiding imperatives of their departments are, and ask them to address a wider range of arguments.

This piece is simply a call for a true African-American Studies paradigm: a study of black people entire, with ample room for views from all sides. Black conservatives should be read alongside Du Bois and Baldwin, with no clucking and hedging. Any hovering consensus that leftist positions are “truth” should be a mark of failure.

Two Posts to Read

2009-10-06T12:06:00.002-04:00

First, Megan McArdle destroys Paul Krugman for this excercise in partisan hackery.

Second, David Brooks offers a really interesting (and philosophical) op-ed on our current political options.

Obama's Gay Problem

2009-10-05T15:31:00.005-04:00

Andrew Sullivan blasts President Obama over his party's substantive failure on gay rights:

In some ways, Obama's fealty to the big gay lobby rather than to the real gay community is testimony to why Democratic party politics remain repulsive to me. HRC has achieved nothing substantive for gay equality on a federal level in the twenty years I've been observing them. But they sure know how to milk donors at swanky black tie affairs. They are the Rotary Club for affluent gays, and their prime job is to explain to the gay community why it is never in the Democratic party's interest to do anything for gay people that might actually resemble equality. Oh, yes, we'll get a lovely Obama speech. Like that costs him anything or proves anything. There is nothing Obama can say at this self-satisfied, well-heeled Rotary Club dinner that he hasn't said before.

. . .

If Obama wants to support gay equality, he knows what to do. If Pelosi and Reid want to support gay equality, they know what to do. If HRC believes in gay equality, they also know what to do. So spare us the schmoozing and the sweet-talking and do it. Until then, Mr president, why don't you have a nice steaming cup of shut-the-fuck-up?

Ouch.

The Supreme Court, States, and Gun Rights

2009-10-05T13:50:00.004-04:00

TIME magazine has a good roundup of the "Five Supreme Court Cases to Watch This Term."

I'm most interested in McDonald v. Chicago. Hopefully, the Court will finally incorporate the Second Amendment against the states. As I've said before, I am a strong proponent of total incorporation.

Unsurprisingly, the libertarian Cato Institute has filed an amicus brief in this case, arguing in favor of incorporation. It's worth a read, if you're interested.

The Morality of Grayson

2009-10-02T07:53:00.010-04:00

I've never been a big fan of Matt Yglesias -- and I've never understood why Andrew Sullivan apparently finds him so fair-minded that he named an award after him.

Anyway, I'm glad that Sullivan finally called out Yglesias for his strained justification of Alan Grayson's vicious ad hominem against Republicans on the floor of Congress.

Yglesias's defense amounts to: "'So what?' Republicans engage in this kind of abusive rhetoric all the time. That's the real issue."

This seems to be the same moral logic that I used in grade school, when I tried to convince my mother she should overlook my cookie-stealing habit because what I had done was relatively less offensive than some of the things my friends had done.

They were the real problem children, after all . . . .

Update: There is another aspect of this controversy that's been bothering me. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, Grayson called congressional Republicans "knuckle-dragging Neanderthals."

Grayson said:

What I mean is they [Republicans] have got no plan. It's been 24 hours since I said that. Where is the Republican plan? We're all waiting to see something that will take care of the pre-existing conditions, to take care of the 40 million Americans who have no coverage at all.

I've been hearing a lot lately that health care reform has been stalled by Republican "obstructionists." But are Democrats really waiting for the Republican plan, or is Grayson just posturing?

Right now, there are three bills floating around in committee: the House tri-committee bill, the Senate Finance Committee bill, and the Senate HELP Committee bill.

One major sticking point here is the public option, but there are many other points of contention (Ezra Klein offers a good summary of the main disagreements here). In the Senate, the Finance Committee bill (the "Baucus Plan") does not include a public option, while the HELP Committee bill does.

It's true that the virtually all Republicans (with the possible exception of Olympia Snowe) have refused to support either of the bills in the Senate, but the House Blue Dog Coalition is also largely opposed to a public option. More importantly, Blue Dogs seem to strongly favor the deficit-neutral Baucus Plan. The Democratic leadership, on the other hand, seems to be leaning toward the HELP Committee bill.

If the Democrats could unite on a single plan -- and perhaps convince Snowe to come on board -- they could easily pass health care reform. The problem is that they can't.

It's not Republican "obstructionists" who are holding up health care reform at this point. Most Democrats have already abandoned all hope for a bipartisan compromise.

The central conflict is now within the Democratic party.

The Two Faces of the Public Option

2009-10-01T11:09:00.004-04:00

Clive Crook writes:

My view on the public option has always been that I'll know whether I like the idea when I see it explained. The problem is that the idea has been pitched as all things to all men. Centrist voters are told it won't make much difference. Progressive voters are told it will make so much difference that the entire project is a waste of time without it.

. . .

The public option cannot be both an ordinary competitor, leaving your circumstances unchanged if you choose not to take it up, and a force that can balance the budget by squeezing hundreds of billions out of public health-care costs. It can be one of these or the other, but not both.

Democrats have been debating whether a "strong" public option should pay Medicare reimbursement rates, something an ordinary competitor could not do. If it did, this would drive down costs and have many other (not necessarily intended) consequences. It would be a big step towards Medicare for all. As I have argued before, there are worse things than Medicare for all, including in my view the present system. But this outcome is one of the things that the administration is saying it does not want.
If you want Medicare for all, do what some Democrats do and make the case. If you don't, stop proposing a public option that would push the system towards it.

I couldn't agree more.

Update: According to Gallup, the majority of Americans (61%) believe that it is not the responsibility of the federal government to guarantee health insurance to all its citizens. (The sampling error is +/- 4%.)