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This is unquestionably a good thing.
Archive for February, 2009
27
Feb
09
links for 2009-02-27
26
Feb
09
Inter-Racial Friendships
Here’s something interesting (via Pew Research Center):
My first thought was: I wonder how people are defining “friend?” If we’re talking about friends in the casual sense – someone you work with, someone you occasionally chat with – then these results are basically on point. Most people interact with someone of a different race on a fairly regular basis (if not daily), and accordingly, people build relationships of varying degrees. But, if you’re defining “friend” as something deeper – someone you invite over for dinner, a close confidant, or even a lover – then this survey probably exaggerates the extent to which most people have those relationships with someone of the opposite race. Indeed, if you’re defining “friend” in the latter sense then judging from most American’s inability to discuss race in any rational way, these survey results can’t be correct, since they would suggest that most Americans are very comfortable with people of other races. Which, you know, isn’t really the case.
I don’t really have much else to say, I just thought this survey was interesting.
26
Feb
09
links for 2009-02-26
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A while back I predicted that the Obama Administration would do little to move the ball forward on marijuana legalization. Well, as it turns out, I was completely wrong.
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Stephen Suh (who comments here occasionally) explains why anti-choice laws really are about restricting women's sexuality, and how he wishes that pro-lifers would own up to that fact.
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I still don't understand why conservatives are so paranoid about the Fairness Doctrine, but hey, if they get an amendment passed, more power to them.
26
Feb
09
RE: Birth Control Spending
Last month there were concerns over President Obama’s apparent decision to pressure House Democrats into removing funding for family planning from the stimulus bill. Although liberals were apprehensive about the choice, the administration assured congressional Democrats that it would reinsert the provision in a future spending bill. Well, as it turns out, the Obama Administration was serious: their proposed budget includes funding for family planning.
(h/t to Kay Steiger)
Judging by its place on most of the major news aggregators, the biggest story of today is that President Obama unveiled a $3.55 trillion dollar budget blueprint with a massive deficit of $1.75 trillion for the current fiscal year. Although the administration hasn’t provided the complete details, it is clear that this budget represents a major shift in federal priorities. The majority of the administration’s planned deficit spending is directed towards health care, education and energy programs, with planned cuts in agriculture subsidies and tax increases on the wealthiest Americans (more on that in another post). Even with those revenue enhancers in place though, the deficit will come to about 12.3 percent of GDP. That sounds huge (because it is), and you can expect conservatives to latch onto that as a way to attack the budget. It’s worth noting though, that this pales in comparison to the level of deficit spending the country saw during the Great Depression and the Second World War (via Ezra Klein).
Between the tail end of the New Deal period and the end of the Second World War/beginning of the Cold War federal spending accounted for nearly half of the country’s economic output. If you categorize our spending on the war as stimulus spending (and you should, because it was), then our current deficit spending is a drop in the bucket relative to deficit spending over the course of the 20th century. Of course this isn’t to say that deficit concerns are unwarranted, but to put our current spending within its proper historical context.
25
Feb
09
links for 2009-02-25
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Alex Massie's take on last night's speech, and what it means for the political environment, is pretty much on point.
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Another cogent analysis from the always insightful Matt Yglesias (please notice my links, pleassee!)
The early word on President Obama’s faux State of the Union address is that it was a success. Obama was everything he needed to be: weighty, forceful and positive. More importantly, he gave Americans a cogent explanation of our current problems, and offered a clear path for moving forward. The actual content of Obama’s agenda notwithstanding, it’s hard to argue that this wasn’t an effective performance.
The Republican response, on the other hand, was far from effective. In fact, it was downright embarrassing. As anyone who has seen him in an interviews can attest, Governor Jindal is an effective, charismatic messenger, part of which is a result of his folksy, Clinton-esque demeanor. The problem of course, is that this wasn’t an interview or a town hall, this was a response to the State of the Union, and moreover, a particularly serious State of the Union. Any response should have been met Obama’s weight and somberness in equal measure, and there, Jindal failed miserably. Jindal’s unpolished, casual style seemed deeply out of place, and at times, a little bizarre. Frankly, it sounded less like a response to a presidential address, and more like an overly long sales pitch from a too-slick-by-half car salesman.
The content of Jindal’s response wasn’t much better. Obama’s speech was notable in that he presented the Democratic agenda as a pragmatic agenda, on which Democrats and Republicans can work to solve the nation’s problems. Jindal, by contrast, presented a huge helping of Republican boilerplate; focusing largely on the standard Republican “solution” to any economic problem – tax cuts. The problem for Republicans is not only are further tax cuts wrong on the merits, but that pushing for substantial tax cuts is an electoral loser; Obama has successfully defined (Republican) tax cuts as “irresponsible,” and pushing for further tax cuts only bolsters the perception that Republicans are the irresponsible governing partners.
In fairness to Jindal, it is very – very – difficult to give an adequate response to the State of the Union. Most of the Democratic ones were mediocre at best, and that was facing a President who wouldn’t win very many awards for oratorical skill. Making an effective response to a State of the Union address requires an amount of political and oratorical skill which is in short supply in both parties. Yes, Jindal’s response was pretty bad, but when you’re up against one of the most gifted political orators in a generation, it’s hard to do much better.
Andrew Sullivan is a good writer, and his single-minded devotion to exposing the seedy, illiberal underbelly of contemporary American conservatism is admirable. But he is a dunce when it comes to fiscal policy, and worse, is virtually impervious to any evidence challenging his long-held conservative shibboleths about federal entitlement spending. For example:
Now we see the real struggle for the soul of this administration. Obama wants to tackle the insolvency of the big three entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. These three programs, especially Medicare, will destroy the fiscal future, unless we pare them back now. Left untouched, they will also make it much likelier in the near future that global financial markets may finally snap and stop sending money to a country that looks more and more like those subprime mortgage-owners than a serious polity. And so we have a tough-on-spending budget and a desire to convene the long-anticipated, endlessly delayed fiscal sanity summit to make the deal we all know needs to be made. The GOP will have to accept some tax hikes and the Dems will have to accept some entitlement cuts. [Emphasis mine]
You’ll hear no argument from liberals about the need to reform Medicare; as the good folks at Wonk Room have recently shown, Medicare costs threaten this country’s long-term fiscal solvency, and reforming the program is an absolute must if we want to move onto a path for sustainable spending. But therein lies the rub, grouping Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security together obscures the fact that the entitlement crisis is – more than anything else – a health care crisis. In fact, it’s even a little misleading to refer to this as an “entitlement crisis”; to borrow Ezra Klein’s formulation, there is no such program as socialsecuritymedicaidandmedicare, there is Social Security and various forms of health care spending.
What’s more, Social Security is actually in remarkably good fiscal shape; OMB director Peter Orszag notes that “the program faces an actuarial deficit over the next 75-100 years,” a “problem” which only really requires a longer-term plan of modest benefit cuts or tax increases. Indeed, you could leave Social Security untouched and it would only have a slight impact on GDP. Health care spending isn’t in the same game; it isn’t even in the same league. As the graph shows, left untouched, Medicare, Medicaid and all other health care spending will eat up 50 percent of the GDP.
Sullivan’s claim that Social Security threatens our fiscal solvency is frustrating because it simply isn’t true, and more importantly, Sullivan knows that it isn’t true. In fact, I got the above graph from one of Sullivan’s posts. And I’m sure that on some level, Sullivan understands that Social Security isn’t the problem. It’s just that – to borrow from Ned – Sullivan is one of those pundits “who come to bizarre conclusions based on a combination of their gut and what their friends tell them.” Sullivan’s “gut” tells him that there is a problem with Social Security, and there’s nothing on God’s green earth which will convince him otherwise.
23
Feb
09
*Facepalm*
So there was a story this morning on NPR about how families are “cutting back” on food spending by switching from spending $50 on takeout to spending $50 on frozen meals. Uhh, I see the logic here…
The strangest part of this article was that there was barely a ghost of a mention of the nefarious “C” word – that word being cooking. They had a correspondent who talked about how you could buy either a one pound bag of frozen french fries or a five pound bag of potatoes for the same cost, but even in this segment they didn’t mention exactly how these potatoes would become five pounds of fries. Is everyone so weirdly disconnected to the process of making food?
Cooking isn’t really that difficult or scary either – you just apply heat to ingredients over time, and things cook (in the words of my favorite cookbook). Cooking, like most other things, takes some time, but if you really have to do it, like most things, you can find time for it. I’ve cooked pretty much a complete meal (you can make sauce, brown some meat, cook some vegees) in the time it takes to boil and cook a pot of pasta. Or, hell, invest in a crockpot and spend 10 minutes each morning loading ingredients in. Not to mention that cooking is cheaper and almost always healthier, unless you typically stock lard and high fructose corn syrup in your kitchen.
I don’t think people should find cooking demeaning, either, as the woman spending bank on salt-laden frozen meals does. I think this is actually a larger societal problem, though – I can vaguely wrap my head around why people think cooking is beneath them, if only because I know several guys that wouldn’t – not couldn’t, but wouldn’t – cook to save their lives, because they think it’s girly (or whatever – but NB, I know plenty of guys who love to cook, even ones that decree other things as “girly”, so it’s definitely a mixed bag). And when some women think this too, and associate cooking with stay-at-home moms, that’s even more of a problem.
Maybe having to cook is also associated with being thrifty (you can save tons of money, for sure) and thus one of the things people shy away from because they’re “not that kind of person” – the one that has to worry about their expenses. Yet if you’ve just lost your job due to the recession, as this woman had, it might be time to rethink what kind of person you actually are, and what expenses make sense, rather than just buying your huge LCD TV at Walmart instead of Best Buy, as it were.
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