Matthew Yglesias

What?

Very puzzling Rasmussen report:

For most Americans, cutting government spending is more important than either balancing the federal budget or cutting taxes. That's the clear message from the latest Rasmussen Reports survey on fiscal policy.

By a 52% to 39% margin, American voters say that balancing the budget is more important than cutting spending.

By an even larger margin, 55% to 38%, voters also say that cutting government spending is more important than balancing the budget.

That doesn't sound like a "clear message" about anything to me. Either it's a typo, or it's a question-order artifact. If X is more important than Y, Y can't also be more important than X. And then there's the last paragraph:

The national telephone survey of 1,000  Likely Voters in Missouri was conducted by Rasmussen Reports on March 22-23, 2004. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is +/- 3 percentage points, with a 95% level of confidence.

A "national telephone survey" of "Likely Voters in Missouri" -- which is it? And was this whole poll a national survey or a Missouri survey? I'm confused.

Home Mortgage Interest Deduction

James Joyner, who I met last night for the first time and seems to be a good guy, makes the case for the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, item number one on the list of things I'd like to see changed that are never going to change:

I think the home mortage interest deduction is unfair but not silly. Society has an interest in people building equity and investing in communities. If no one has ever washed a rented car, one suspects no one has ever renovated a rented house, either. I don't think this is what tax policy is for, though, and it clearly disadvantages the young and poor over those with the resources to scrape together a down payment and get into a home. Not to mention the urban/rural issue, since getting that down payment together is much, much harder in places where home prices are outrageous.

For one thing, lots of people renovated rented houses. The house I rent was renovated last summer. Not by me, of course, but by the guy who owns it who was hoping to reap profits by charging higher rents. And it worked. Similarly, I assume car rental companies wash their cars. Everything's owned by someone.

On the equity building point, this is a very odd way for the government to go about encouraging that. As with other government efforts to boost savings through giving tax-advantaged treatment to certain savings mechanisms, the main effect is simply to encourage people to under-invest in non-preferred savings vehicles and over-invest in preferred ones. It's a distorting effect that causes people to build equity in the form of homes rather than either buying a cheaper home or else renting and investing their cash in some other form of asset. The main impact of all of this is just to make homes more expensive than they might otherwise be (this is why HMID will never be eliminated -- it would cause all the already-owned homes to lose value), not to boost the national savings rate.

If you want to increase savings, you need to look to programs that will combine tax advantages (preferably tax advantages for saving per se rather than for specific forms of saving) with progressive matching payment systems or something so that low-income people can actually build assets. There are a lot of good "stakeholder society" ideas out there that involve establishing government-financed accounts for all children at birth that appeal to egalitarian intuitions in an appealing and relatively unintrusive way.

Cobain in Prague

Interesting story from Matt Welch. I saw The Smashing Pumpkins in Prague in 1997. They came on stage, played a song, and then Bill Corgan said "dobry den" and the whole crowd applauded wildly even though I don't think that was really the time-appropriate greeting. Then he said "it's so great to be here in Poland." The audience was not amused.

Nader As Environmentalism

Over at the Gadflyer, Elaine Kamarck writes:

Let's start with the Nader voters. In the most recent Newsweek poll, Nader pulls in five percent of the vote, a small share but still potentially crucial, as it was in 2000. Back then, many Nader voters felt that they could cast a protest vote against the Establishment. But faced with four more years of Bush and Dick Cheney and the very real prospect of oil drilling in the Alaskan preserve, a weakening of clean air laws and total inattention to global warming, we can hope and expect that some of those who voted for Nader last time -- especially those who live in swing states -- will decline to vote for him again. In two states, Florida and New Hampshire, all Gore needed was a fraction of the Nader vote. Given the environmental policies of the current administration and his own robust record on the environment, Kerry ought to be able to put those two states in the Democratic column.

The premise here seems to be that the Nader vote was driven by environmentalism. That conclusion seems driven by a very superficial analysis -- Nader ran on the Green Party ticket, Green Parties are known for their ecological views, therefore Nader voters must have been primarily concerned with the environment. In fact, however, the environment surely posed one of the clearest differences between Bush and Gore in 2000. In general, Al Gore, like Bill Clinton, was often disliked on the left for his New Democrat ways and abandonment of traditional liberal policies. This did indeed happen on topics like trade, welfare, the death penalty, and to some extent on labor issues in general, but it certainly did not happen on the environment. Gore, in particular, was more clearly a liberal on this subject than on any other.

Now I agree with the broader point that we can expect a lower Nader vote, at least in key states, but I don't think this will have much to do with it.

Homeownership

Kash has a nice takedown of administration claims that the home ownership rate vindicates his tax policies or anything else. This, though, is the kind of dishonesty that I think a president sort of does deserve a pass on. The homeownership rate really is up, reflecting the general tendency of things to get better over time unless something really awful happens. I seem to recall Bill Clinton constantly talking about this as he, too, got to take advantage of secular trends combined with the tax code's senseless privileging of ownership over renting. It's really just not a big deal, typical politician rosy-glow type stuff.

Since the basic Bush political strategy is to misrepresent everything it's worth throwing this in, and at least noting that it has nothing to do with tax cuts, but there's really nothing to see here.

Israel, Iraq, Etc.

Take a look at this Juan Cole posting (and others on this subject) and you'll see that many Iraqis are not thrilled with Israel, current Israeli policies, or America's policies toward Israel.

Along these lines, it's worth raising the question of whether the current administration really wants a democratic Iraq, or whether the reason their policies seem so unlikely to create one is that they in fact fear such a thing. Muqtada al-Sadr, who Cole's post deals with, represents an extreme element in Shi'ite public opinion, but more mainline opinion is still fairly hostile to Israel and to America's support for Israel. This should be expected. Public opinion pretty much everywhere is hostile to Israel, and more hostile when you're talking about Arabs than elsewhere.

Fundamentally, America's beef with Saddam was not that he was a nasty dictator (lots of nasty dictators in the Middle East) but that his policies were inimical to America's strategic interests in the region -- defense of Israel, and preventing the emergence of a hegemonic regional power in the Persian Gulf. Replacing Saddam with an elected government, however, might do very little to change any of this. Saddam's hostility to Israel was, broadly speaking, in line with public opinion. Iraq's quest for hegemony, meanwhile, is a logical outgrowth of the factual situation. Unlike Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, it has a large population; unlike Egypt or Syria it has a lot of oil; and unlike Iran, it's majority-Arab and hence suited for regional leadership.

That's not to say that a democratic Iraq would necessarily go about building up a large army and trying to conquer the region, but it certainly might. Democracies have been known to seek WMD (see, e.g., America, the United States of; France; Israel; India) and to launch wars, especially against illegitimate dictatorial regimes. The likelihood that a democratic Iraq would be a predominantly Shi'ite regime further complicates the matter. There are large Shi'a populations in Saudi Arabia and at least one other Gulf state (Bahrain, I think) and they're not very well treated. It would be natural for a democratically elected Shi'ite president of Iraq to see himself as the champion of the rights of his co-religionists right across the border, possibly through methods including military intervention. If a legitimate Iraqi regime were to use force against, say, the Saudi monarchy, it's sort of hard for me to see how the United States could credibly characterize such a move as illegitimate. Lots of complications.

I say, on balance, that at this point a democratic Iraq is more in our interests than not, but I'm not big on the maintainance of American hegemony. Dick Cheney, however, is.

Female Cab Drivers

The overwhelming consensus on this issue seems to be that women rarely drive taxis because it's dangerous. That's a solid point. But is it dangerous to drive a cab during the day? Doesn't seem right to me. Even if it's not, though, possibly the night-shift factor is enough to create some kind of tipping point. Seems to me that cab drivers should all be armed one way or another.

Interestingly, the overwhelming majority of crime victims are actually male. It's not even close to being close. And most rapes, as we all learned on those delightful "take back the night" marches, are acquaintance-type situations not strangers leaping out of the night. It's not totally clear to me how much of the gender skew in violent crime victimization is attributable entirely to the fact that women take many more steps to avoid victimization or what else is going on there.

UPDATE: My liberal readers will, of course, likely greet the armed cabbies proposal with some skepticism. Admittedly, I don't have some vast quantity of research at hand to prove this would lead to a net reduction in crime -- it just seems that way to me. To put things in perspective, note that a cab driver is, by definition, a person legally empowered to pilot an extraordinarily massive high-speed vehicle that has a proven track record of massive lethality. Given that level of trust, I think we could trust them with a pistol, too.

In general, I think gun-car analogies are very strong, and would like to see similar policies apply to both. By and large, people should be able to obtain these potentially useful but potentially deadly tools, but possession should be contingent on demonstrated capacity to use them responsibly and subject to revocation as a penalty for misuse. Unfortunately, gun politics have gotten so mixed up in cultural bitterness that gun owners suspect (not without reason) that proposals for licensing schemes are a stalking horse for future confiscation. Recognition of some kind of bottom-line second amendment right to gun ownership that would take the confiscation scenario off the table while allowing for reasonable restrictions preventing certain classes of persons (minors, felons, the insane, the blind, etc.) would allow for a reasonable pro-safety, pro-freedom compromise position. I don't think anyone regards the requirement that car owners be licensed (as opposed to the long, slow-moving DMV lines per se) as an intolerable big government imposition.

State/Nonstate

Good Fareed Zakaria column on what the Bushies just don't get -- state-sponsorship of terrorism is not the problem. I wrote about this last week in case people are interested -- plus my assertions are backed up with evidence and stuff, not just my awesome credibility.

Broadband

A friend and I were snarking about this for a while the other day, but I didn't blog it. Long story short, Bush thinks we should have a "bold" plan to provide universal broadband access by 2007. He does not, however, actually have such a plan or, seemingly, any knowledge of the fact that meeting this goal is totally impossible. Drop the 2007 goal, however, and you might be able to come up with a workable medium-term target.

I'm sympathetic to this idea because it's an infrastructure-building proposal and I think we need more infrastructure spending in this country. On the other hand, though, it seems to me that in practice it would wind up being one more in a long series of wealth transfers directed at rural America. This whole interlocking series of policies aimed at trying to shore up the non-viable rural economy is a pretty significant waste of money and the farm protectionism that is its linchpin has morally repugnant results. In principle, a universal broadband strategy could be part of a broader plan to ween the plains off the farm dole and try to construct some kind of alternative economic development out there. Michael Lind had a piece in the Atlantic about 15 months ago making the case for something like this. Unfortunately, a magazine article can't really go into detail about whether or not the scheme could work.

Unlike Lind, though, I just don't fundamentally see a problem with letting rural areas continue to depopulate while America's metro areas grow. With the exception of New York, every city in the United States is pretty low-density outside of a relatively tiny downtown business districy (look at Washington's endless tracts of three story row houses in neighborhoods both fancy and decrepit), a situation that could be easily changed by altering some tax and zoning rules in a way that could radically lower urban (and, consequently, inner-suburban) housing prices even while permitting a much larger concentration of people in the regions of this country that have viable economic bases.

Base/Superstructure

Mark Schmitt quotes Kevin Drum and adds some observations:

Most lefty bloggers are actually pretty moderate liberals: me, Josh Marshall, Atrios, Matt Yglesias, Jeralyn Merritt, Brad DeLong, etc. (Atrios is a hardnosed partisan, but his politics are actually fairly centrist liberal. Surprise!) Most righty bloggers are actually libertarians, not conservatives.

It's an interesting point, and I think it actually has a lot to do with the vitality of this little subculture, which James Wolcott captured well in Vanity Fair this month.

I am a pretty moderate liberal, but I've also got a predilection for Karl Marx's theory of ideology, so I think it's worth dwelling a bit on this. The high-traffic corners of the political blogosphere exhibit much less populism -- in both it's left- and right- variants -- than is the public at large. Now I think that's fine, because I'd rather read and debate an empirically oriented libertarian than a fire-and-brimstone evangelical and I myself am a pretty un-populist kind of liberal, but this outcome is not some kind of coincidence. Instead, it's a pretty direct outgrowth of the blogosphere's class base, which seems to consist almost entirely of students, academics, and professionals and contain almost no representation at all of the vast majority of Americans who are engaged in other sorts of work. The real world is a very different kind of place.

Daddy Dearest

Maureen Dowd writes:

The globe got whipsawed by a father-son relationship so twisty and rife with undercurrents that we're still not sure if W. was trying to avenge his father with Saddam or upend his dad's legacy in Iraq -- or both. Or was he just following the gloomy, brass-knuckled lead of his surrogate father, Dick Cheney?

Um...maybe we're "still not sure" because it's clear to everyone besides Maureen Dowd that this is not a useful way of trying to understand what happened, why it happened, and what to make of the fact that it happened.

In the real world, preoccupation with Iraq as a national security problem -- dating back to before 9/11 -- was not some insane fantasy of George W. Bush alone. It was consistently a pretty important element of the Clinton foreign policy and the notion that the Clinton administration wasn't doing enough about it was a consistent Republican critique of Clinton's conduct in office. It is, moreover, perfectly possible to trace the thinking of the core anti-Saddam group of neocons back from "A Clean Break" through the PNAC regime change letter and on forward. Amateur psychologizing simply has nothing to do with it.

Clarke Kicks Ass

On Meet The Press. It's a delight to watch. Among other things, he's doing a good job of trying to keep the focus on the actual issue here -- did invading Iraq help us or hurt us in the war on terror.

Think of the Nonexistent Children

One semi-recurring theme in correspondence I -- and at least one of my colleagues -- get from readers of The American Prospect related to the alleged need to control population growth. The presence of this line of thought among some people on the left is, I believe, a hangover from some misguided work done in the 1960s by Paul Erhlich and others. In reality, there is no problem of population growth as a general matter, though there are certain countries which may have this difficulty.

A more pressing matter is, in fact, looming population decline. Such countries as China, Japan, Russia, all of Europe, the United States, Canada, and even Mexico are facing demographic trends that point either toward rapid aging or else to actual drops in population that pose serious policy problems. These are, to some extent, offset by immigration in some places (though not in Russia and Eastern Europe at all) but this poses dilemmas of its own.

At this Hudson Institute lunch I was at last week about social issues, this was one of the subtexts in my interlocutor from the right's discourse. As America grows more secular and more socially liberal, we threaten to become like northern Europe. Northern Europe, in turn, threatens to become increasingly populated by relatively fecund Muslim immigrants and their children. The result will be -- The End of Western Civilization and the answer is to make all the nice white people into better, more procreative Christians.

In a move that I hope will warm Russell Arben Fox's left-traditionalist heart, let me suggest that as a strategy for forestalling The End of Western Civilization this is misguided. The essential birthrate problem, insofar as it is a problem, is a question of incentives. Given the extremely high costs of child-rearing, the emotional and psychological benefits of this undertaking simply aren't enough to convince many women that they want to have more than 2.1 kids on average. One way to overcome this is with the threat of eternal damnation. People like sex, and if you convince them that non-procreative sex will get them a one-way ticket to hell, you can boost child-bearing up above the replacement level. In practice, however, once the secularist cat is out of the bag, it's very hard to force it back in. Moreover, those of us who are not Straussians may find it somewhat immoral to engage in a large-scale campaign to trick people into believing that they are going to hell. The lesson of history, anyway, is that you can't really pull off this trick in a highly-literate, well-educated society. Forestalling the End of Western Civilization by, essentially, destroying its most admirable elements is not, moreover, a very good idea.

A much better idea is a third way solution. Instead of, as one often hears, using market means to socialist ends, you use socialist means to conservative ends -- rejigger public policy to socialize more of the costs of child-rearing and you should boost the birthrate. Phillip Longman, who doesn't put the problem this way, has a lot on this subject and how it could be done in The Washington Monthly.

Fair's Fair

Jim Henley's right about this. The fact that there was little-to-know political support for a more robust anti-Taliban effort during the Clinton administration is an explanation for the failure of such an effort to emerge, but not an excuse. If Clinton had really wanted to get the US military involved, he could have done it, just as, eventually, he overwhelmed reluctance to get more deeply involved in the Balkans. One of the many lessons of the second Gulf War is that, given sufficient commitment on the part of the national leadership, a president can get pretty much anything he wants foreign policywise. Clinton, moreover, was not up for re-election in 2000 so he really, really could have done what he wanted.

Cure for AIDS

I had an interesting discussion a while back as to what would happen if scientists suddenly discovered a cure -- not a vaccine -- for AIDS of some sort. In the developed world, pretty clearly, folks would just take the medicine, be cured, and we'd all be very happy.

A pressing issue would arise, however, of what to do with all the very poor people in the third world who suffer for AIDS or HIV infection. Humanitarians would want to provide the for free or nearly for free. Various questions about budgeting and the effects of price controls arise at this point, but say we could work that out, and start loading the boats full of drugs up and they sail to Africa. It seemed to me that a very serious problem might arise as to how to distribute them across a vast area in which corruption is pervasive and state authority is extremely weak. Roughly speaking, you would have a continent-sized Somalia-type problem where folks with guns would have every incentive to try and seize control of the medicine so that they could re-sell it at low, but non-zero prices to the extremely large number of people who would be very interested in obtaining the treatment. Efforts to provide security for shipment and distribution facilities would, I think, present a fairly intractable logistical problem. The result would probably be widespread chaos, civil wars, etc.

I guess I don't have a broader point to make, and it sort of doesn't matter since obviously the underlying technology isn't here, but I find this pretty depressing and would like to believe it's wrong.

Meat...It's What's for Dinner

I'm by no means as dogmatic on this subject as my colleague N. Confessore who's been known to register some very strident objections to meat-free pizza, but I'd like to make clear that the presence of an advertisement for Vegan Outreach on the sidebar should by no means be construed as an endorsement of veganism (or its desperately inconsistent stepsister vegetarianism) on my part.

It also seems noteworthy that I've become acquainted with some vegetarian professional libertarians. This seems to raise the specter of an odd ideological innovation where one could combine traditional libertarianism with the environmentalist premise that animals (and, perhaps, trees and swamps and stuff) have rights, thus supporting the creation of a massive regulatory state. I don't believe anyone actually endorses this view, but someone really should as it would help lead to the demise of the hated two-dimensional model of political commitment.

Why Are Cabbies All Men?

Last night I got in a taxi and the driver was . . . a woman. I don't want to say I've never had a female taxi driver before, but I certainly can't recall any previous instances of this, and over the years I've ridden in a lot of cabs in various places. The vast majority of my sample, of course, comes from NYC, Boston, and Washington so maybe things are different outside of the Northeast corridor. This seems very strange, as driving a cab does not seem to be the sort of thing that puts a great premium on physical strength. It's also hard to imagine that taxi driving is dominated by some kind of old boys' club that's shutting the women out. So what's the deal?

Perjury

Jesus. What is it with Republicans and spurious, politicially motivated perjury accusations? Read Josh Marshall as always.

The astounding thing here is that before the book came out, the White House had already admitted to all its main charges. Bush told Woodward he didn't take terrorism very seriously before 9/11. When, in 2002, they were called on to say what the administration had done before 9/11, they produced Richard Clarke as their example. Now Clarke says that he was working on this stuff before 9/11 but his bosses didn't take him seriously. Now the White House says he's wrong.

Moral Responsibility for Dummies

The following meme appears to have gained popularity on the right. "Democrats, and Richard Clarke, say that Bush is to blame for 9/11. This is wrong because al-Qaeda is to blame." Yes and no.

Obviously, responsibility can be diffuse in these kinds of situations and different sorts of responsibility exist. If Chief Ramsey were to tell all the DC Metro Police that they don't need to show up for work next week and then next week the murder rate spiked, who would be to blame? Well, the murderers, in one sense. And one would hope that when the cops came back to work next week they would be held responsible in the appropriate manner -- arrest, trial, punishment. But Chief Ramsey is not without culpability here either, and you would need to hold him responsible by firing him.

As with the Spanish elections, however, the rhetorical purpose of this argument is very clear. Once again, the idea is that if there are no further attacks, Bush's brilliant leadership deserves the credit, but if there are further attacks, that simply proves the need to demonstrate moral clarity by reelecting Bush.