Matt Yglesias

Endgame

Pour qui tu dansais pendant ta vie sans moi?

— Big legislative win on crack/powder sentencing disparities.

— Big win on Arizona immigration law.

— Masjid Manhattan has been near Ground Zero since before the World Trade Center was even completed.

— Improve the CLASS Act, don’t scrap it.

— The real problem with “gifted” programs.

— Robert Gates takes a dark view of scouting.

— John Thune and Greta Van Susteren don’t understand what a 10 percent annual reduction means.

Stereo Total, “Je Rêve Encore de Toi”.

The Perils of Overtreatment

Scare stories from Sarah Palin and Chuck Grassley about “death panels” didn’t succeed in derailing efforts to expand health insurance coverage, but they did help the health insurance industry shield its conduct from some much-needed scrutiny. Two recent posts, one from Igor Volsky discussing doctors’ tendency to prescribe useless aggressive treatment options for men with low-risk prostate cancer and one from Ezra Klein citing Atul Gawande on making terminally ill patients miserable with dignity-sapping extraordinary measures.

This is all bad stuff and not primarily because it “costs money.” Rather, it costs people quality of life. People have better things to do with their time than undergoing painful cancer treatments that they don’t need. Gawande writes of a study “showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions” and also “six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression.” I don’t think there’s anyone out there who’s terminally ill and saying to himself “I want to handle this in the way most likely to produced major depression for my loved ones” but that’s what happens and it’s horrible.

Unfortunately, even post-reform our health care policies are going to skew incentives in favor of too-little preventive care and too much end-of-life care as well as too much health care and not enough healthy living. But we are slowly making progress.

Loopy Hits

I was talking about this earlier today while recording a BHTV episode with Ross Douthat, but I think it’s genuinely too bad that so much of the right-wing’s energy is dedicated to idiotic made-up stuff. There’s presumably some insidious goings-on inside anything as enormous as the United States government and people need to look into that, and the ideological adversaries of the incumbent administration are logical candidates. Instead we’ve got:

— Andrew Breitbart discovers Dixiecrats: “Tea Party demand: Will the Democratic Party condemn its racist KKK roots on national TV?”

— Jim Lindgren exposes the totalitarian implications of Michelle Obama’s birthday email about her husband.

— The Weekly Standard exposes . . . something unclear about John Podesta’s not-at-all secret support for UFO disclosure.

— Newt Gingrich battles a made-up looming sharia takeover of Minnesota.

That’s just stuff I came across today, none of it written by Andy McCarthy or Jonah Goldberg!

Recession-Response Has Worked

Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder have an intellectually ambitious effort (PDF) to quantify the impact of the various recession-response measures undertaken by George W Bush, Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, and the US congress. Their conclusion is that the total impact was substantial:

We find that its effects on real GDP, jobs, and inflation are huge, and probably averted what could have been called Great Depression 2.0. For example, we estimate that, without the government’s response, GDP in 2010 would be about 6.5% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8.5 million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.

Annie Lowrey observes that “that the stimulus — the $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act — had less impact and proved less important than the government’s monetary policy and financial-market stabilization measures, like the Fed buy-up of mortgage-backed securities.” And this isn’t because ARRA didn’t work: “the fiscal stimulus alone appear very substantial, raising 2010 real GDP by about 2%, holding the unemployment rate about 1.5 percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls.”

I think this is important, because with fiscal policy politically off the table I think it’s important for progressives to get more engaged on all the other levers the government has—including just talking differently—to get output closer to its potential.

Filibuster Reform Is a Question of “When” Not “If”

Megan McArdle thinks the likes of me should think twice about filibuster reform: “[Democrats] risk empowering a Republican Senate majority — if not in 2010 (which I think is very unlikely) then in 2012.”

I really wish people would stop treating this kind of consideration as a knock-down refutation of the case for reform. I really and truly think it would be better to let the Senate vote by majority rules. That’s what I thought in 2005, it’s what I think in 2010, and it’s what I’ll think in 2015.

But anyone who is holding out on reform out of fear of empowering future Republican majorities should consider that for all the reasons Democrats will have the chance to change the rules in January 2011, Republicans will be able to change the rules in 2013 or 2015 or whenever else. The only reason filibustering has been allowed for as long as it has has been because of strong norms against its over-use. But those norms have been eroding for decades. The idea that Senate majorities are going to allow this trend to continue indefinitely is silly. The way this movie goes is that the downward spiral of obstruction continues until some majority gets sick of it and changes the rules. The question is when will the rules change not will they be changed.

Meanwhile, here’s a good one. Harry Reid seems to have the votes to pass an important reform to the school lunch program, but it may not survive efforts to chew up floor time: “Last night, he began the process of finally bringing the bill up for passage in the Senate. Unfortunately, the GOP seems intent on requiring full votes for every intermediate legislative step — and there are many, so each one can take days.”

Less Traffic = Fewer Traffic Deaths

(cc photo by CodeHooligans 1)

Ken Archer flags the CDC’s self-description of how to improve public health by reducing traffic fatalities:

CDC’s research and prevention efforts target this serious public health problem. We focus on improving car and booster seat and seat belt use and reducing impaired driving, and helping groups at risk: child passengers, teen drivers, and older adult drivers.

As Archer says, this seems to miss the fact that driving in a car itself is a major risk factor. If you drive to work every day and live 12 miles from your office, your odds of dying in a car wreck are dramatically lower than those of someone who lives 25 miles from his office. If you ride a train or a bus to work or if you walk, it’s even lower. It’s not necessarily the CDC’s job to take these issues on, but it’s important for people to recognize that not only are traffic crashes the leading cause of death for Americans under 35 but their incidence is directly related to land-use policies.

The Not-So-Scammy Interchange Fee Scam

When the great Credit Card Interchange Fee Debate began, I said I was generally skeptical of the idea of purely economic regulation (as opposed to regulation aimed at public safety or environmental hazards). Kevin Drum followed up yesterday with a post on “The Great Interchange Fee Scam” which cites a Boston Fed paper (PDF) that provides the following distributive analysis:

On average, each cash-using household pays $151 to card-using households and each card-using household receives $1,482 from cash users every year. Because credit card spending and rewards are positively correlated with household income, the payment instrument transfer also induces a regressive transfer from low-income to high-income households in general. On average, and after accounting for rewards paid to households by banks, the lowest-income household ($20,000 or less annually) pays $23 and the highest-income household ($150,000 or more annually) receives $756 every year.

Once you keep in mind the fact that the median household income in 2008 was slightly above $52,000 it’s not at all obvious to me that this is any kind of scam. Instead, it appears to be a classic positive sum business interaction. Credit card companies use interchange fees to cut into retailers’ monopoly rents and then rebate a share of the fee to consumers via reward programs, and on net consumers benefit and the median household appears to benefit.

This is precisely the sort of dynamic that makes me suspicious of economic regulation. Retailers seem to end up losing here in a very clear-cut way. And I bet if you ask the average credit card user “do you benefit from high credit card interchange fees” he’s going to think that he doesn’t, even though according to the Boston Fed report he clearly does (the adverse impact on the poor stems from their propensity for paying in cash). Thus retailers, under cover of a populist campaign against evil banks, can persuade politicians to enact rules that help them preserve their monopoly rents. Unless, that is, we maintain a strong presumption against this sort of regulatory second-guessing of whether business model innovation is welfare-enhancing.

Now it’s true that in this particular case my conscience is pricked by the fact that poor consumers end up losing out. At the same time, do we really think it’s feasible to conduct distributive analysis of every new business model and only accept the ones that are beneficial to poor consumers? Wouldn’t it be easier and more workable to have higher taxes and more and better public services? What’s more, doesn’t it make more sense to try to focus on issues that unite the interests of the poor and the middle class against the rich rather than ones that seem to divide us so evenly and could plausibly be even more broadly beneficial in the future as credit card usage spreads?

I’m not going to weep for days if we wind up with a regulatory crackdown on this front, but it strikes me as primarily the sort of business versus business dispute that we should stay out of.

The Muslim Dead

On a non-jokey note regarding Newt Gingrich’s proposed Lower Manhattan Mosque Exclusion Zone, a correspondent writes “there were at least 12 people of Bangladeshi origin who died during the 9/11 attack in New York, and most of them were Muslim U.S. citizens.” It’s also worth observing that there’s a small-but-non-trivial decades-old Muslim-American community in Lower Manhattan that today most obviously manifests itself in the strip of “Indian” restaurants on 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues that are, in fact, generally owned by Bangladeshi Muslims. All in all, it seems that around 60 of the victims were Muslims.

Capital Market Innovation

Andrew Wiseman reports on the latest food cart concept:

Now, though, there’s one you can literally help bring to the street: Purveyors of Rolling Cuisine (PORC) is a nascent pork-based cart looking for funding. Instead of getting some investors or asking Mom and Dad, they’re doing it the crowd-sourcing way, using a website called Kickstarter where people pledge money. In return, donators get freebies, like meals, shirts, and charitable donations.

It’s sort of like PBS, but for pork.

When I first read that, I thought this was an innovative way for entrepreneurs to do some disintermediation of the banking system. But I clicked through and saw that this is literally like PBS, you’re just giving them money in a way that guarantees losses. A $25 donation gets you “two complimentary meals (entree and drink) from the truck,” a much less than $25 value. I don’t really understand why you would do this when you could give your money to an actual charity.

This is all too bad, because I think the idea of trying to run this as a real investment is a promising strategy for projects like this one that don’t need much capital. Right now a one-year CD has a pathetic 1.34 percent yield. If some cartrepreneurs offered a bit more than that (1.45 percent, say) I bet they could raise the $30,000 from cart-loving yuppies who just want to be part of something new.

Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic of American Education-Related Social Stratification

Peter Beinart, like all good heterodox liberals, thinks we should curb race-based affirmative action in college admissions in favor of something more focused on class. I’m open to this idea, though I’d like to see a specific proposal rather than a vague suggestion. But every time I hear this debate I have to wonder why we’re having it. The presumption that you can solve any significant problem of social justice in America by fiddling with Ivy League admissions policies is dead wrong, as is the idea that the main challenge poor people of any race face education-wise is that they might not get into an elite college.

Your application to Yale Law School is not a real social problem (cc photo by Marc Smith)

People who are plausible admission candidates at Harvard and don’t quite make the cut end up at Columbia or Penn. People who don’t get into Berkeley go to UCLA. And they all end up fine. There’s just absolutely no need to cry for someone who got into Bryn Mawr instead of Wellesley thanks to affirmative action or legacy preference or structural bias in the SAT or anything else. This is a made-up social problem. Every single American teenager who winds up at a selective college of any kind is in very good shape in a country where (a) most people don’t have college degrees and (b) most colleges aren’t selective.

If you were to start writing a list of the problems faced by poor people in the United States of America you’d run out of paper long before you got to elite university admissions policies. Poor kids start school already behind their higher-SES peers. They are then disproportionately concentrated in low-performing schools featuring ineffective teachers. And when they’re in school is the lucky time! Every summer, the schools shut down and poor kids fall further behind their middle class peers. If they depend on the school lunch program to feed them, well then they’re out of luck come summertime on the eating front as well as the schooling front. A very substantial proportion of kids from poor families drop of out of highschool and those who do manage to get into any kind of college at all have much-reduced odds of actually graduating.

These are complicated, multi-faceted problems but they just have nothing to do with the admissions policies at fancy colleges. Even our program designed to funnel federal money to poor kids’ schools is a poorly targeted mess. But if you want to talk fancy schools and social class in America the thing to say is that massive social pressure should be brought to bear on rich people to stop donating money to fancy colleges and start giving it to either effective charter schools or else non-fancy non-selective colleges with a proven record of helping kids from low-SES backgrounds succeed.

The Filibuster Fans

There’s a growing level of interest in the Senate in reforming the filibuster via Tom Udall’s 51-vote constitutional option but it should come as no surprise that many Senate Democrats would rather stick with the status quo even thought that means it will be 100 percent impossible to deliver on any progressive agenda items.

The article cites Dianne Feinstein, Daniel Akaka, Russ Feingold, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, and Jay Rockefeller as definite reform skeptics. I assume, however, that this is merely the leading edge of opposition to reform. People really need to press their Senators on this, however. Several of these people say they support action to curb climate change. That can’t happen without filibuster reform. Several say they support comprehensive immigration reform. That can’t happen without filibuster reform. Several say they support a public option. That can’t happen without filibuster reform. Senators who are happy with the status quo—who think our current approach to energy and immigration and gay rights and all the rest is fine and shouldn’t be changed—should support the filibuster. But people who want you to believe that they support substantial policy reform need to explain how they envision that happening.

Priorities

Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan

People who believe that the war in Afghanistan is important to the long-term interests of the United States of America are absolutely, unequivocally correct to vote to spend tens of billions of dollars on it notwithstanding the adverse impact that has on the deficit. I think we should be clear about that. If you think this war is important, then you should blow up the deficit to get the job done. Under current circumstances, it would be completely insane for the government to not do something important simply because of the deficit. Situations can arise when the deficit should be considered an independent consideration that’s given weight, but that time is not today.

So rather than note the hypocrisy of the several hundred House deficit-whiners who voted yesterday for a deficit-ballooning war appropriation it’s worth just worth dwelling on what counts as a priority for the United States of America today. Is Afghanistan important? Sure. Does it matter? Sure. Is the performance of a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Khost Province more important to the long-term interests of American citizens than the performance of the Riverside County Public Schools? I don’t think so. Are American efforts in Afghanistan achieving some humanitarian purposes? Sure. Is building a T.G.I. Friday’s at Kandahar Air Base a better way of undertaking a humanitarian mission than increasing appropriations to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria? It’s almost silly to even ask the question.

From a Keynesian standpoint, I believe that with the economy depressed it’s better to spend the money in Afghanistan than not to spend it. But it’s kind of nuts that at a time when we “can’t afford” to do all kinds of things, this is what we can afford.

Land Use and Real Estate Bubbles

A very basic model of the economy would suggest that the overall price of real estate should stay very flat over time. Land should get more expensive as more people try to live in a particular metro area since building more land, though possible, is difficult to undertake. But you can always just build taller buildings. And since buildings are built out of a wide array of materials, the price of construction tends over the long term to converge to the overall price level. That’s not to say real estate prices should never rise, but just to say that increases should be temporary. Neighborhood A gets pricey, so people start building taller buildings there, which causes prices to fall. Supply and demand, equilibrium, etc.

In the real world, however, we see two things. One is development restrictions. Lots of them. The other is price bubbles. Lots of them. Is there a link? Intuitively, the argument seems clear. Thanks to development restrictions, it really is possible for real estate prices in a given area to reach a semi-permanent new plateau. As the DC Metropolitan Area has grown, houses in nearby and pleasant Arlington County, VA have gotten more and more expensive since outside of a couple of corridors it’s not allowed to build denser. This sort of phenomenon becomes the grain of truth on which speculative dreams are hung.

Now Via Adam Ozimek comes some empirical research from Haifang Huang and Yao Tang (PDF) “Residential Land Use Regulation and the US Housing Price Cycle Between 2000 and 2009″

In a sample covering more than 300 cities in the US between January 2000 and July 2009, we find that more restrictive residential land use regulations and geographic land constraints are linked to larger booms and busts in housing prices. The natural and man-made constraints also amplify price responses to an initial positive mortgage-credit supply shock, leading to greater price increases in the boom and subsequently bigger losses.

Consider this another reason to believe that we need to think harder about our regulation of land in this country. Some land-use restrictions—those that aim to preserve undeveloped natural land—have a clear environmental rationale that should be weighed against the economic cost. But most land-use restrictions don’t prevent development, they just force it to be inefficiently low-intensity. Such laws are bad for the environment, chewing up space and wasting energy, as well as economically harmful.

Performance, Not “Size” Is What Matters

Guy Molyneux, Ruy Teixeira, and John Whaley describe some new survey research related to CAP’s “Doing What Works” initiative:

Public confidence in government is at an all-time low, according to a major new survey commissioned by the Center for American Progress. And yet clear majorities of Americans of all ages want and expect more federal involvement in priority areas such as energy, poverty, and education, the poll found.

The key lesson embedded in these seemingly paradoxical results: Americans want a federal government that is better, not smaller. CAP’s new research shows people would rather improve government performance than reduce its size. And they are extremely receptive to reform efforts that would eliminate inefficient government programs, implement performance-based policy decisions, and adopt modern management methods and information technologies.

I don’t really find this all that paradoxical. I’ve heard plenty of people complain about long lines at the DMV, but I’ve never heard anyone say “it’s too bad 9 year-olds can’t drive legally.” What’s interesting is that public intuition on this point appears to track serious research—high quality government is strongly correlated with economic prosperity whereas “big” or “small” government are not. In other words, size doesn’t matter nearly so much as what you do with it.

Unfortunately, political obsession with the budget deficit tends to lead to a myopic focus on the budgetary cost of this or that rather than the social cost, which is much more important. Another problem is that the political forces in this country who are most attuned to problems with the functioning of government programs seem to have little interest in actually improving them. Instead you get this odd “MMS isn’t doing its job right and therefore we shouldn’t try” attitude that I find very frustrating.

Endgame

Get up and shake the glitter off your clothes now:

— Center for Japanese Studies located perilously close to Pearl Harbor.

— Temecula, California also too close to Ground Zero to have a mosque.

— Heritage’s Brian Reidl explains the logic of the individual mandate.

— Wikileaks documents show Turkish militants in Afghanistan.

— Wikileaks documents show US-funding propaganda efforts under rubric of “provincial reconstruction.”

— Fired from The Washington Post Company’s Washington Post unit, Dave Weigel has now been hired by the Washington Post Company’s Slate unit.

— Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney report on the bleak economic outlook for Nevada.

A cheesy Vegas song I like better than Cheryl Crow’s—Katy Perry, “Waking Up in Vegas”.

Filibuster and the Super-Judiciary

The United States of America had a longstanding rule banning corporate funding of political campaigns. The purposes of this law were worthy, and in practice I don’t think it was doing much harm, but the conservative justices who overturned it on free speech grounds had some non-absurd objections to the old rule. The DISCLOSE Act, which would have required corporations (including both businesses in the conventional sense and also a wide array of nonprofits) to identify themselves when they sponsor political ads and in some cases to reveal donors, was a good solution to this. It’s a way of achieving the former rule’s goal of preventing wealthy business executives from exerting even more influence over the political process while meeting the Court’s constitutional concerns.

I’m not a huge fan of strong judicial review systems such as the one we have in the United States, but all systems of judicial review are built around the possibility of this kind of productive interplay between judicial and legislative branches. Except there’s a problem here—thanks to a filibuster mounted by 41 Senators (John Cohn notes the special hypocrisy of Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Scott Brown, and John McCain) the new bill can’t go forward even though it has majority support in two branches of congress and the White House.

This is one of the under-discussed consequences of filibuster-induced legislative paralysis. In ordinary times, the judiciary’s ability to remake policy is typically pretty constrained. This is especially true of judges’ role in statutory interpretation. It’s not that judges don’t play a big role, but whenever judges act against a clear consensus among elected officials, they find themselves de facto overruled by congress’ ability to pass new laws. Thanks to routine filibustering, however, the balance of power shifts in and John Roberts plus 41 Senators can prevail against the entire rest of the political system.

Irresponsible Speculation About Public Opinion Dynamics

Via Paul Waldmann, a cool Pew chart that, among other things, actually offers some fairly persuasive evidence for the much-lamented-by-me Center-Right Nation Hypothesis:

One interesting thing here is that most self-identified Democrats are very happy with the Democratic Party, which is not the impression you would get from reading blogs where folks like me who are to the left of Democratic Party politicians are regularly castigated as crypto-conservatives. The other is simply that people disagree about where the Democrats stand, but everyone sees Republicans and the “tea party movement” about the same.

Now on to the irresponsible speculation. Looking at this chart, I wonder if Republican politicians are benefitting from a psychological anchor phenomenon around the fact that the media has adopted the conceit that there’s something called the “tea party movement” that’s distinct from the conservative base of the Republican Party. Voters seem to see themselves as about equidistant between Democrats and Tea Parties, which means they’re closer to Republicans than to Democrats. But it’s hard for me to think of important policy disputes between, say, John Boehner & Paul Ryan and tea party leaders.

Someone told me at Netroots Nation that in her opinion the group she works for had made a mistake in not diverting some funding away from HCAN and toward single-payer groups precisely in order to create this sort of anchor.

Excessive Demand for Money

I think a lot of the commentary and analysis of high corporate profits amidst weak hiring is kind of missing the picture:

Many companies are focusing on cost-cutting to keep profits growing, but the benefits are mostly going to shareholders instead of the broader economy, as management conserves cash rather than bolstering hiring and production. Harley[-Davidson], for example, has announced plans to cut 1,400 to 1,600 more jobs by the end of next year. That is on top of 2,000 job cuts last year — more than a fifth of its work force. [...]

“Because of high unemployment, management is using its leverage to get more hours out of workers,” said Robert C. Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the former president of Fidelity Investments. “What’s worrisome is that American business has gotten used to being a lot leaner, and it could take a while before they start hiring again.”

It’s important to think harder about this. What would it mean for benefits to flow to shareholders rather than to the broader economy? Suppose Harley-Davidson increases profitability by laying off workers, then rebates the extra profits to shareholders as dividends thus benefitting them. Well then they’re going to take their money and buy some stuff with it. Maybe Harley-Davidson shareholders want to get their kitchens redone or they want to go visit Miami or whatever. This is the whole reason economic growth works—distributive issues matter, but economic interactions aren’t zero-sum and when some people are getting more prosperous the benefits of that prosperity normally flow around a bit. As an alternative to giving money back to shareholders, a profitable motorcycle firm that doesn’t want to expand its own capacity could always save it in a way that finances some other firm’s investment. Indeed, this is what the financial system is for.

But when you look at the economy as a whole, you see that this circulation of funds into either consumption or business investment isn’t happening. Just looking at one firm (increasing productivity, flat market) and then generalizing doesn’t tell you the whole story. The issue, system-wide, is that there’s a huge amount of demand for cash and other very safe, very liquid instruments. As a result of this cash shortage, there’s a glut of nearly everything else and that’s leaving many potentially productive resources idle. The Federal Reserve could almost certainly solve this by pushing up inflation expectations which would reduce the demand for cash and therefore increase the demand for things that aren’t cash. But its leadership doesn’t seem to want to do this, perhaps because it’s still pursuing a strategy of opportunistic disinflation.

Newt Gingrich Clarifies Thoughts on Mosque Exclusion Zone, Questions Remain

Ever since Newt Gingrich took the position that it should be impermissible to build a mosque “near ground zero” because that’s how they would handle this in Saudi Arabia, I’ve been wondering how big the Mosque Exclusion Zone is supposed to be. All of Manhattan? The whole of New York City?

According to Eric Kleefeld, Gingrich clarified his thinking somewhat last night on Greta Van Susteren’s show indicating that the northern boundary of the Exclusion Zone lies somewhere south of 59th Street:

“You know, there are over a hundred mosques in New York City. I favor religious freedom,” said Gingrich. “I’m quite happy if they’d come in and said, ‘We want to build a community center near Central Park, we’d like to build a community center near Columbia University.’ But they didn’t. They said right at the edge of a place where, let’s be clear, thousands of Americans were killed in an attack by radical Islamists.”

So the zone is clearly meant to mark out some kind of specific element of lower Manhattan. My recollection of the actual events of 9/11 were that the National Guard set up barricades along 14th Street (inconvenient for my 12th Street-based family) that people weren’t allowed to cross except for a one-time opportunity for folks to get to their houses. So maybe in honor of the day, we should say no mosques south of 14th Street since, after all, the good people of Greenwich Village, SoHo, etc. are well-known fans of Gingrich, Palin, and their brand of xenophobic militarism.

Hispanics, Like People, Cooling on Obama

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

By Ryan McNeely

There’s an annoying tendency in much of the reporting on poll results to ignore any sort of context or comparison, often in service of a narrative that is belied by the actual poll. From NPR we have “Hispanics: Cooling on Obama,” and the article details legitimate reasons why Hispanics might be upset with the President, including the lack of action on immigration reform and the disproportionate impact the recession is having on vulnerable communities. It then cites a poll about the President not “adequately addressing the needs” of Hispanics and says of the results: “Obama gets only lukewarm ratings on issues important to Hispanics — and that could bode poorly for the president and his party.”

Five paragraphs into the article you finally get the job approval number: “Still, 57 percent of Hispanics approve of the president’s overall job performance compared with 44 percent among the general population in the latest AP national polling.” This is held up against the 2008 election results, where Obama won 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. So, there has been some cooling! But, according to the poll results in the very same article, the cooling among the general public is almost exactly the same (53% of the vote down to 44% approval). So, in essence, Hispanics are like everyone else.

Then there’s the bizarre refusal of some journalists to internalize the fact that electoral politics (unlike policy) is zero-sum in the two-party system. If Obama’s “down,” Republicans have to be “up,” or the narrative falls apart. Further down in the article, we see that “[w]ith the first midterm congressional elections of Obama’s presidency in three months, the poll shows a whopping 50 percent of Hispanic citizens call themselves Democrats, while just 15 percent say they are Republicans.” Run for the hills! In fact, the only way for these issues to not manifest themselves in a zero-sum fashion is if someone like Tom Tancredo runs a third-party campaign in Colorado because the Republican party is insufficiently nativist.

Finally, there’s the odd tendency to ignore basic probability theory. The poll finds that “two years after witnessing Hillary Rodham Clinton’s White House bid, Hispanics are twice as likely to expect to see a woman than a fellow Hispanic become president.” The implication is that this shows a demoralized Hispanic community that is sadly bearish on the prospects of a Hispanic president. Actually, since Hispanics make up about 15% of the U.S. population while women are a majority, if you chose a person at random to become president it’s actually over three times as likely you’d pick a woman than a Hispanic person. So Hispanics are actually oddly optimistic about the prospect of a Hispanic president.

Bush Tax Cuts: Where Was the Growth?

I say kudos to Erick Erickson for not simply relying on lazy anti-tax rhetoric and actually attempting to delve in and make the case that the Bush administration’s tax policies led to; good macroeconomic outcomes. Unfortunately, this kind of analysis doesn’t tell you very much: “More crucially, after the 2001 initial tax cuts, the annual growth rate went from 0.3% in 2001 to 2.5% in 2002. By 2004, GDP growth was the highest in 20 years.”

It’s true, Bush took office at the tail of a recession and then the recession ended and the economy was growing. But as my colleague Michael Ettlinger and EPI’s John Irons detailed in their excellent September 2008 paper “Take a Walk on the Supply Side” if you compare the Bush era to the relatively high tax Clinton era it looks quite bad:

One frequent thing to do is to measure economic activity from business cycle peak to business cycle peak. And we see that the era during which Bush’s tax policies prevailed was the first in which median household income declined:

In essence, we’re looking at the worst peak-to-peak economic performance ever, followed immediately by the worst recession since World War II.

The Information Flow

Probably the least-obvious victim of routine over-classification of military information is the person best-positioned to actually do something about it—the President of the United States. After all, one of the most powerful informal checks on any president’s powers as commander in chief is the institutional military bureaucracy’s control of the flow of information up the chain of command. Each actor in the system has an incentive to offer a relatively rosy account of whatever it is he’s up to, and the compounding effect of this phenomenon can distort the view of the ultimate decision-makers. This is a problem all large organizations face, but the United States government is the largest organization in the world and especially prone to these kind of issues.

The media is one potential mitigating factor. When something important ends up in The New York Times or on MSNBC a whole different group of people in the administration find out about it, who face a different set of job incentives and may well bring it to the president’s attention. I’ve heard specific, though unverified, stories about solid reporting from Afghanistan making waves inside the Obama White House in terms of policy substance as well as political messaging.

Upon assuming office, presidents tend to adopt monarch-derived metaphysical theories that involve a unitary state apparatus that they themselves personify. Thus incumbent administrations are traditionally friendly to secrecy in a manner that goes beyond their obligation to uphold the law by prosecuting violators of existing statutes. The reality, however, is that real administrations are made up of human decision-makers with limited time and attention and who are better able to do their own jobs in a world where information flows relatively freely.

In Defense of Congress

By Ryan McNeely

In the course of discussing Netroots Nation straw poll results that show very high favorables for Barack Obama, Jamelle Bouie hits on a strange blind spot of the progressive base:

While I’m sure there was plenty of disappointment over the lack of a public option in the Affordable Care Act, for example, I don’t think anyone challenged the notion that passing health care is a defining achievement for the administration. By contrast, I’m sure that if you were to ask Netroots Nation attendees to give their opinion on the Senate, you would get abysmally low numbers.

The problem is, Congress is actually the institution that “passed” health care reform. Let’s be clear: the Obama health care strategy was explicitly “hands-off,” which left the details to be worked out on Capitol Hill. Now, this strategy worked, unlike the HillaryCare White House central-command strategy of the ‘90’s. So the administration’s strategy has been vindicated. But to be consistent, if Congress is to be blamed when progressive policy can’t see the light of day, then it must be credited when good policy does get though – and in total, health care reform was good policy.

Taliban vs Afghan Security Forces Compensation Structure

Spencer Ackerman offers some WikiLeaks-inspired reporting and analysis of Taliban vs official Afghan security forces payscales:

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Hylton, a spokesman for the NATO mission to train the Afghan security forces, says that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. His information is that the Taliban pays about $10 per day for fighters — presumably that’s where McChrystal’s $300 monthly figure came from. But that’s allegedly not year-round: the Taliban, according to NATO, don’t pay when they’re not fighting, while the Afghan security forces budget for a full twelve months. Plus, if a soldier or policeman is in a “hazardous zone,” Hylton says, he gets an additional $75.

But that means our green soldier or cop working in Taliban country while the insurgents keep the heat on him is raking in… $240. He might be forgiven for asking himself why he should risk his life for $60 per month less than what his neighbor makes from the Taliban, even if the Taliban won’t pay him when they don’t need him. (Is that what passes for flex time in Kandahar?) And that’s without a big bribe offer to walk off the job.

At a minimum, the Taliban’s preferred means of paying soldiers seems likely to reduce the absenteeism that appears to be a big problem in the official security forces. In general, I feel like I read way too little reporting and analysis on the issue of what, exactly, is it that makes it hard for the NATO-backed government to assemble security forces that meet the “better than the Taliban” standard. This is the core of our mission, and NATO-backed forces should have access to wildly more resources than the Taliban. When you hear that the Taliban gets support from Pakistan, for example, you should recall that Pakistan’s entire GDP is substantially smaller than the US defense budget.

Breitbart-Hyping Media Calls for Legal Sanctions Against Bloggers to Solve Problem of Their Own Creation

Andrew Breitbart isn’t really what I’d call a blogger and he’s certainly not anonymous. He does like to lie about things, including with deliberately misleading videos. One particularly misleading video targeted a woman named Shirley Sherrod, created a firestorm on cable news, and led to her wrongful termination from a job at the United States Department of Agriculture. Naturally, the stars at CNN think the moral here is that bloggers should be sent to jail:

“There are so many great things that the internet does and has to offer, but at the same time, Kyra, as you know, there is this dark side,” Roberts said. “Imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t taken a look at what happened with Shirley Sherrod and plumbed the depths further and found out that what had been posted on the internet was not in fact reflective of what she said.”

But Phillips replied that the mainstream media “can’t always do that.”

“There’s going to have be a point in time where these people have to be held accountable,” Phillips said. “How about all these bloggers that blog anonymously? They say rotten things about people and they’re actually given credibility, which is crazy. They’re a bunch of cowards, they’re just people seeking attention.”

The whole reason you might think anonymous bloggers would be a problem is that they could make stuff up and nobody would know who they were in order to sanction them. In this case, though, there’s nothing anonymous about Andrew Breitbart so this problem shouldn’t exist. Except instead of sanctioning Andrew Breitbart, a specific individual with a specific name, and the other specific institutions (who employ specific individuals with names) CNN’s team is lashing out vaguely at “the internet” and “anonymous bloggers.” The issue here, however, is primarily Andrew Breitbart. To a secondary extent, it’s Fox News and conservative talk radio. And to a broader extent it’s a conservative movement that continues to celebrate Breitbart and Fox News despite their legacy of inaccuracy and race-baiting. Anonymous bloggers have nothing to do with anything.