The Democratic Party makes me angry and depressed, and Portishead is the perfect music for that kind of mood.
“Sour Times (Live from NYC)” by Portishead
Archive for January, 2010
Matt Yglesias does the admirable work of explaining President Obama’s bizarre plan for a three-year freeze on non-defense discretionary spending (via Dara):
The freeze would not apply to the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, or to the foreign operations budget of the State Department. The official emphasized that the freeze is not the only element of the administration’s plans for deficit reduction, just the only element he was prepared to discuss on this particular call. “This is only one component of an overall budget,” he said, “you’ll see other components on Monday.”
So is this an across-the-board freeze like we’ve heard Republicans call for? No, it’s “not a blunt across the board freeze.” Rather, some agencies will see their budgets go up and others will go down, producing an overall freeze effect. The senior official sought to portray this as not just a question of spending less money, but of getting our money’s worth—cutting (unspecified) ineffective programs and spending more on programs that work.
I don’t understand this at all. If there’s any portion of the federal budget that’s amenable to freezing, it’s defense spending, which eats up the vast majority of discretionary spending. Non-defense discretionary spending amounts to a scant 1/6th of the federal budget, and the majority of it goes towards programs that benefit millions of poor and middle-class Americans. And because those programs — unlike agricultural subsidies — don’t have powerful lobbies or influential advocates, they are the ones most likely to be cut by the Republicans and “centrist” Democrats that will end up controlling the process (since President Obama will probably take a hands-off approach to this too).
What’s more, I don’t see how this will do anything to close the deficit. The vast majority of the long-term deficit is a product of under-taxation and growing health care costs. And assuming a major tax increase/revamping of the tax code isn’t going to happen anytime soon, the single best thing the Obama administration could do to reduce the deficit is to pass the Senate health care bill, which is projected to substantially lower the deficit over the long-term.
Policy aside, this is bound to be a political disaster. The American people don’t give a shit about deficits, and insofar that they do, it’s because large deficits are associated with economic hardship. Health care aside, the most important thing the administration can do, politically, is reduce unemployment. What they’ve chosen instead is to pursue a policy that will take money out of the economy, and push unemployment upwards. The nearest parallel is FDR’s attempt to balance the budget in 1937; the immediate impact of which was to plunge the economy into a second Great Depression. Which is another way of saying that if Obama goes through with this, he’s not only is he looking at an even worse economic picture, he’s essentially forfeiting the party’s majority and ensuring a one-term presidency.
25
Jan
10
links for 2010-01-25
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In sum, there's no question that the stranglehold corporations exert on our democracy is one of the most serious and pressing threats we face. I've written volumes on that very problem. Although I doubt it, this decision may very well worsen that problem in some substantial way. But on both pragmatic and Constitutional grounds, the issue of corporate influence — like virtually all issues — is not really solvable by restrictions on political speech.
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That said, I think Obama has done an adequate job in office his first year and given McCain's statements and actions, which show no remaining evidence of the independent streak he once exhibited, I have no reason to think we would be any better off if he had won. So I am comfortable with my vote and willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt for a while longer.
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While we still don’t know the name of the new tablet device; could be iPad, iTablet, iSlate, iCanvas, or an extension of the MacBook name. But what we do know, due to many recent leaks on the announcement coming from Apple next week, the tablet is being targeted as a gaming device.
My favorite thing about anti-abortion folks is how they don’t actually take their own views all that seriously. Here’s Ross Douthat describing his views to Mother Jones’ Mark Oppenheimer:
He began with the boilerplate position: “It would probably be a blanket ban on abortion with exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother.” He went on, however, to say such a ban would require “radical experimentation with the welfare state” and likely “a lot of new welfare agencies of one kind or another,” plus orphanages and an expanded “network of crisis pregnancy centers.” Nobody involved would go to jail, he said, as “it is possible to believe that abortion is murder and also believe it is a completely unique form of murder. Abortion would be, you know, if you have first-degree murder, second and third degree…it’s like seventh-degree murder or something.”
“But,” he quickly noted, “those things aren’t on the table.”
Granted, my ethics background isn’t nearly sophisticated enough to fully parse this out, but I think it’s fair to say that this distinction is completely absurd. If a woman came to me and gave me money in exchange for killing her husband, we would both be charged with murder. And rightfully so. By our society’s standards, her husband was a person, with all the rights and privileges we accord to persons. We committed premeditated murder, and as such violated the fundamental rights we accord him as a person. If we weren’t arrested and prosecuted, it would be a gross miscarriage of justice.
Why is abortion any different? Since pro-lifers maintain that the fetus deserves full rights of personhood, the above scenario is basically analogous to nearly any given abortion. Indeed, the only way it can be different is if pro-lifers implicitly believed that a fetus isn’t quite a person and didn’t deserve the rights we accord to adults, children and the mentally impaired. Honestly, I think the main reason for why pro-lifers are reluctant to take their argument where it leads is that they realize that their position isn’t a popular one. Americans would quickly turn against the anti-abortion movement if it began pushing for prosecution and prison terms for women and doctors. As far as political strategy goes, it’s far better to obscure the full implications of ones views.
Of course, the other possibility is that pro-lifers have so little respect for the rights and choices of women that they don’t acknowledge the validity of their choices, even when it results in the death of an innocent human being. This is a little less charitable, yes, but judging from the hostility pro-lifers have towards women, it has the virtue of being pretty close to the truth.
As Jonathan Rauch notes in National Journal, reform-minded conservatives should be cheering this bill along, since this is — in all likelihood — the last chance for health care reform that maintains the the private insurance market:
Republicans think that doing nothing this year might yield a GOP House majority in 2011 and a better bill in 2012. Maybe. But after the last attempt crashed in 1994, it was 15 years before Congress was willing to try again. If the current effort fails, the next chance for comprehensive reform might not arrive for years.
In the meantime, piecemeal changes might make matters worse instead of better. Absent broader reforms, legislative scrambles to cut Medicare would mostly shift costs to private payers, and requirements to cover all comers could price private insurance nearly outof existence. A few more years of ad-hockery and Band-Aids might leave the public in the mood for exactly the kind of single-payer socialized medical system that Republicans dread. Doing nothing, in other words, is not a risk-free proposition, even for the John Thunes of the world.
I understand why my E.D. or Ross Douthat would prefer a deeply incrementalist approach over the comprehensive approach taken by the Democrats, but it’s simply the case that without large-scale reform, the problems — lost coverage, lower wages and high costs — will get worse, and judging the past decade of cost growth, it could happen quicker than we expect. Rauch is absolutely correct; incremental reform could easily backfire and leave the public with an appetite for more and greater government intervention, far beyond what even liberals are envisioning.
If I were more ideologically self-serving, I’d say that this is a good thing. But it’s not. Each year that we don’t have comprehensive reform is another year that 45,000 Americans die from lack of health insurance. From where I stand, a “private,” relatively conservative universal system is a small price to pay for preventing those deaths.
Sir Charles doesn’t think that Bill Clinton will count much in the grand scheme of things:
In reading this post from Bruce Reed the other day offering advice to Obama and the Democrats, while trumpeting Bill Clinton’s political adjustments after the 1994 election, this thought kept occurring to me — has there ever been a less consequential two-term president in the history of the United States than Bill Clinton? Seriously, what did he accomplish in his eight years? A balanced budget. That’s something. There was prosperity on his watch — but how much of that was ephemeral and how much of it was Clinton’s doing? It seems to me that the neo-liberal policies that he embraced were not all that different from those of Reagan and Bush II — oh they were the free market with a human face of sorts, but by and large he helped foster the bubble economy.
Sure, this is one way to look at it. The other, and the one I prefer, is to look at Bill Clinton’s presidency as an eight-year attempt to put us in a position to greatly reduce our debt obligation, expand our welfare state, and make valuable investments in infrastructure. And he was successful! At the end of Clinton’s presidency, the United States was looking at a steady parade of surpluses. You can easily imagine — had Al Gore been appointed president won the presidency — that a President Gore would have used his predecessor’s surpluses to put the nation on a firm fiscal and policy footing. Not, you know, squander them on trillions of dollars in tax cuts and wars.
Matt Welch pushes back against liberal complaints that last week’s Supreme Court ruling will lead to greater corporate corruption of politics with a post that’s either incredibly dense, or incredibly disingenuous:
New York Times editorial board members, as noted last week, believe that Citizens United vs. FEC “has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.” They should think about reading their own paper, where David Kirkpatrick on Sunday asked “legal scholars and social scientists” about corporate corruption of politics, and found that “the evidence is meager, at best.”
Haha, touche’ liberals! At least, that’s what you would think if you didn’t actually read the piece. If you did, then you’d find a different argument entirely:
In the United States, studies comparing states like Virginia with scant regulation against those like Wisconsin with strict rules have not found much difference in levels of corruption or public trust, several scholars said. Jeff Milyo, an economist at the University of Missouri, has compared states with strict bans on corporate contributions to political parties against those with no limits at all. “There is just no good evidence that campaign finance laws have any effect on actual corruption,” he said. [Emphasis mine]
The big takeaway from this article isn’t, as Welch suggests, that there is no corporate corruption in politics, it’s that campaign finance laws don’t seem to have a noticeable effect on corruption. Which, contra Welch, doesn’t preclude the existence of actual corruption. Moreover, given what we already know (Senator Dick Durbin: banks “own Congress“), it’s stunningly naive to believe that there isn’t any corporate influence in Congress.
Of course, to get on my soapbox for a bit, this kind of equivocation is par for the course from libertarians, who above all else are tireless supporters of whatever further increases the advantages of the advantaged and the privileged. Welch sees that liberals are worried about the further impact of corporate money on our elections, and in some weird attempt to spite them, reflexively defends the entrenched privileges of monied interests (in the guise of “liberty,” of course).
25
Jan
10
They’re Not Gonna Take It!
I’m sure the Obama administration isn’t too happy about this:
A candidate who opposes the relocation of an American air base on Okinawa won a crucial mayoral election on Sunday, raising pressure on Japan’s prime minister to move the base off the island, a move opposed by the United States.
The election in the small city of Nago could force Japan to scrap, or at least significantly modify, a 2006 deal with the United States to build a replacement facility in the city for the busy Futenma United States Marine air station. The base is currently in a crowded part of the southern Japanese island.
This is one of of those things that goes under the radar in the United States, because there isn’t much interest in knowing more about it, but the U.S. military has over 700 bases in over 120 countries, and in most of those countries — particularly the larger, more prosperous ones — the host population isn’t exactly happy about the U.S. military footprint. No where is this more evident than in Japan, where Okinawans have been particularly vocal about their desire to see the United States relocate its 25,000 strong military base. Their hostility isn’t unfounded; American service members have been implicated in rapes, sexual assaults, and various violent crimes, all of which have been a source of tension in U.S./Japan relations for more than a decade.
Most of these bases are relics of the Cold War, and indeed, it’s hard to argue that each and every one of these bases is necessary to American security, especially in countries like Japan, where the bases exist for no other reason than to “project” American power (at the expense of Japanese defense self-sufficiency). Of course, the odds are long that the United States will scale back its overseas commitment; our political class has all but agreed that a massive global military presence is integral to protecting American “security,” even if it has to come at the expense of something truly controversial, like providing health care to poor people.
You’re wrong*: (via the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University by way of Ezra Klein):
More telling is this:
Last week we saw an incredibly idiosyncratic election in a very unusual political environment. Given that Massachusetts’ voters are still pretty positive about the president, and given Brown’s own support for “MassCare” (the state’s universal health care plan), it makes more sense to understand his win as a product of political discontent — “throw the bums out!” — driven by economic uncertainty (depending on which methodology you use, unemployment in Massachusetts is either at 9.4 percent or 17.2 percent).
Massachusetts voters don’t hate Obama or his health care plan, and they overwhelmingly expect Brown to work with — and not against — Democratic goals. Unfortunately, Massachusetts voters — and Americans more generally — don’t understand that the Senate is essentially a parliamentary institution, and Brown’s personality/ideology means incredibly little in the face of strict party discipline. Ironically, the voters who seem to want a Democratic agenda just elected a man who will, regardless of his intentions, end up thwarting that agenda at every turn.
*This is Ezra’s graph, but I don’t like Google Docs much, so I recreated it using Apple’s Numbers.
Apparently, South Carolina gubernatorial candidates don’t mess around about hating poor people:
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed,” Bauer said, according to the Greenville News. “You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”
The gubernatorial candidate said the government can’t afford to keep giving money away without requiring something in return. He said poor people should lose their benefits if they don’t pass drug tests, and parents should be required to be more active in their children’s education.
I tend to get a lot of heat from my conservative readers — not to mention my conservative friends — when I say that Republicans aren’t actually interested in helping poor people or anyone else outside of the wealthiest Americans. Their response, almost always, is that they aren’t opposed to helping poor people, they just differ on how to go about it.
I’m not sure if Lt. Gov. Bauer’s views are representative of conservatives — though judging from what I’ve heard, they might actually be — but assuming they don’t hate poor people, I don’t see how conservatives can get away from the fact that their policies mainly benefit the wealthy and privileged at the expense of everyone else, especially the least well-off. Tax cuts concentrate wealth in the hands of the most well-off, foreign wars and massive military expenditures divert funds away from domestic priorities, categorical deregulation leaves regular Americans vulnerable to powerful corporations, and so on and so forth.
What’s more, conservative protests that they care about poor people would be a lot more convincing if prominent conservatives weren’t so hostile to the most minimal efforts to improve the lives of poor Americans. Last year, a (successful) attempt to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program attracted a scant 8 Republican votes in the Senate, and 40 in the House (out of a total of 219 Republicans).
Conservatives clearly don’t like the fact that they’re accused of hating the poor. Well, if that’s not the case, then maybe they should take concrete steps to help the poor. Complaining that you don’t hate poor people isn’t very convincing, particularly when your policies say otherwise.
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