Matt Yglesias

The Shame of the Daily Caller

I’d encourage everyone to read this Ann Althouse post on today’s bogus Daily Caller story about JournoList. Her bottom line: “The Daily Caller’s article is weak. And I’m inclined to think the material in the Journolist archive is pretty mild stuff.”

What’s maddening about this whole issue is that of course it’s impossible to prove a negative. The closest one can come, however, is reasonable inference. The Caller appears to have access to a very large proportion of JournoList emails and they can’t come up with anything that withstands cursory scrutiny. Nor are they willing to simply publish the full text of the pilfered emails they’re writing about, forcing their audience to instead rely on Jonathan Strong’s deliberately misleading writeups.

At some point conservatives need to ask themselves about the larger meaning of this kind of conduct—and Andrew Breitbart’s—for their movement. Beyond the ethics of lying and smear one’s opponents, I would think conservatives would worry about the fact that a large portion of conservative media is dedicated to lying to conservatives. They regard their audience as marks to be misled and exploited, not as customers to be served with useful information.

Clark County Parking Regulations

It will come as no surprise to learn that Las Vegas, Nevada is not a model of sustainable urban planning. After all, this is a giant city in the middle of the desert where nobody should have ever put a city. But it’s always fun to look at the parking regulations of a new place, since this is a form of big government activism that nobody ever talks about even though there’s no cogent argument that it’s necessary to curb any kind of negative externality. Thus we learn in the parking regulations (PDF) that a Clark County apartment building must contain at least 1.25 parking spaces for every one bedroom unit.

There’s also this provision, apparently designed to encourage drunk driving:

Of course once a given metro area is built with utter car-dependence in mind, it makes perfect sense for developers to build future projects that assume utterly car-dependent clients. Consequently, these kind of regulations can come to seem like not such a big deal. But from another view that’s all the more reason to think we can get by without these regulations. In a place like Las Vegas the market almost certainly would provide ample parking. But if some particular group of people happen to think they could get by with less parking, why should the government tell them otherwise? What public purpose is being advanced?

How Bad is the DC Metro?

By Ryan McNeely

Last night on Twitter, Tyler Cowen asked why the D.C. Metro was so bad. Matt jumped to Metro’s defense, arguing that while the D.C. system is not up to European standards like Berlin’s U-Bahn and S-Bahn systems, it is the “second best” system in the U.S. after New York City’s subway system.

For comparison, here’s the average weekday ridership per mile of the four largest metro systems in the U.S. (while D.C. has the second highest overall ridership, it’s “per mile” ridership is diluted because it goes far our into the suburbs):

Now, what makes for a good metro? Well, cost for one. New York and Chicago have a flat-rate fare of $2.25 for a single trip, while it looks like Boston costs a maximum of $2.00 with several discount options. D.C., by comparison, has fares ranging from $1.75 to $4.60 (!), and you somewhat annoyingly need to swipe at the beginning and end of the trip because the fare is based on distance — though I suppose an argument can be made that it’s prudent to charge suburban commuters more than the urbanities. What about service? Well NYC runs 24/7, and Chicago’s busiest lines run 24/7 with some others closing around 1:00am. Boston and D.C. seem very similar, with stations closing between 12:30 and 1:00am on weeknights. Then there’s the matter of fatalities — I only did a cursory search, but I don’t think NYC, Chicago, or Boston has had any fatalities involving passengers in trains since 1990. Meanwhile, eight passengers died in the horrible D.C. Red Line accident last year, and there have been many other close calls (an investigation concluded that a 2004 accident at the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan stop would have killed at least 79 people if one of the trains involved had not been empty).

So, I think a case can be made using these few metrics that the D.C. metro is actually the worst of the biggest four in the U.S. But, still, I really enjoy it. I find the staff to be generally friendlier than the New York staff, which is difficult given the constant delays (yet another downside of the D.C. metro, but it’s hard to find comparables). I also think the curved vaulted ceilings are beautiful and make the underground feel much less claustrophobic, and the “no food or drink” policy really does contribute to the Metro’s very impressive cleanliness. Overall, the evidence is mixed, but I don’t think the ever-present D.C. Metro haters have conclusively made their case that the system sucks in the domestic context.

Surveying the Troops

With the Pentagon prepping to survey America’s soldiers about how they feel about allowing their gay colleagues to have equal rights, my colleague Igor Volsky took a trip to the National Archives to examine the last time they attempted this charade:

Today [i.e., yesterday], I traveled to the National Archives and recovered some of the surveys the military conducted about the troops’ attitudes towards black people between 1942 and 1946. At the time, the military — along with the overwhelming majority of the country — opposed integrating black servicemembers into the forces and preferred a ’separate but equal’ approach that would have required the military to construct separate recreation spaces and facilities. One month before Truman’s order, a Gallup poll showed that 63% of American adults endorsed the separation of Blacks and Whites in the military; only 26% supported integration.

These surveys show that the same attitude pervaded the military: 3/4 Air Force men favored separate training schools, combat, and ground crews and 85% of white soldiers thought it was a good idea to have separate service clubs in army camps:

Sometimes you’ve got to do the right thing.

Cynicism and Intellectual Dishonesty

By Ryan McNeely

Yesterday, Republican Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) was apparently “livid” on Capitol Hill, speaking with reporters while Democrats met to discuss their next step towards getting an energy bill through the Senate. Voinovich complained that since, in his opinion, there’s virtually no chance of passing such a bill before the November elections, even having the meeting at all was “cynical”:

“Anybody that has been in the Senate for any period of time knows there is no way, no way, that an energy bill is going to get done between now and the election or for that matter between now and the end of this year,” Voinovich told reporters. “This whole thing is very cynical.”

“Give me a break. This is just going through the motions, maybe to satisfy some people in your conference, but don’t kid us about we’re going to come forward with this thing and it’s going to be serious,” Voinovich said. “Anybody that’s being intellectually honest has got to say we do not have the time to do anything meaningful at this time in regards to climate change.”

The first thing to say is that unfortunately Voinovich may be technically correct that there isn’t time to “do anything meaningful” about climate change as the entire Congress gears up for election season. Certainly Senate Democrats could have pursued climate legislation before health care reform and financial regulation, but then one wonders if there would have been time to accomplish those other priorities. But the question is why is there insufficient time to deal with the most important issues facing the country?

The answer is the systematic Republican campaign to object, obstruct, delay, and filibuster every aspect of Senate business. And George Voinovich fully participated in this effort to run out the clock on the 111th Congress. Does George Voinovich believe that tackling climate change is important? If so, he could have declined to join his colleagues in filibustering the unemployment insurance extension over and over and over knowing full well that — eventually — the Democrats would be able replace their deceased caucus member and break the filibuster. Even if Voinovich doesn’t support extending the benefits (something he has voted for in the past), he could have simply declined to filibuster. But instead, Voinovich decided to go “through the motions, maybe to satisfy some people in [his] conference,” and cynically grind the Senate to a halt.

Housing Policy and the Housing Bubble

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but while it’s true that there are a lot of problems with American housing policy and also that we’re currently having a lot of problems associated with a collapse in real estate prices, I think the connection between those two facts is a bit incidental. Barry Ritholz has a smart post that makes the case for the basic irrelevance of idiosyncratic features of the American property market:

Or simply within the American context, note that we treat owner-occupied housing and commercial real estate quite differently but they had a similar price trajectory. The reason the details of housing policy don’t matter, it seems to me, is that our policy errors tended to affect the level of real estate prices whereas the relevant factors in prompting the recession had to do with unsustainable trends. Both sets of problems should be fixed, and it’s good that the recession has increased attention to the misallocation of resources involved in large covert subsidies for owner-occupied housing, but they’re pretty much separate issues as far as I can tell.

I’m on a Plane

In flight Wifi is pretty neat:

That said, hell’s going to freeze over before “I can’t complain” will be an accurate description of any commercial air travel. Isn’t there anyone in politics who wants to spare us of this absurd shoe-removing and toothpaste-inspecting?

Pie-in-the-Sky Post on Political Reform

As long as I’m prescheduling material to be published while I’m on an airplane, why not share with you my big picture pie-in-the-sky ideas about democratic political institutions? My basic thought is that places should be governed more like Switzerland which, after all, is a place that people generally think is well-governed:

People know that for electoral systems, I like ‘em proportional. And for political systems, I like ‘em parliamentary. People know that I’m not a fan of veto points. Ideally, I think legislation should be drawn up by technically competent experts in the executive branch and then accepted or rejected by a unicameral legislature. Won’t that lead to an unaccountable government? Well, I think that once we’ve filed down the legislative veto points to a minimum, it’s possible to put the people in as a veto point. Like in Switzerland, you could make it relatively easy for opponents of major pieces of legislation to force a referendum. So how a bill becomes a law looks like:

Ministry drafts bill –> Parliament approves bill –> Referendum approves bill.

Discussions of political systems often evince a tension between a desire for technocratic competence and populist legitimacy. The genius of this system, however, is that it’s both more technocratic and more populist than the current system. Things like ballot initiatives and congressional markup undermine technocracy by letting people frame unsound policy options. Meanwhile, multiple veto points and “the separation of powers” undermines accountability by blurring lines of responsibility. Parliamentary unicameralism plus referenda, by contrast, encourages policy ideas to come forward in technically sound ways while ensuring that the public has the opportunity to say “no” to their technocrat overlords.

I think it’s possible that the United States is too large to govern in this manner (I think the argument that the US is just sub-optimally big is pretty plausible) but I think more countries and sub-national units ought to explore this Swiss model. After all, as I say, people generally acknowledge that Switzerland is a well-governed place. Indeed, it seems noteworthy that Switzerland is a fair bit richer than Germany or France or Italy sandwiched between the three. The widespread use of ballot initiatives at the state level shows that there’s a lot of desire for more direct democracy, even as it’s widely acknowledged that ballot initiatives have been a governance disaster.

Pure Delay

Requiring 60 votes rather than 50 to pass legislation in a body with 100 members is a terrible idea. It’s always been a terrible idea. Nobody would design a legislature that way. But lately, filibustering has been used for even newer and more terrible reasons, like simply slowing bills down to be annoying. For example, Annie Lowrey reviews the Unemployment Insurance aftermath:

Yesterday, Senate Democrats cleared the 60-vote cloture hurdle to restoring federally extended unemployment benefits for 2.6 million American families. The bill needs a final majority-rules Senate vote, a House vote and President Obama’s signature to become law. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader, had hoped that Senate Republicans would waive the procedural 30-hour window between the cloture vote and the final vote — giving Democrats consent to move on. The GOP refused.

The practical upshot of this kind of foot-dragging tactic is to make it impossible to staff the executive branch in a timely maner. It also makes it impossible to legislate about important issues through any mechanism other than these lumbering comprehensive packages. Instead of addressing the variety of problems with the financial regulatory architecture through a variety of different bills, it all has to be done through one mega-bill.

Texas Fried Conservatism

By Ryan McNeely

Chris Cillizza notes that over the weekend in separate television appearances, the two Republicans in charge of House and Senate elections this fall went out of their way to claim that the employment situation was better under President Bush and that Bush himself is on the verge of a popular resurgence:

“People had jobs when Republicans were not only in charge but George Bush was there,” said National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (Texas) during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”.

John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program that “Bush’s stock has gone up a lot since he left office,” adding: “I think a lot people are looking back with more fondness on President Bush’s administration, and I think history will treat him well.“

Sensing that it may not be a good short-term electoral strategy to tell people that “history” will prove them wrong, Ramesh Ponnuru tries to downplay these statements as simple home-state niceties: “Cillizza is a savvy guy, but let’s not forget that both John Cornyn and Pete Sessions are from Texas.” Indeed, let’s not forget that the GOP has chosen two Texans to lead their national election campaigns during a cycle when they are supposedly attempting to break from the presidency of Texan George W. Bush, much like when they replaced Texan Dick Armey with Texan Tom Delay as Majority Whip in 2003.

Texas is a big state so it’s not necessarily strange to have Texans in a party’s leadership positions. But the fact is the Republican Party leadership is dominated by southern white men, some of whom belong to a state Republican Party that advocates – in 2010 – criminalizing sodomy, revoking American membership in the U.N., and a variety of other nutty, destructive, and unconstitutional ideas. The simplest explanation for Sessions’ and Cornyn’s defense of Bush is that they believe that the Bush presidency was successful. But even if you chalk up their comments as some sort of harmless regional solidarity with the former president it just bolsters the case that Republicans are still the party of Texas-style southern radicalism.

New Made Up JournoList Scandal

It seems that someone has leaked a vast number of “Journolist” emails to The Daily Caller, and that now that the Caller has the emails in hand and its staff can see for itself that there’s no story here they’ve resorted to making things up. Today, for example, the Caller has a piece entitled “Liberal Journalists Suggest Government Shut Down Fox News” that doesn’t cite any examples of a liberal journalist suggesting the government shut down Fox News. In Strong’s writeup, however, it tries to make it seem as if Michael Scherer from Time Magazine favors this measure:

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.

“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air.

The reality is that Scherer, though agreeing with the point that merely subjecting Fox to fact-based criticism wouldn’t deter it from inaccuracy, sent a message chiding non-journalist Zasloff for suggesting any such thing: “You really want political parties / white houses picking and choosing which news organizations to favor?” The story here, in other words, is the reverse of the one Strong reported. Some liberals were complaining about Fox News on an email list. The idea of FEC action was raised, and no working journalists embraced it because journalists believe in free speech. Another “revelation” from this discussion is that British people tend to think the British approach to libel law is good, whereas Americans tend to prefer the American approach.

(Net) Roots Radical

I’m off to Netroots Nation today, so for the next couple of days the blogging will be happening on a somewhat diminished schedule.

Endgame

Kids get high and make out on the train:

— The Obama administration’s handling of this Shirley Sherrod business has been shameful.

— Andrew Breitbart’s conduct is also shameful, but that’s to be anticipated.

— The costs of 2009.

— The American aristocracy.

— University of Phoenix becomes the first university to get $1 billion in Pell Grants.

Going back to the well with “Cry When You Get Older”.

Shrugging at the Long-Term Deficit

From a technocratic point of view, I agree with the idea that it makes sense to pair short-term stimulus (i.e., bigger deficits) with measures that reduce the long-term deficit. In practice, however, I don’t think it makes sense to spend 2010 & 2011 worrying about what the deficit may or may not look like in 2047.

There are two reasons for this. One is the lessons of the 1999-2001 period. The reaction of the conservative movement to the elimination of budget deficits wasn’t to say “great news, let’s stick to PAYGO in the future.” It was to say that budget surpluses proved the need to cut taxes. Alan Greenspan even decided that budget surpluses were a bad thing and likely to lead to socialism and doom. The second reason harkens back to the conservative argument that the Affordable Care Act won’t actually reduce the deficit because it’s deficit-reducing provisions may be repealed. Progressives are fond of observing that this proves too much, since you coud say the same of any effort to reduce the long-term deficit. Which is true, but that in turn indicates that there’s something a bit pointless about having Congress in 2010 make promises about what will happen in 2023. It really could just change in the future.

Instead of worrying about CBO projections, people should worry about financial markets. If market concern about the deficit is pushing up interest rates or leading to problematic inflation, then you should worry. And of since you probably can’t reassure markets with one-off budget stunts, you probably need to enact measures with some enduring bite. This is what was done in 1990 and in 1993, and it worked out great. But what we need to be worrying about all the time is growth. That means stimulus when needed, it means deficit reduction when needed, and it means all the time striving to make the tax base more efficient, to improve education & infrastructure, and all the rest.

Talking Housing Policy With the Right

Tim Lee has an interesting post up about how language shapes political coalitions and vice versa and I thought about it while reading Reihan Salam’s article on America’s crazy subsidization of owner-occupied housing. The piece doesn’t really break new ground in terms of policy analysis—not sure how it could at this point—but it casts arguments I’m accustomed to hearing from people with political commitments similar to my own in more conservative-friendly rhetoric than I would use.

One example, paint the tax subsidies for rich homeowners as a giveaway to decadent liberal elites: “Not surprisingly, over 75 percent of these benefits go to three high-cost metropolitan areas: New York City–Northern New Jersey, Los Angeles–Riverside–Orange County, and San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose.” If the right really wants to stick it to Barbara Streisand, replacing the home mortgage interest tax deduction with a modest tax credit would be an excellent way.

At any rate, my only real disagreement with the piece is Salam’s suggestion that suburbanization-oriented industrial policy was a good idea at some past point in time. My view is that this is the kind of thing that has in fact always been a bad idea, and whose badness has been kind of incidentally highlighted as a result of the financial crisis even though the causal relationship is a bit tenuous. Unfortunately, as with all issues that blend issues of class and geography there’s no real way to make the change on a partisan basis. At the moment, however, there’s no prospect for major bipartisan legislation of any kind.

Questions for Ben Bernanke

Derek Tang at the Macroeconomic Advisors blog has a great list of questions the oversight committees ought to ask Ben Bernanke at their next hearing:

— What is the probability of a double-dip recession?
— Are you concerned about the possibility of deflation?
— Given the FOMC’s forecast of a persistently elevated unemployment rate and very low inflation, why would there be any question about the FOMC resuming easing?
— What is the hurdle or threshold to resume tightening?
— What options does the Fed have should it want to ease?
— Would any of the Committee’s easing options be able to provide meaningful additional stimulus?
— What do you think about the direction of the financial regulatory legislation to remove the Fed’s authority over consumer protection?
— Do you worry about the adverse and potentially dangerous consequences of keeping rates so low for a very long time?
— Do you believe that it is wise for a Fed Chairman to meet with the President and subsequently participate in a press conference with the President in which the President lays out part of his political agenda and indicates that these are points of agreement between himself and the Fed Chairman?
— Do you believe that financial stability should be an explicit third mandate for the Federal Reserve?

Unfortunately the tendency at these hearings is for members of congress to fail to focus on the core monetary policy issues.

The Land of the Free

Arnold Kling has a post up about how America was better in the 1940s in which he specifically writes “[n]ote to intellectual bullies: please do not confuse nostalgia for decentralized school districts with nostalgia for ’separate but equal.’” So I’m not going to say that Kling is a racist who’s nostalgic for the days when segregated schools were enforced by a campaign of systemic terrorism enabled by state authorities. Instead I’ll just observe that Kling, while not nostalgic for the massive disenfranchisement of African-Americans, seems in practice to be blind to the interests of non-whites, of gays and lesbians, and of women. After all, though he disavows nostalgia for Jim Crow he does write that “American government has become structurally less libertarian and less democratic in recent decades” just before citing the centralization of school governance since 1940 as a key example.

(Santa Rosa County School Board, 1950)

I’ll admit right off that I don’t have a mathematical formula that demonstrates that the right of black people to vote in school board elections is an important victory for human freedom that absolutely dwarfs the impact (for good or for ill) of school districts getting bigger. I think it’s just obvious. And I think that the only way to not see it as obvious that the structure of government has become freer and more democratic since 1940 is from inside a very narrow white male frame. I’m old enough to remember when Hillary Clinton faced off against Barack Obama to see who would secure the nomination of a major political party.

It may be that there are good arguments for decentralizing political authority (I think we need more accountable government and the steps to get it don’t fall on an easy centralize/decentralize framework). After all, doing so should be perfectly compatible with social and political equality for women, minorities, and non-straights. But trying to frame the case in terms of comprehensive nostalgia for the free & democratic American politics of the past is just a doomed enterprise.

Casual Factual Distortions in the Washington Post Op-ed Page

Today’s Anne Applebaum column is pretty good, but it also appeared on the Washington Post’s op-ed page so apparently she decided to toss a major misstatement of fact into the piece in order to ensure it passes muster with the editors. Hence:

Yet it is Social Security, Medicare and the ever-expanding list of earmarks — federal grants — that are going to sink the American budget in the next few decades, not President Obama’s health-care reform (though that won’t help). Yet in Washington, these expenditures are known as “third rails”: If you touch them, you’re dead.

She’s managed to pack two or three different mistakes into the sentence. For one thing, the expansion of earmarks has no budgetary impact whatsoever. For another thing, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act will in fact reduce the budget deficit according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Tax Committee, and the Office of Management and Budget. If Applebaum has some argument that these authorities are mistaken, she’s welcome to present it, but it’s odd for her to simply state that they’re mistaken as a matter of fact without even acknowledging that the main budgetary authorities disagree with her. Last, though I’m not sure whether it should count as a separate error or an extension of the previous one, Applebaum seems not to realize that the aforementioned Affordable Care Act does in fact touch Medicare expenditures.

Something that I don’t think The Washington Post’s editors fully realize is that people who read the columns that appear in their paper—and the syndicated versions of those columns that appear in papers across the country—generally believe that The Washington Post’s editors take some kind of action to ensure the factual content of the stories that appear in their newspaper. The op-ed page doesn’t come with a banner saying “WARNING: THIS IS THE OPINION SECTION WHERE WE LET CONSERVATIVES MAKE THINGS UP.” But the policy of the paper is, in fact, that if conservatives want to make things up in the op-ed pages they are free to do so. Under the circumstances, I’m not entirely certain why the Post doesn’t offer that disclaimer. Presumably they think it would be bad for business for people to realize that a certain share of their daily “opinion” content consists of false assertions of fact. But if this is what they believe, they ought to take some steps to reduce or eliminate the quantity of such assertions in their pages.

Moments of Opportunity

I spoke to Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico this morning about his drive for reform of the Senate rules. If you’re coming to Netroots Nation this year, so is Senator Udall and he’s on a panel also featuring Yours Truly on this subject. His focus, at the moment, is on what you might call a meta-rule, namely that the Senate can and should adopt new rules at the beginning of the term by majority vote rather than the 67 votes it would take to change the rules mid-session. He talks here about his inspiration for the idea:

The concern I have is that the political timing is wrong. Back in late 2008, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic about the evils of the filibuster, and had more progressive institutions been on the bandwagon back then I think it’s quite easy to imagine the Senate exercising Udall’s “constitutional option” amidst the hope and enthusiasm associated with the beginning of the Obama administration. If that had happened, more progressive bills could have passed (liberals like it!), vulnerable members could have ducked more tough votes (moderates like it!), and the economy would be in better shape (incumbents like it!), but of course it didn’t happen. Now 18 months later, Washington is older and wiser on these matters. But will it really be politically feasible to adopt a more sensible ruleset with a less-popular President Obama and a diminished majority in the Senate?

Karzai/NATO Tensions on Timelines

(State Department photo)

Ahead of today’s Kabul Conference, my CAP colleagues Caroline Wadhams and Colin Cookman released a policy memo full of smart and ambitious recommendations for action. Naturally, the actual world of international conferencing doesn’t lead to anything nearly as clearly worded or decisive. But I think it’s noteworthy that part of the inevitable muddle of statements involves some serious disagreements about timelines:

“I remain determined that our Afghan national security forces will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country by 2014,” Karzai said. [...]

So US, Nato and European officials added a number of caveats to Karzai’s timeline. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary-general, said any Nato withdrawal would be based on “conditions, not calendars”.

“Our mission will end when, only when, the Afghans are able to maintain security on their own,” Rasmussen said.

Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, made a similar point: She said withdrawals “should not be driven by a prescribed calendar, but by the reality on the ground.”

Obviously, Karzai has political incentives to exaggerate the pace at which the government he heads will acquire capabilities. So I understand why, as a matter of technical military judgment, western leaders might want to second-guess him. But as a question of higher politics and grand strategy it strikes me as slightly absurd to have American (and European!) officials expressing more determination to have foreign troops in Afghanistan than the Afghan government expresses. I think it would be wrong to simply abandon allies in Afghanistan, but if Karzai wants to draw-up timetables that points toward an honorable exit strategy that we ought to be working with, not pushing back against.

Fed Ponders What Its Job Is

Robin Harding reports on a shift in the internal debate at the Fed: “in spring it was all about when and how to exit from very loose monetary policy, now it is more about what to do if even looser policy were required.” But I find the report pretty puzzling. It seems to me that the question of whether to ease or whether to tighten is often fairly easy. If inflation is running above the target rate and the price level is above the desired trend, you tighten. Conversely, if inflation is running below the target rate and the price level if below the desired trend, you loosen. More difficult situations can arise, but those are easy cases.

For some reason, though, according to Harding the Fed’s decision-makers don’t see it that way:

Fed officials have a range of measures to judge if the outlook has deteriorated far enough to merit more easing. Some are focused on inflation expectations, which remain quite strong. As long as consumers, markets and businesses still expect inflation, these officials are fairly confident that it will come to pass.

Others will need evidence that the recovery is no longer on course to bring down unemployment.

If weak job market data continue, for example, they could prompt concern about downward pressure on wages leading to very low inflation.

I’m baffled as to what’s making this such a complicated calculation. Right now, inflation is below two percent. And it’s been below two percent for a while. And expectations are for it to remain below two percent for a while. Tough choices arise in monetary policy, but we’re in an obvious situation—the Fed needs to go looser. People seem to be making up reasons to avoid the obvious conclusion.

The Crowded Skies

The other day James Fallows posted a fascinating chart showing that total Available Seat Miles on U.S. passenger planes have tumbled over the past decade even as the population has grown:

Consequently, it doesn’t just seem like your flights are getting more crowded lately. They are, in fact, getting more crowded. Among other things, this leads to more delays for travelers, which is annoying. But the more efficient flights with fewer vacancies seem to be powering airlines back to profitability.

Crist Tacking Left

Charlie Crist used to be a fairly moderate Republican. Then instead of that reputation for moderation making him a shoo-in to win the 2010 Florida Senate election, it made him an increasing underdog in the 2010 Florida Senate Republican primary. Consequently, he ended up ditching the GOP and running as an independent. Now via Jon Chait, it seems that Crist’s strategy is increasingly to tack to the left in an effort to get Florida progressives to back him:

Mr. Crist this year vetoed an education bill and an abortion bill sent to him by the legislature, which won him praise from many teachers and liberal women’s groups. Now, in calling a special legislative session to discuss a state-constitution ban on oil drilling in state waters, he is gambling that voters will see him as protecting Florida’s tourism industry in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill. (Florida law already bans such drilling, but some lawmakers have sought in the past to repeal the ban.) [...]

Mr. Crist has made other policy shifts. Despite pledging as a Republican to help repeal President Obama’s health-care overhaul, Mr. Crist now says he does not support such a move. He has long called himself “pro-life,” doing so even in the interview last week. He is now quick to add that while he personally opposes abortion, he would not seek to overturn Roe v. Wade and supports abortion rights.

Looking at the polling, I’d say this is another situation in which it would be nice to have Instant Runoff Voting. In America, elections with more than two credible candidates tend to end up turning on tactical voting considerations.

Varieties of Suburban Experience

To continue a theme from yesterday, not only does public policy shape the available choices between suburban and urban places but it absolutely defines how people travel from suburban locales to central cities. If you connect a suburb to a main city via a wide highway and don’t build a train link, then obviously people will “choose” to go via the highway. Alternatively, if you do what they did outside of Copenhagen and build relatively narrow roads and heavy rail lines then more people will choose the train.

I was thinking about this this morning since at the gym I was listening to Robyn’s “Cry When You Get Older”:

The song features the line “Back in suburbia kids get high and make out on the train / Then endless incomprehensible boredom takes a hold again.” This of course doesn’t make much sense in the American context where there generally is no train in suburbia (and “train” and “again” don’t rhyme). Here in suburbia kids get high and make out in the Taco Bell parking lot. But Robyn’s from Sweden where they have an extensive commuter rail network and suddenly teen culture clichés look different.

The Political Economy of High Unemployment

Mark Thoma points to a 1943 essay (PDF) by Michael Kalecki on the “Political Aspects of Full Employment” that rather presciently predicts that in the case of a severe slump the political authorities will not, in fact, take steps to bolster aggregate demand in a sufficient way:

In this situation a powerful alliance is likely to be formed between big business and rentier interests, and they would probably find more than one economist to declare that the situation was manifestly unsound. The pressure of all these forces, and in particular of big business—as a rule influential in government departments—would most probably induce the government to return to the orthodox policy of cutting down the budget deficit. A slump would follow in which government spending would again come into its own.

Thus at a time when many thought the experience of 1937-38 would teach people not to repeat those mistakes, Kalecki predicts that the experience will be repeated with governments only pivoting back to expansion again if things get really severe.

I think the key move you need to make to apply this analysis to the political economy of today is to understand that Social Security and Medicare have more or less made old people into a rentier class writ large, with even the least-affluent seniors largely insulated from the ups-and-downs of the labor market. At the same time, this demographic has become the key pillar of conservative opinion today. The fly in the ointment, in theory, would be that conservatives generally support dismantling Social Security and Medicare. The solution is the current set of proposals to cut Social Security benefits for younger Americans while making sure today’s seniors and near-seniors get paid in full.