Matt Yglesias

Endgame

I wonder what I’ll find:

— It seems to me that if you disburse federal agencies you’ll make media/congressional oversight even worse than it is now and regulatory capture will run rampant.

— Arkansas excited about Dunkin Donuts maybe opening a store there.

— How corporate boards inflate executive pay.

— WikiLeaks knew info was largely things “we already knew” but lots of people need to hear about these things.

— CBO on immigration.

Celebrate the end of Netroots Nation with Sheryl Crow’s “Leaving Las Vegas”. I have a large tolerance for bad nineties hits, but this one is truly indefensible.

Niall Ferguson Debates Himself

I’ve been known to remark on the conservative movement’s strong adherence to Keynesian arguments as a justification for tax cuts in the wake of the mild 2001 recession, adherence that seems puzzling in light of their contrary rhetoric in the wake of the cataclysmic 2008-2009 downturn. Brad DeLong observes that one particularly hilarious example of this is historian-turned-pundit Niall Ferguson who wrote a December 12, 2003 article on the Bush administration that’s in considerable with his contemporary take on things. DeLong requests a Ferguson v Ferguson debate, and with assistance from Ryan McNeely I’m prepared to unveil one.

2003 Ferguson is in boldface, 2010 Ferguson is in italics:

Guns or butter: this is the choice historians conventionally say that governments face. The administration is currently engaged in an audacious — some would say reckless — experiment to disprove this theory. To judge by his actions, the President’s response to the question “Guns or butter?” is: “Thanks, I’ll take both.” This, in short, is the guns and butter presidency.

Are there precedents for such a combination? What’s to say this deficit-spending won’t work? Keynes would tell us that in the current environment we must boost aggregate demand.

Certainly. Long before Keynes was even born, weak governments in countries from Argentina to Venezuela used to experiment with large peace-time deficits to see if there were ways of avoiding hard choices. The experiments invariably ended in one of two ways. Either the foreign lenders got fleeced through default, or the domestic lenders got fleeced through inflation.

But the United States has broken the guns or butter rule before. Under President Ronald Reagan, substantial increases in military spending coincided with comparable increases, relative to gross domestic product, in personal consumption — that proportion of G.D.P. that the public, as opposed to the government, spends. The crucial point, of course, is that in the short term at least, fiscal policy is not a zero-sum game.

But this doesn’t respond to long run inflationary fears. When economies were growing sluggishly, that could be slow in coming. But there invariably came a point when money creation by the central bank triggered an upsurge in inflationary expectations.

But, as Keynes remarked, in the long run we are all dead! Aren’t these “inflationary expectations” priced into the markets?

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who likens confidence to an imaginary “fairy” have failed to learn from decades of economic research on expectations. All it takes is one piece of bad news – a credit rating downgrade, for example – to trigger a sell-off.

But this will not be the kind of inflation experienced in the 1970’s and 1980’s. So powerful are the deflationary forces today (notably in the second and third biggest economies, Japan and Germany) that Washington can splurge on its military and social services with only a modest impact on expectations of inflation.

But it is not just inflation that bond investors fear. Foreign holders of US debt – and they account for 47 per cent of the federal debt in public hands – worry about some kind of future default.

But the United States has a unique advantage over all other sovereign borrowers: central banks and other institutions around the world need to hold dollars as the currency most frequently used in international transactions. While this is true, America can count on selling large amounts of dollar assets, like 10-year Treasury bonds, to foreigners — very large amounts.

But for how long? The evidence is very clear from surveys on both sides of the Atlantic. People are nervous of world war-sized deficits when there isn’t a war to justify them. According to a recent poll published in the FT, 45 per cent of Americans “think it likely that their government will be unable to meet its financial commitments within 10 years”. Surveys of business and consumer confidence paint a similar picture of mounting anxiety.

The only imminent danger is that the dollar could slide sharply against Asian currencies, as it has against the euro. But the chief losers then would be the Asians. And those who panicked about the debt under President Reagan failed to see how manageable it was. It’s even more manageable today.

Hogwash. It was said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. The same could easily be said of some of today’s latter-day Keynesians!

Indeed!

Hard Time

Excellent Economist article on over-imprisonment in America (though it sort of mixes this issue up with the separate question of vaguely worded federal criminal statutes, which I think is a different problem):

Massachusetts is a liberal state, but its drug laws are anything but. It treats opium-derived painkillers such as Percocet like hard drugs, if illicitly sold. Possession of a tiny amount (14-28 grams, or ½-1 ounce) yields a minimum sentence of three years. For 200 grams, it is 15 years, more than the minimum for armed rape. And the weight of the other substances with which a dealer mixes his drugs is included in the total, so 10 grams of opiates mixed with 190 grams of flour gets you 15 years. [...]

Prosecutors may charge him with selling a smaller amount if he agrees to “reel some other poor slob in”, as Ms Dougan puts it. He is told to persuade another dealer to sell him just enough drugs to trigger a 15-year sentence, and perhaps to do the deal near a school, which adds another two years.

Severe drug laws have unintended consequences. Less than half of American cancer patients receive adequate painkillers, according to the American Pain Foundation, another pressure-group. One reason is that doctors are terrified of being accused of drug-trafficking if they over-prescribe.

The result is a terrifying wasting of financial resources and human potential. Sticking to tradeoffs inside the realm of crime prevention, it would clearly make more sense to increase the quantity and quality of police officers and parole/probation supervisors than to be handing out these endless jail sentences. Even for legitimately serious violent crimes, it’s more important to catch and prosecute people quickly and effectively than to lock people away forever and ever. In formalistic terms, a 50% chance of a 2-year sentence and a 2% percent chance of a 50-year sentence are the same thing. Real people, however, discount the future. And the sort of people who commit violent crimes—young men with poor impulse control—are especially likely to do so.

Mark Kleiman’s When Brute Force Fails makes these points (and more) and is by far the best thing I’ve read on the subject of crime and crime control in 21st century America.

The Right and Carbon Regulation

Ross Douthat has a column today that, in his inimitable way, puts forth the strongest possible defense of the right’s opposition to climate change legislation. Such columns are worth reading, because you see that his case is still full of holes. David Leonhardt gets at a couple, and I’ll have a go at this one:

[Conservative opposition to carbon pricing legislation] is also grounded in skepticism that such a regime is possible. Any attempt to legislate our way to a cooler earth, the argument goes, will inevitably resemble the package of cap-and-trade emission restrictions that passed the House last year: a Rube Goldberg contraption whose buy-offs and giveaways swamped its original purpose.

Two objections. One—ACES certainly had its Rube Goldberg qualities, but it hardly “swamped its original purpose” of reducing the risk of climate catastrophe at small economic cost.

Two—if Republican members of congress looked at ACES and thought “nice try, but too many side deals” they were, of course, free at any time to introduce an alternative piece of legislation. They did not. And you can tell by the rhetoric of the broader conservative movement (”cap and tax,” “job-killing energy tax,” etc.) that there was no openness to this kind of effort to find more optimal ways of pursuing environmental goals. On the contrary, every move congressional Republicans have made—from adopting a House posture that made it necessary to forge costly side-deals with coal belt Democrats to adopting a Senate posture that ensures carbon regulation will be left primarily to the EPA—has tended to simultaneously undermine the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while also making the economic impact of the regulations more costly.

The reality is that I don’t think American conservatives need a reason, as such, to oppose effective policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Siding with the Chamber of Commerce against proposed new environmental regulation is just what the conservative movement does. Insofar as any particular person wants to dissent from that judgment in a vocal and persistent way, that person would simply be read out of the movement. The extent to which the conservative movement has its grip on any particular politician (or, indeed, newspaper columnist) can change from year-to-year or day-to-day but there’s no real opening for a conservative person or institution to make a genuine effort to help environmentalists without turning apostate. Things are different in Denmark, but that’s true of many subjects.

Consensus in New Jersey

By Ryan McNeely

On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, NJ Gov. Christie was interviewed by Jake Tapper, who pushed the governor to articulate the Republican position on immigration and specifically identify who was blocking reform — reform that Christie claims to support. Christie replied that he doesn’t think there’s “one Republican position” but Tapper correctly noted that really the Republican position is to simply obstruct, as “there are Democrats offering a bill and they can’t get any Republicans to join them.”

Christie answered this by saying it’s the Democrats’ fault for not building “consensus”:

“Well, listen, the fact of the matter is they need to find a way to build consensus.  And I think that’s what the President said he wanted to do when he came to town, and I think that’s the challenge for those who are in the majority – find a way to build consensus.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing in New Jersey, Jake.  We have a Democratic legislature.  I’ve passed a budget…with a Democratic legislature, a property tax cap with a Democratic legislature, pension reforms with a Democratic legislature.  If you want to lead and build consensus, you can, and it’s the obligation of those people in charge to build consensus.”

It actually is an impressive list of accomplishments, even if I don’t agree with the governor’s policy prescriptions. The problem is Christie’s definition of “consensus”:

The Democrat-controlled Legislature passed the Republican governor’s $29.4 billion spending plan early this morning, following a long and arduous night of debate at the Statehouse. Christie has scheduled a signing ceremony in South River for 1 p.m., about 12 hours after the Assembly approved his plan.

…The budget cleared both houses with bare majorities under a deal in which the Democrats provided just enough votes for the Republican-sponsored measure to pass.

Hopefully Gov. Christie will join the supporters of Sen. Udall’s plan for filibuster reform as he clearly knows the benefits of majority-rule in the legislature. If not, he should place the blame for the failure of reforms to get through Congress squarely where it belongs: on members of his own party in the Senate who are insisting on a 60-vote threshold for literally everything.

Jeff Sessions Continues His Lifelong Crusade to Defend White Interests

Jeff Sessions is joining with several of his Senate Judiciary Committee colleagues to demand further investigation of the fake-scandal around the New Black Panther Party. I’ve heard some suggest that it’s hypocritical for Sessions to be leading this charge when he showed so little interest in the overall subject of the George W Bush administration’s politicization of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. I beg to differ. Sessions has, throughout his career, been a loud and outspoken defender of white interests. Consider Sarah Wildman’s reminder of his history:

The tip of the problem was a 1984 case that came to be known as the “Marion 3″ – Sessions’s prosecution of three civil rights workers over what he perceived as voting fraud. As Lani Guinier lays out in her book Lift Every Voice, before 1965 there were “virtually no blacks registered to vote in the 10 western Black Belt counties of Albama”.

But by the 1980s that had started to change. Through the massive get-out-the-vote efforts of three leaders – including a former aid to Martin Luther King – black voter turnout began to creep toward 80%, and a handful of black legislators were elected. That’s where Sessions stepped in, charging three voting rights organisers with voter fraud. All three were quickly acquitted. Sessions’s choice to focus on their efforts looked a lot less like good governance and a lot more like voter intimidation.

Career Justice Department employee J Gerald Hebert testified under oath that Sessions told him the NAACP was an “un-American,” and “Communist-inspired” organization that, in collusion with the also un-American and Communist-inspired ACLU, managed “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” He thought the Voting Rights Act was unduly “intrusive” and a a black former assistant US attorney named Thomas Figures testified that Sessions called him “boy” and joked to him that he liked the Ku Klux Klan until he found out that some of its members smoked pot.

The Tax Debate

Nice Wall Street Journal chart on what’s at stake in the tax debate:

Many people very genuinely think that making the income tax as un-progressive as possible is crucial for future economic growth. That, combined with the fact that politicians spend a lot of time socializing with rich people and thus are achingly attentive to their interests, is driving this dynamic. Personally, I find the evidence for the policy merits of low income taxes on the right to be wanting. But I do think it would ultimately be worth hedging our bets by adopting Robert Frank’s idea of a strongly progressive consumption tax rather than the current system.

Stimulus and the Welfare State

In the course of an otherwise excellent column, Martin Wolf offers what I think is a misleading aperçu:

Whatever the rhetoric, I have long considered the US the advanced world’s most Keynesian nation – the one in which government (including the Federal Reserve) is most expected to generate healthy demand at all times, largely because jobs are, in the US, the only safety net for those of working age.

Two points in response to this. One is that the Keynesian prescription is not only for the government to run deficits in response to recessions, but to run surpluses in expansions. Thus, the Clinton administration’s fiscal policies were arguably “Keynesian” but the Reagan and (especially) George W Bush administrations were implementing an agenda that flew in the face of Keynes’ ideas much more clearly than anything Angela Merkel’s ever done.

But I think the bigger problem comes with trying to construct a dichotomy between a “safety net” and a government “expected to generate healthy demand at all times.” The Keynesian take ought to be that a well-designed safety net helps to stabilize aggregate demand by stabilizing disposable income flows. Understood in this light, the key fact about US fiscal policy during the current recession is that there’s nothing well-designed about state and local budget practices in the United States and the burden-sharing between the federal and state/local sides of the American welfare state hasn’t been put together for good reasons.

Stressing Over Europe’s Stress Tests

Wolfgang Munchau is not impressed by Europe’s new bank stress tests:

Banks hold most of their bonds on their banking books – where they usually keep them until maturity – and a small minority on their trading books. The stress tests assumed some further loss only on the value of those bonds in the trading books. Yet the pricing of Greek bonds already implies a non-trivial probability of a default – and that would affect both books.

Certainly, the stress tests should be based on what one might call a plausible worst-case scenario, not one that represents the absolute worst. Nobody is asking the bank supervisors to stress-test the impact of an alien attack. But sovereign default in the case of Greece is not such a far-fetched scenario – even if you believe it to be unlikely. It is irresponsible for the stress testers to ignore that sort of event. That is like a car crash tester failing to consider the possibility of an oncoming vehicle.

The real meaning of “stress tests,” however, seems to me to be a mechanism for politicians to offer guarantees to banks while pretending that’s not what they’re doing. After all, when a bank regulator says a given bank has passed a stress test that means in effect that the regulator is saying that for him to let that bank fail would require him to admit to having made a mistake. And since powerful people these days never seem to admit to having made mistakes, that amounts to a guarantee. Then the hope is that this covert guarantee will allow the bank to recapitalize itself through earnings, thus avoiding politically unpopular direct appropriations and the dilution of incumbent equity owners’ holdings. As is generally the case when policy action is undertaken primarily to obscure what’s happening, the result is that a basically worthy aim (recapitalizing salvageable banks) is being undertaken in a mighty roundabout and inefficient way.

The problem is that the correct alternative is something like TARP—coercive injections of public equity into banks—which bankers understand to be worse for them but the public understands as an evil “bailout.”

Senate Inaction to Devastate Future Farmers

This isn’t an article about climate change. It’s just an amusing human interest piece about growing watermelons. But the piece highlights the fact that relatively small changes in the weather have big implications for the prospects of a good watermelon crop. And that’ll be one of the leading edges of climate devastation. Farmers have particular land and particular crops they’re accustomed to growing. When the climate shifts, they’ve got a problem. Initially it won’t be an insurmountable problem for farmers in rich countries who’ll be able to draw on a lot of technical resources to try to adapt. But for poor peasants in the developing world, their livelihoods will be ruined quite rapidly.

And the richer farmers won’t be off the hook either, because the volume of change will just keep compounding and eventually swamp their ability to adjust.

Still, it’s worth attending to the problems of the third world and the ethical issues it raises. I doubt many members of the Chamber of Commerce would, if faced with a starving Namibian family on their front doorstep, just refuse to give them any food and say “hey, I’m greedy, get over it.” But when the climate shifts, there will be crop failures and famines and people will die. And the people preventing action to stop that outcome are doing it because it would be financially inconvenient. So how different is that?

The Deportation Surge

Peter Slavin surveys what’s actually happening to immigration policy in the United States:

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency expects to deport about 400,000 people this fiscal year, nearly 10 percent above the Bush administration’s 2008 total and 25 percent more than were deported in 2007. The pace of company audits has roughly quadrupled since President George W. Bush’s final year in office.

The effort is part of President Obama’s larger project “to make our national laws actually work,” as he put it in a speech this month at American University. Partly designed to entice Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform, the mission is proving difficult and politically perilous.

My guess is that there are approximately zero people currently residing in the United States who place a high premium on deportations of illegal immigrants and who are aware of this information and have therefore become enthusiastic backers of Barack Obama. By contrast, there are many people in the United States who are concerned with undocumented workers and their families who are aware of this information and have therefore become less enthusiastic about Barack Obama.

The Care and Feeding of the Liberal Psyche

I have a Netroots Nation wrap piece up at The Daily Beast saying that progressive activists are depressed and the White House hasn’t done very much to offer the kind of psychic goodies that keep people’s spirits up:

It’s always difficult to characterize the emotional state of a convention full of people. But if the 2007 edition of Netroots Nation was mostly angry, 2008 was hopeful, 2009 was anxious, and now in 2010 the dominant mood is depressed. Perhaps the defining moment of the conference came near the very end when Harry Reid spoke Saturday afternoon. An exhausted-sounded Senate majority leader spoke eloquently about the injustice faced by gay soldiers and the need to end the policy of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”—only to end lamely with the promise that “we’re going to continue to work on this to the best we can.” In years past, progressives would be promised results. This summer, the best anyone can offer is continued effort. [...]

On the other side of the ledger, the Obama administration points to an impressive array of accomplishment. Their health-care bill is the most significant progressive achievement in more than 40 years. Financial regulation, the new START treaty, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, etc. are nothing to sneer at. But something the administration barely seems to recognize is that political activists do not live on policy accomplishments alone. Small donations, volunteer time, and even voting itself are undertaken primarily in exchange for psychological benefits. People engaged in the process want—need—to feel good about themselves for doing it.

My prescription to cure the malaise is Elizabeth Warren:

The presumptive choice is Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor whose work inspired the office’s creation. Her doubters inside and outside the administration raise a variety of objections, ranging from a lack of administrative experience to concern over whether she’d be a good “team player.” They also observe, correctly, that other candidates, like current Assistant Treasury Secretary Michael Barr, have a strong record on these issues and would do a good job. And so they would. But in terms of emotional impact, nothing will make a difference like Warren. As one attendee put it to me, “what a great signal it would send.” Tellingly, he’s an environmentalist. His work has, really, nothing to do with Warren or financial regulation. But he wants—and needs—a signal that the president cares about the people who’ve been fighting the good fight for years and may or may not continue doing so in the future.

Meanwhile, for the process-oriented among you, I do detect some momentum gathering behind Tom Udall’s constitutional option for curbing the filibuster in January of 2011, which if it happens would revive hope in the legislative arena.

The Lynching of Bobby Hall

Item nine million in the conservative racial cluelessness files comes from Jeffrey Lord and the American Spectator who insist that Shirley Sherrod was wrong to say that sheriff Claude Screws lynched her relative Bobby Hall. Lord cites the following evidence from the Screws v US Government case to insist that the Hall lynching tale is just more of the vast liberal media conspiracy to keep the right-wing down:

The arrest was made late at night at Hall’s home on a warrant charging Hall with theft of a tire. Hall, a young negro about thirty years of age, was handcuffed and taken by car to the courthouse. As Hall alighted from the car at the courthouse square, the three petitioners began beating him with their fists and with a solid-bar blackjack about eight inches long and weighing two pounds. They claimed Hall had reached for a gun and had used insulting language as he alighted from the car. But after Hall, still handcuffed, had been knocked to the ground, they continued to beat him from fifteen to thirty minutes until he was unconscious. Hall was then dragged feet first through the courthouse yard into the jail and thrown upon the floor, dying. An ambulance was called, and Hall was removed to a hospital, where he died within the hour and without regaining consciousness. There was evidence that Screws held a grudge against Hall, and had threatened to “get” him.

Lord’s article, which is quite extensive, seems to be based on the theory that being beaten to death by a mob on the courthouse steps with the complicity of local law enforcement doesn’t count as “lynching” because nobody was hung from a tree. But considering the length of his article on the matter, you’d think he might have looked up the term in question. To lynch is “to seize somebody believed to have committed a crime and put him or her to death immediately and without trial, usually by hanging.” Or perhaps “to put to death, esp. by hanging, by mob action and without legal authority.” Or maybe “to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction.”

If you read the anti-lynching section of the Truman administration’s landmark report on civil rights, “To Secure These Rights,” you’ll see that at no time did anyone think the purpose of federal anti-lynching legislation was to ensure that lynching victims were shot or beaten rather than hanged.

How to Fire Up the Helicopters

Bruce Bartlett despairs that nothing can be done to stimulate the economy, not even monetary policy:

I still believe that monetary policy requires fiscal expansion to be effective under current economic conditions. For example, those who advocate a monetary helicopter-drop of money to stimulate growth concede that the Fed doesn’t have the capacity to do it without some action by Treasury to distribute the funds, which would be fiscal in nature. It would also require congressional action that is very unlikely in the current political environment.

That basically leaves two things that the Fed can do: buy longer term securities and buy very unconventional assets such foreign currency denominated bonds. The first it has already done some of without doing much to get money circulating. The second would put the Fed at war with the Treasury, which jealously guards its dominion over exchange rate policy. It will also raise holy hell with the “strong dollar” crowd and undoubtedly invite foreign retaliation. It’s even possible that China could effectively sterilize the intervention by soaking up all the dollars created by the Fed.

I still think this is wrong. Timothy Geithner has already received appropriations to buy printer paper and toner cartridges for the Treasury Department. If Ben Bernanke is inclined to play along, there’s no bar stopping Geithner for literally firing up his word processor program and printing out pieces of paper that say “Take this to Ben Bernanke and he’ll give you $10,000.” Call such pieces of paper Geithnerbucks. Geithner can’t turn these Geithnerbucks into legal tender, but the Federal Reserve bank can decide to “buy very unconventional assets” such as pieces of paper printed out by Timothy Geithner. Such action, if undertaken at any substantial scale, would almost certainly cause people and businesses to become less inclined to hold cash and more inclined to trade their cash for some goods and/or services.

But the larger point I would make is that focusing on the precise microdynamics of Fed action is a mistake. What’s more important is how the Fed frames what it’s doing. If the Fed says it’s determined to push the price level up, and will keep trying things until it gets up to such-and-such a point then that will probably work. Conversely, if the Fed says it’s willing to intervene to prevent a total economic collapse but beyond that is determined to pursue a strategy of opportunistic disinflation then we won’t get robust recovery.

Too Many Secrets

I’m not sure much of what I’ve read thus far from the WikiLeaks document dump on Afghanistan has actually done a great deal to change my understanding of the war there. The Times is leading with the story that elements of Pakistani intelligence are supporting elements of the insurgency and the Guardian is emphasizing that coalition military operations have killed a lot of civilians, but I think most of us already knew both of those things. More broadly, the people most inclined to actually look at this material are going to be those of us who are already skeptical of the merits of long-term deep military engagement in Afghanistan. It is, however, a potent reminder that there’s far too much classification and secrecy in the United States government. This is actually underscored by the phrasing of National Security Advisor Jones’ condemnation of the leak:

The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents – the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted.

That’s supposed to be the standard. Information should be classified when making it publicly available would put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk. And maybe there’s something in this giant trove of documents that meets that standard. But surely Jones isn’t going to seriously maintain that every document in here meets that standard. This report on an orphanage with no orphans, for example, is clearly benign. Reading its explanation of why the orphanage is empty, however, does give the reading public a somewhat deeper understanding of the country of Afghanistan:

SOCIAL: The PRT visited the Gardez Orphanage to conduct an assessment and drop HA and toys to the center. There are currently no orphans at the facility due to the Holiday (note: orphans are defined has having no father, but may still have mother and a family structure that will have them home for holidays.) Governor ———— states that the Red Crescent fund raiser (donation tickets) for winter relief has begun in the Province and will be collecting funds to aid the unfortunate during severe winter weather.

That’s not a military secret that puts people’s lives at risk. It’s not a scandalous secret that needs to be covered up, either. It’s just a small data point that gives us some greater understanding of Afghan society but that’s being kept secret out of an obsessive and ultimately counterproductive obsession with controlling the flow of information.

The Right’s Muslim-Bashing

I’ve already written about the insanity of the campaign to prevent the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan, but Robert Wright’s piece on the matter goes deeper into the McCarthyite smear campaign the right wing is wages against the organizers, typically of their efforts to beat down any kind of political or cultural activities by American Muslims:

But if you think Rauf’s good intentions are going to keep him safe from the Weekly Standard, you underestimate that magazine’s creative powers. Its latest issue features an article about Park51 chock full of angles that never would have occurred to me if some magazine had asked me to write an assessment of the project’s ideological underpinnings. For example: Rauf’s wife, who often speaks in support of the project and during one talk reflected proudly on her Islamic heritage, “failed to mention another feature of her background: She is the niece of Dr. Farooq Khan, formerly a leader of the Westbury Mosque on Long Island, which is a center for Islamic radicals and links on its Web site to the paramilitary Islamic Circle of North America (I.C.N.A.), the front on American soil for the Pakistani jihadist Jamaat e-Islami.”

Got that? Rauf’s wife has an uncle who used to be “a leader” of a mosque that now has a Web site that links to the Web site of an allegedly radical organization. (I’ll get back to the claim that the Westbury Mosque is itself a “center for Islamic radicals.”)

Think about how insane that is. Think about all the people who are more closely related to you than your wife’s uncle is. There’s your wife. Your wife’s brothers and sisters. Your wife’s parents. Your own parents. Your aunts and uncles. Your grandparents. Your cousins. Your brothers and sisters. Unless your family is extremely odd this set of people is going to contain a wide range of political opinions. My grandparents were card-carrying members of the Communist Party for a good long while. What does that have to do with my current political views?

But Is The Pizza Any Good?

This sign at Netroots Nation rubbed this New Yorker’s sensibilities the wrong way:

I feel like it would be impossible to make a really giant pizza any good. What kind of oven could you cook it in?

Keynesian In Asia

David Pilling and Paul Krugman both write about the success of Keynesian fiscal policy in Asia where it’s been attempted on a massive scale and is working well.

The difference is that most of these Asian countries had accumulated large stockpiles of money or financial assets pre-crisis, which I think makes a big difference to a lot of people’s intuitions. I think it’s obvious to most people that a government shouldn’t just sit on a large pile of money amidst mass unemployment when it has the opportunity to spend the money putting the people to work. But the important thing to understand is that spending $1 billion is spending $1 billion and nothing magical happens when your “unsaving” turns into “borrowing.” In either case, the issue is that a government in a slump should try to find a way to mobilize real resources rather than letting everything stay idle. That normally takes money. But whether you get that money by borrowing it at super-low interest rates or by spending down accumulated surpluses or just by printing it up doesn’t make much of a difference. The issue is the real resources. Are you targeting resources that are genuinely idle? Are you mobilizing them to do something useful? The intuition that “the money has to come from somewhere” and thus that there’s a huge difference between spending what you’ve saved and borrowing what you don’t have is a mistake. Money is just money, it’s the people and raw materials and such that constitutes the actual constraint (or lack of constraint) on what you can do.

Credit Scores and Employment

Via Kevin Drum, a fascinating Slacktivist post about the growing tendency of HR departments to check the credit scores of potential employees apparently deeming this data to be an important predictor of employee behavior. This creates a Catch-22 scenario for the unemployed where you can’t improve your credit score unless you get a job and you can’t get a job until you improve your credit score.

Drum and the Slacktivist both call for making this illegal, and at first blush I’m inclined to agree. But at the same time I try to adhere to the principle I outlined here and resist the urge to call for regulating the business practices of private firms when the issue isn’t pollution or some other case where the externalities are clear. After all, it seems like either this credit check business is a sound business practice (in which case allowing it is making the economy more efficient and ultimately building a more prosperous tomorrow) or else it’s an unsound business practice (in which case competition should drive it out). But this really does seem fishy and I’m curious to read more on the subject.

Drugged Driving

There’s an interesting piece in the NYT about the growing problem of car crashed caused by drivers impaired by prescription drugs, an issue that poses a challenge for law enforcement because unlike with drunk driving there’s no broadly accepted legal definition. As I’ve said before, the whole phenomenon of people dying in automobile wrecks is an underdiscused risk to public safety and all too often one that’s framed as a matter of “accidents” ignoring the fact that reckless—and often illegal—driver conduct is normally responsible.

A Vast Conspiracy to Generate Blog Posts That Are Mildly Critical of the Obama Administration

The latest fake scandal arising out of JournoList is that when Jared Bernstein was at the Economic Policy Institute he was, like many other JList members, on the email list. Then he got an appointment as Joe Biden’s economic advisor and so he left. Then over a year after that, there was a White House meeting where Bernstein talked to several progressive writers including Yours Truly about the first anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Apparently the insidious nature of this double-dealing — a think tank policy expert offering his views to journalists, then becoming a government official, and then continuing to sometimes talk to the press — is so self-evident that it merits a sarcastic “Nothing to see here, move along.”

So for the record, I thought I would look up what kind of fawning coverage the administration earned from the Yglesias Blog in exchange for the February 2010 meeting. I got a post titled “White House Should Fill Open Federal Reserve Board Slots”

I asked Bernstein about something different, namely that given the importance of monetary policy it seems odd that the Obama administration hasn’t filled either of the vacancies on the Federal Reserve board. The answer I got wasn’t unexpected, but it wasn’t super-enlightening either. He said it was a good question but “it’s one I’d rather not comment on.”

So fair enough. But I’ll comment that we have an independent central bank in the United States, which is as it should be. But we also have a democracy in the United States. And the way that democracy works is that one of the important powers the President has is the ability to appoint members to the Fed board.

Collusion! Or, um, mild criticism! Which is just to say that if you want to know if a given blogger is shilling for the Obama administration the best way to figure it out is to read his blog and see what he says.

Literature Jeopardy

“[L]onger than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg.” Please give your answer in the form of a question.

Cosmopolitanism

In response to my assertion that “The United States was founded fairly explicitly on a set of liberal ideals—pragmatic egalitarian cosmopolitan individualism is the American creed and the progressive movement is largely about trying to make those ideals a reality,” commenter Brahma wrote: “This sounds like something that a libertarian snarler like Matt Welch or perhaps Will Wilkonson could have written it. Do progressives have to be ‘cosmopolitan?’”

Two levels of response. One is that while Will Wilkinson and I have very different judgments about important matters of public policy, in terms of very abstract ideas about values we do in fact have similar views. Second, of course I can’t force progressives to be cosmopolitan but I think cosmopolitanism is integral to the liberal worldview and that the best strands of thinking in the progressive coalition in contemporary America reflect that cosmopolitanism. But I should clarify that by “cosmopolitan” I mean on the level of values not on the level of lifestyles. A cosmopolitan politics is about taking seriously the idea that the welfare of Chinese people is as objectively important as the welfare of Americans. Cosmopolitan lifestyle is more about knowing where to find authentic Sichuan-style cooking. There’s a contingent empirical relationship between the two in that people with cosmopolitan lifestyles are personally comfortable with the “different” and thus perhaps more likely to understand the moral issues correctly, but it’s perfectly possible to enjoy travel and also be a nationalist troglodyte in your political views or to be a fairly parochial American who also (perhaps inspired by the strong cosmopolitan strand in Christianity) donates to international charities.

The American political tradition is, I think, a cosmopolitan one in a way you can see clearly expressed in our founding documents. We start by positing a set of universalistic principles and assert that the purpose of founding our state is to instantiate those principles in practice. Thus whatever nationalistic claims we make are supposed to follow from our success at implementing a cosmopolitan value system. In practice, of course, this often isn’t how it works at all—we have plenty of ugly nationalism in our history and more than our fair share of racism—but that is the formal structure of our basic rhetoric about ourselves.

Endgame

By Ryan McNeely

How I wish there were more than twenty-four hours in the day:

– You might as well face it: they’re addicted to Bush.

– How the GOP could kill health care reform without repealing it.

– Swearing to uphold the Constitution while advocating secession? And when is impeachment going to be taken “off the table”?

– Ezra Klein’s excellent interview with Kent Conrad.

– “Breitbart lied about Shirley Sherrod. Now he’s lying about the NAACP.”

– Unsurprisingly, there are problems with some military commission convictions.

– Barney Frank and Felix Salmon now back Elizabeth Warren for CFPB.

– James Clyburn pokes fun at the Vice-President.

In honor of Netroots Nation, Viva Las Vegas.

Climate Counterfactuals

Brad Plumer has a nice post about climate change counterfactual scenarios asking various “what ifs” and wondering whether they could have led to a bill.

I’ve been interested in various aspects of counterfactual since college when I read Niall Ferguson’s excellent book Virtual History, studied David Lewis’ work on the metaphysics of counterfactuals, and did a philosophy of history class with Robert Nozick. To make a long story short, the upshot of that kind of analysis is that it really depends how you specify your counterfactual. If you want to ask “would a McCain administration have led to a better outcome for climate legislation,” in other words, you need to ask yourself “why in this scenario would McCain have won the election?” After all, it’s very hard to imagine a scenario in which the 2008 congressional elections come out the exact same way but Barack Obama somehow loses. In the real world, the same dynamics that powered Obama to victory also drove the election of Kay Hagan and Tom Perriello and Mark Begich and any number of other downballot candidates. A scenario in which Democrats win landslide congressional victories but Obama loses would have to entail something pretty odd happening and the precise nature of what that is would have a big impact on subsequent events.

Something similar happens when you ask about “what if climate had gone before energy.” During 2007 and 2008 both Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama fairly strongly signalled personal preferences for energy reform as a higher priority than health reform, I judgment that I also share. But Obama reversed course on this for reasons having to do with the different status of the issues inside the progressive political coalition. So there’s a difference between asking “would the outcome have been different if the underlying coalition dynamics that drove Obama’s choice had been different” (plausibly yes) and asking “would the outcome have been different if Obama made an idiosyncratic effort to swim against the tide of coalition dynamics” (almost certainly not).

The best-specified counterfactual I can think of that leads to a more successful outcome actually has nothing to do with the specific political dynamics of the climate debate. That would be something like “what if decisive Federal Reserve action had led to substantially more robust economic growth in the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010?” Had that happened, public opinion on Barack Obama and all Obama-related policy proposals would be more positive. What’s more, narrative about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would be much more positive. So GOP rejectionism on the Affordable Care Act would have been a tactical failure and rejectionism on ARRA would have been a strategic failure, and you’d see many more voices from within the conservative coalition urging people to adopt a more cooperative stance to shed the “party of ‘no’” stance.

That’s my view. Which is in part a long-winded way of saying that I’m detecting at Netroots Nation a self-critical vibe within the green community that I don’t really think is justified. In terms of what political advocacy organizations can be reasonably expected to achieve, the climate change groups have been extremely effective. But a whole set of other problems related to the economy have dragged their program down. Much the same could be said about immigration reform, which has also been the victim of a political dynamic that’s extrinsic to the immigration issue silo.

The association of progressive reform with the Great Depression sometimes confuses people about this, but if you look at the timeline correctly you’ll see that even though the 1933-37 period was “part of” the Depression it was actually a period of extremely rapid economic growth following four years of epic collapse and preceding a secondary recession. That “everything was terrible and then FDR came in and conditions improved rapidly” dynamic was highly supportive of the president’s legislative agenda.