Adventures in Hyper-Local Governance
Brooks Butler Hays had a smart take on the recent tussle between popular Bloomingdale cafe Big Bear’s problems with the local Advisor Neighborhood Commission which highlights some governance issues of much broader relevance:
One question that arises from the flames: how can such a popular business that has faithfully served the community for several years – in an area that has a dismally minuscule number of retail and restaurant options – be so angrily opposed by residents? Big Bear Cafe was even granted the Mayor’s 2009 Environment Excellence award. Granted, that sounds like a meaningless certificate a third grade teacher would give to make sure all her students felt appreciated, but still! Another logical question is: why is the ANC bestowed the authority to raise such a hissy fit? It seems the large majority of the community is in support of the business’s plans (600 signed a petition in support of the liquor license application), but the ANC has given a symbolic megaphone to a minority of elected curmudgeons in opposition. When an organizations only real power is to say no to things, it’s apparent that they are more likely to conjure the zeitgeist of prohibition-era attitudes in order to play devil’s advocate. How can residents expect property values to improve if amenities like restaurants, bars, and markets are not readily incorporated into the community? DCMud will keep its readership informed as answers to these questions reveal themselves in the coming months.
Another point to raise here is that the ANCs are one of America’s examples of electoral democracy without democratic accountability—nobody knows who these guys are or what ANCs do, so incumbents tend to just keep getting re-elected indefinitely. Then they’re empowered to say “no” to stuff, so their default position is that nobody should be allowed to do anything. And last they’re hyper-local so they don’t properly weigh the interests of the broader community of people—lots of people who live near-but-not-in ANC5A (me, for example) go to the cafe and also enjoy the farmer’s market that’s associated with it. Community input in decision-making is important, but you need to think hard about how you structure these institutions.
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Pete Peterson Does Outreach to the Left
Pete Peterson, bête noir of Social Security advocates, does some outreach to the left in an interview with Benjy Sarlin of the Daily Beast:
On an ideological level, caricatures of Peterson as Grover Norquist-lite do not stand up to scrutiny. Peterson accurately noted to the Beast that he includes many dissenting views from the right and left at his events. The Fiscal Summit, for example, featured President Clinton and the chairmen of major progressive think tanks, the Center for American Progress, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Economic Policy Institute. And the America Speaks discussion group, despite its embarrassing correction, ended up finding participants in favor of protecting benefits and taxing the rich.
Peterson’s emphasis on entitlement cuts rankles progressives, but many of his recommendations for closing the budget gap would be perfectly at home in a Democratic administration. He favors a carbon tax to raise revenue and combat climate change, and advocates cuts to defense spending. Much like Obama, he identifies growing health-care costs as a bigger driver of red ink than Social Security and his proposed solution, weaning doctors off of a fee-for-service system, is in line with the ideas of Democratic wonks like Atul Gawande. He supports running up the short-term deficit to overcome the recession, including extending unemployment benefits. He begins most of his speeches with an attack on Republicans’ zealous obsession with tax cuts—a trend he’s been pushing against since the 1980s, when he decried Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics.
I think it’s a disturbing fact about American politics and society that a lone billionaire with an obsession can have such an impact on elite political discourse. But politics is (sometimes) more complicated than black hats vs white hats and this is one of those situations.
Endgame
You’re only nineteen for God’s sake!
— Orszag retrospective.
— I still don’t know the answer to this question.
— July 2010 was the cruelest month for US soldiers in Afghanistan.
— Judicial confirmation rate tumbling in Obama era.
— Global warming is real.
— Dropping bombs is not an effective way of helping people.
— Democratic accountability, now with puppies.
Long Blondes, “Once and Never Again.”
The Filibuster Undermines Democratic Accountability
I have a post up at Grist building off my remarks on the filibuster at Netroots Nation. You can also read contributions from Dave Roberts, David Waldman, Senator Tom Udall, and Mimi Marziani.
GDP Revisions Highlight Dismal Bush-Era Economic Performance
The latest round of GDP revisions was mostly noteworthy for revising Q2 2010 GDP growth down slightly, but Neil Irwin observes that the releases also changed estimates going back a bit:
The upshot is that things were even weaker in the 2006 to 2009 time frame than was previously recognized. In 2008, for example, the Commerce Department had earlier estimated 0.4 percent growth for the year; it now estimates that GDP was unchanged. [...] Overall, for the 2006 to 2009 period, GDP decreased at an average annual rate of 0.2 percent, compared to a zero percent average annual change previously estimated.
Obviously George W Bush’s tax cuts didn’t cause the great recession. But the question I asked earlier this week about Bush-era tax policy looks even more acute today—where was the growth?
Going back to before the financial crisis and economic disaster we lived through one of the most anemic business cycle upswings in American history, the only one ever in which household income declined. At the time, the story was that this was fine because skyrocketing home prices showed that we were getting wealthier but now that’s in tatters too.
The Language of Inequality
What I really find conspicuous in the comparison of top income shares across rich nations is the similarity of the patterns observed in English-speaking countries as opposed to those found in continental European countries. It is striking that, after a prolonged period of moderate decline, the income share of the richest 1 percent suddenly began to rise in the mid-1980s in the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand as well as in the United States, while it exhibited no upward trend in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.
The difference between these two groups of countries confirms that market and technological forces cannot be the whole story, but the similarity of trajectories, including the time of the turning point, in the English-speaking countries defies an explanation based only on the national characteristics of the U.S. political process. Hacker and Pierson recognize the potential problem, but play it down by positing that the close interdependence of the markets for top executives can largely account for the common trends in English-speaking economies. Perhaps, but why should interdependence be so much stronger between London and New York than between London and Frankfurt in today’s highly integrated financial markets? Can common language be the only critical factor, or are there more fundamental reasons?
Like Brad DeLong, I don’t really know why we’d be so casually dismissive of the idea that master class labor mobility inside the Anglosophere is in fact much greater than mobility across the linguistic divide. Now it’s true that this lack of mobility seems somewhat irrational. Firms interested in reducing labor costs could realize substantial gains by importing low-paid Asian CEOs but in practice corporate nationality makes a big difference when it comes to staffing the board of directors and the executive suite.
At any rate, you could probably try to test this. In some European countries they subtitle the American TV shows and in others they dub them. The quality of the English spoken in the dubbed countries is noticeably lower than that spoken in the subtitle countries. Are people form subtitle countries more likely to relocate to Anglosphere countries than people from dub countries? When Carl-Henrik Svanberg was CEO of Ericsson in Sweden, he earned 15.75 million SEK. Wikipedia says his compensation as BP’s chairman is much higher than that. And like most Swedes, he speaks English very well. Nonetheless, he did manage to create a PR fiasco by talking about “small people” instead of “the little guy.”
Today in Mosque Madness
Team Gingrich gets both dumber and more offensive chatting with Salon’s Justin Elliot:
Newt Ginrich’s spokesman told Salon in a phone interview today that building a mosque at Ground Zero “would be like putting a statue of Mussolini or Marx at Arlington National Cemetery.”
Asked what the 19th century German philosopher had ever done to America, Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler said: “Well let’s go with Lenin then.” Tyler explained that he was talking about Lenin, who died in 1924, as representative of the Cold War and ideologies opposed to America.
And here we actually get to the nub of the problem. Joking about the exact scope of the proposed mosque exclusion zone the issue here is whether or not we should be defining Islam, as such, as an “ideolog[y] opposed to America” comparable to the ideology that powered the Soviet Union. I say “no,” Team Newt says yes. That’s both repugnant and strategically disastrous.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League embarrasses itself by abandoning the organization’s normal support for freedom of religion in a statement that condemns the anti-Muslim bigotry fueling the mosque’s opponents while endorsing their policy objectives. If the ADL wants to see Jewish/Muslim relations in America head down the toilet, this a sound strategy. Otherwise you might want to stick with J Street whose President, Jeremy Ben Ami, has his eye on the big picture:
The principle at stake in the Cordoba House controversy goes to the heart of American democracy and the value we place on freedom of religion. Should one religious group in this country be treated differently than another? We believe the answer is no.
As Mayor Bloomberg has said, proposing a church or a synagogue for that site would raise no questions. The Muslim community has an equal right to build a community center wherever it is legal to do so. We would hope the American Jewish community would be at the forefront of standing up for the freedom and equality of a religious minority looking to exercise its legal rights in the United States, rather than casting aspersions on its funders and giving in to the fear-mongerers and pandering politicians urging it to relocate.
American Jews have normally understood that minority groups in this country have an interest in sticking together. Today the right is going after mosques as un-American, but the principle of intolerance versus liberalism winds up implicating us all sooner or later.
Wide Range of Foreign Scientists Advancing Climate Lies in Order to Boost US Socialism and Cripple Growth
The Washington Post wouldn’t publish things in its newspaper if they weren’t true, so when George Will tells me repeatedly that global warming is made up, I believe him. Thus the only question is what’s up with these liars:
“A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record,” the annual State of the Climate report declares. Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, the report said its analysis of 10 indicators that are “clearly and directly related to surface temperatures, all tell the same story: Global warming is undeniable.” [...]
Deke Arndt, chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at the National Climatic Data Center, noted that the 1980s was the warmest decade up to that point, but each year in the 1990s was warmer than the ’80s average. That makes the ’90s the warmest decade, he said. But each year in the 2000s has been warmer than the ’90s average, so the first 10 years of the 2000s is now the warmest decade on record.
As best I can tell, this is what’s going on here. Barack Obama understands that if people ignore George Will and believe the planet is getting warmer rather than cooler, that this will make him more politically popular. He also knows that people might believe scientists about something like this. His problem is that while American scientists are all ready to coordinate their message in order to advance a foreign agenda, JournoList doesn’t have the reach necessary to extend this kind of partisanship to foreign scientists. Fortunately, though, foreigners hate America. And foreigners know that Obama’s death panels and general socialism will cripple the US economy. So in order to boost Obama’s fortunes, they’ve gotten 48 countries’ worth of scientists together to promote this lie. Fortunately, George Will still has the guts to call it like it is and the Post—and dozens of other papers across the country—still publish his bold work. Kudos.
Changing the Rules
Kevin Drum has one of these posts where someone explains that the filibuster rule won’t be changed because it wouldn’t be in place unless the powers that be liked it. And that’s true enough! But it almost proves too much. American politics is very small-c conservative. And on top of that, entrenched interests (of which old codger senators count as one) are by definition powerful. Struggles for reform normally lose. That’s true of both substantive reform and procedural reform. But insofar as people are reading about American politics at all that’s presumably because they aren’t total fatalists.
Which leads me to a point that a couple of friends raised with me at a bar last night. Relatively few progressives seem to recognize that it’s always been the case that major periods of substantive reform go hand-in-hand with episodes of procedural reform. Important substantive reforms, by definition, threaten influential actors in the system. Those actors, not being idiots, seek to exploit procedural elements of the system to frustrate reform. Successful reformers need to find ways to frustrate these tactics of frustration. This piece by Julian Zelizer on the politics of congressional reform (PDF) offers a nice recap of the forgotten battle to reform the House Rules Committee, a struggle that set the stage for the Great Society:
The Rules Committee had become more obstructionist after 1955 when Virginia’s Howard Smith took over the chairmanship. In 1959, the Democratic Study Group–which was formed a year earlier by a group of liberal Democrats who wanted their party to move in a more progressive direction- -targeted the Rules Committee. Although Rayburn had promised DSG that Smith had assured him he would be more accommodating following the large liberal gains in the 1958 congressional elections, after 1959, Rules became more obstructionist. The election of John Kennedy as President in 1960 heightened interest in congressional reform. Liberals insisted that with a sympathetic president, there were enough Democrats and liberal Republicans to pass legislation if institutional rules did not prevent them from doing so. “Stripped of the Senate filibuster and the House Rules Committee veto,” ADA promised, “the conservative coalition will no longer stand as a roadblock to the New Frontier.”
Tensions worsened when Howard Smith bragged to reporters that he would “exercise whatever weapon that I can lay my hands on” to stifle Kennedy. He refused to tolerate “radical, wild-eyed spendthrift proposals that will do the country severe damage.” Rayburn became openly frustrated with Smith. Following the 1960 election, Kennedy met with the Speaker in Florida. While refusing to take a position definitively on legislative procedure, Kennedy implied to Rayburn that he endorsed weakening the Rules Committee. Privately, Kennedy told his closest aide, Lawrence O’Brien, “We can’t lose this one Larry . . . The ball game is over if we do.” The Democratic Study Group–a key part of the liberal coalition–made proposals to reform the Rules Committee.
It’s an important historical episode. Particularly the iterative relationship between the various players. Rayburn doesn’t want reform right up until he does want reform. Kennedy doesn’t take a position until he does take a position. People keep saying that conservatives will become more accommodating if liberals win more elections, but eventually the truth comes out that they’ll become less accommodating—they’re not joking around, they honest-to-God want to block progressive reform and intend to do so. Eventually, things change. But you have to keep working for it.
What Do Poor College Students Need?
Richard Kahlenberg thinks I’ve been too hasty in dismissing the relevance of fights over affirmative action and brings to bear a bunch of important data that doesn’t, I think, ultimately undermine what I’m trying to say:
Pakistani Opinion on Drones
Spencer Ackerman summarizes the findings of a new Pew survey (PDF) on Pakistani views and pulls out the surprising-seeming news that most Pakistanis say they don’t know anything about the drone strikes program:
Top of the list: “Just over one-in-three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes.” Apparently, Pakistanis barely know this program even exists. Forty-three percent say they’ve heard “nothing at all” about the drones. You can hear the champagne corks popping at Langley.
But it’s not exactly time for bottle service. Amongst those Pakistanis who have heard of the drones, opinion skews predictably negative. Ninety-three percent say they’re a bad or “very bad” thing. Ninety percent say they kill too many innocent people. While some researchers claim that if you limit your pool of respondents to the tribal areas, support for the drones actually goes up, 32 percent of overall respondents think they’re a necessary measure. (Although perhaps that’s a robust total of people saying a foreign government should shoot missiles at their fellow countrymen.) And almost half of Pakistanis believe the fiction that the drone strikes occur without Pakistani government approval.
This strikes me as much more terrible news than most Americans realize. There are 170 million in Pakistan. 35 percent of that is 60 million people who tell pollsters they’re aware of this initiative. So we’re talking in the end about a population of 55 million Pakistanis who know what’s happening and think what we’re doing is “bad” or “very bad.” My understanding is that what we’re doing in Pakistan—the drones, the aid, the whole deal—is largely supposed to be about bolstering the stability of a US-aligned Pakistani regime. It’s difficult for me to see how this course of action is making such a regime more sustainable over the long term.
Ryan: Raise Interest Rates
Members of congress rarely offer their opinions on monetary policy issues, which I think is too bad. The Fed’s operational independence doesn’t mean this isn’t a subject people should have opinions about (politicians talk about the Supreme Court all the time) and it’s important. But Paul Ryan seems to have some odd views on how this works:
We need to do things to free up credit. We need regulatory forbearance there. Right now, the policymakers and regulators are doing opposite things. So you’re right that there’s a lot of capital parked out there, and we need to coax it out into the markets. I think literally that if we raised the federal funds rate by a point, it would help push money into the economy, as right now, the safest play is to stay with the federal money and federal paper.
The analysis of the “safest play” here is right, but raising interest rates would exacerbate that problem. He’s talking about paying banks a higher yield on the reserves they keep parked at the Fed. This is what central banks do when they want to suck money out of the system.
Perhaps he misspoke and meant to say something else, but my suspicion is that Ryan is really just outlining an underpants gnome theory of growth here. He knows that tight money is the “right-wing” position and he also knows that the general theme of this summer’s right-wing talking points is that we need to be more business-friendly to boost investment. So he’s decided to say that tighter money (right-wing!) would spur investment (right-wing!) even though there’s no causal story he can tell about this.
White Privilege Alive and Well
Someone accused of killing a white person in North Carolina is nearly three times as likely to get the death penalty than someone accused of killing a black person, according to a study released Thursday by two researchers who looked at death sentences over a 28-year period.
People are generally aware of the fact that the criminal justice system sanctions African-American suspects and perpetrators disproportionately harshly. Less noted, but in some ways even more pernicious, is the way it affords lesser protection to African-American victims and potential victims. Randall Kennedy’s Race, Crime, and the Law explicates this neglected issue in an excellent way.
Harnessing the Power of For-Profit Higher Education
(cc photo by carbonnyc)
As is pretty well-known at this point, the United States has seen large increases in the “college wage premium” meaning that the top 20 percent of the income distribution has tended to pull away from the bottom 80 (separately, the top 1 percent have pulled away from the bottom 99). In principle, the magic of the marketplace ought to respond to this by increasing the supply of college graduates until we regain an equilibrium. In practice, this isn’t happening. We’ve kept increasing the number of people who start college, but they’re not finishing. And surely part of the explanation is that higher education isn’t a traditional market. Recently, though, there’s been an explosion of for-profit higher education providers out there who, in principle, could help solve this problem.
Unfortunately, many of these for-profit operators aren’t very good. The Obama administration’s solution is to tweak incentives through a regulatory lever. Specifically, they’re using the Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965’s stipulation that institutions qualifying for federal student aid must prepare students for “gainful employment in a recognized occupation” to base eligibility for money on performance:
For a program to be fully eligible for Title IV aid, its graduates would need to have a debt service-to-income ratio under 8 percent of their total income or 20 percent of their discretionary income. Or, of graduates and non-completers who entered federal loan repayment in the four most recent fiscal years, at least 45 percent would have to be paying down principal on their student loan debt. Forbearances and deferments (other than for program completers who qualify for public service loan forgiveness) would be considered nonpayments. Unless it passed at least one of the debt-to-income ratio tests as well as the loan repayment test, a program would have to disclose all of that data to current and prospective students.
In practice, this is a pretty modest step, but it’s a step down a potentially promising road. Basically the idea is to ensure that for-profit schools now have large incentives to make sure that students who attend them are securing a positive return on their tuition investment. That means that models of effective teaching will tend to spread and models of ineffective teaching will tend to die off. If it works, there’s plenty of room to make these standards tighter and drive the process of innovation further forward. You could imagine this turning out not to work, but the low-end higher education sector is in definite need of more incentive-compatible innovation and this seems like a smart way to get it done.
Improving UI With Lump Sum Payments
Annie Lowrey and Even The Conservative Josh Barro argue in favor of reforming the Unemployment Insurance system so as to make extended benefits eligibility automatic in times of economic depression. Barro:
I haven’t seen any specific formulas proposed (if a reform is on the table, readers, please alert me) but in general UI should be extended when unemployment is high and/or rising, and contracted when it is low and/or falling. A formulaic adjustment program could mimic what Congress habitually does already, but without generating market uncertainty — or incurring risk that Congress will be too timid to pull the trigger on abbreviating UI benefits in recovery.
I agree with the spirit here. One of the big lessons of the Great Recession is that relying on discretionary congressional action in the middle of a downturn is not a great idea. We need to set up systems that have more automaticity. That said, I saw a mind-blowing chart on Mike Konczal’s blog a couple of weeks ago that suggested that everything I think I know about Unemployment Insurance is wrong.
Here, then is some hot, hot empirical research from Austria:
What happens at 36 months? Well, in Austria if you’ve worked a job for at least 36 months, then you get your UI in terms of a single lump-sum payment, rather than a sporadic paycheck. Conventional UI in effect pays people to not work, and thus creates a disincentive to find a job. The general view is that this disincentive effect needs to be balanced against humanitarian issues and aggregate demand considerations during a severe slump. But the Austrian evidence suggests that conventional wisdom is badly misconstruing the situation. Instead of the lump sum encouraging people to take new jobs more quickly by removing the disincentive, it encourages them to wait even longer before finding a new position. Konczal says this is a more efficient reallocation of resources: “This is people searching for a job they fit into better, this is people making their basic payments and obligations, hedging against future risks and future financial ruin, this is people being able to efficiently make the choices for how to fix back into the economy.”
Interestingly, whether you agree with Konczal’s interpretation or want to stick with the traditional disincentive view, either way the lesson seems to be that the main reform UI needs is not automatic extensions, but transformation into lump-sum payments. If you want to do something automatic, you could add some criteria that triggers a new round of payouts.
Endgame
Waiting in Des Moines:
— Journolist is liberal because its members are ugly.
— But back in 2008, Ezra Klein was the fifth-hottest dude on the planet.
— Every once in a while you need to re-read “The Pussification of the American Male” by Kim Du Toit.
— Fred Barnes claims he’s “never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team” but he’s taken thousands of dollars in money from various Republican Party organizations.
— Congress cutting FY2011 Race to the Top education money for no particular reason.
— Philly Fed President Charles Plosser doesn’t know much about the history of monetary policy, which is a problem for someone in charge of monetary policy.
— Anti-mosque protestors aren’t prejudiced, they just don’t like Muslims.
It’s time for some of the emo people love to claim to hate. The Anniversary, “D in Detroit”.
Beijing Traffic Management
Someone (Churchill) once said that the United States of America can always be counted on to do the right thing after it’s exhausted all the alternatives. And sometimes that’s how I feel about China’s ambitious-but-not-working efforts to control pollution while industrializing, admirably recounted by Andrew Jacobs. As just one example, consider my hobbyhorse of traffic planning:
In Beijing, driving restrictions that removed a fifth of private cars from roads each weekday have been offset by 250,000 new cars that hit the city streets in the first four months of 2010.
The policy here is that on any given weekday, there are two digits such that cars whose license plates end in those numbers aren’t allowed on the road. So you can see that the Beijing authorities, unlike those in most American cities, aren’t afraid to tackle the “too much driving” issue. But rather than tackle it in a way that would (a) work and (b) be economically optimal—congestion pricing to fund better bus service—they’ve opted for a goofy rationing system that’s encouraging households to stockpile multiple automobiles in order to evade road restrictions.
The upshot, pollution aside, is that Beijing is already an incredibly congested city even though it’s likely to grow in the future (it’s big, but much smaller than Tokyo, New York, Mumbai, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, or Moscow) and a greater share of the population will be able to afford cars. The Chinese are doing a lot of inspiring things, but an awful lot of their approach to urban planning—tons of new developments seem to be built around a very misguided superblock model—has terrifying implications for the future.
Nobody is Helping Aisha
It’s certainly true as Time’s emotionally manipulative new cover image indicates that the Taliban are terrible for women and that the more of Afghanistan they rule the worse things will be for women. That said, it’s extremely disingenuous to act as if continued American military engagement in Afghanistan is the key to preventing further cases of girls like Aisha from being maimed for violations of retrograde notions of gender norms.
As David Petraeus put it in his remarks upon assuming command in Afghanistan: “We must demonstrate to the Afghan people, and to the world, that Al Qaeda and its network of extremist allies will not be allowed to once again establish sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which they can launch attacks on the Afghan people and on freedom-loving nations around the world.” That doesn’t say anything about what happens to young girls who flee from their in-laws. Protecting them was not among the things he exhorted his troops to do. And when he addressed himself to the people of Afghanistan he didn’t mention anything along these lines either:
Finally, to the people of Afghanistan: it is a great honor to be in your country and to lead ISAF. I want to emphasize what a number of our country’s leaders recently affirmed – that our commitment to Afghanistan is an enduring one and that we are committed to a sustained effort to help the people of this country over the long-term. Neither you nor the insurgents nor our partners in the region should doubt that. Certainly the character of our commitment will change over time. Indeed, Afghans and the citizens of ISAF countries look forward to the day when conditions will permit the transition of further tasks to Afghan forces. In the meantime, all of us at ISAF pledge our full commitment to help you protect your nation from militants who allowed Al Qaeda sanctuary when they ruled the country. Moreover, we see it as our solemn duty to protect the innocent people of Afghanistan from all violence, whether intended by the enemy or unintended by those of us pursuing that enemy. And we stand with you as we all work to defeat the enemies of the new Afghanistan and to help create a better future for you and your families.
Defend Afghan allies from being targeted by the Taliban. Check. Avoid accidental killing of Afghans by NATO forces. Check. Women’s rights? Not so much.
And you can see this time and again if you look at statements about US policy in Afghanistan from George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus, etc. We are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Thus, emphasizing that the Taliban is a group of bad people is often a rhetorical point of emphasis. The Taliban’s poor treatment of women often comes up as a sub-point here to illustrate the theme that the Taliban are bad. But actually altering social conditions in southern and eastern Afghanistan isn’t on the list of war aims.
And that makes sense. After all “invade and conquer southern and eastern Afghanistan” is neither a practical nor a cost-effective means of enhancing the well-being of the world’s women. You go to war for reasons of national security. Those reasons either stand up to scrutiny or they don’t.
Paying People to Work
Catherine Rampbell reports on one ARRA-funded initiative to let states subsidize hiring by private employers:
“I never, ever, ever thought I’d end up in an art gallery,” said Tremaine Edwards, 35, a former computer technician who had been unemployed for two years before he was hired in May by Gallery Guichard, a private gallery in Chicago. Mr. Edwards now earns $10 an hour, financed by the government, through the Put Illinois to Work program, to maintain the company’s Web site, curate exhibits and run gallery events.
He has also become the gallery’s star salesman, selling five paintings during the most recent gallery opening despite no background in fine arts or sales.
One important advantage of this sort of thing over simply cutting people Unemployment Insurance checks is its impact on skills. An unemployed computer technician is basically a depreciating asset, the value of his skills deteriorating as technology shifts and he’s not on the job to keep up. A former computer technician working at an art gallery maintaining the company’s website and working on gallery events, by contrast, is learning new things—including new things about himself—and now has more skills than he did before.
Lindsey Graham’s Uncynical, Apolitical Crusade Against Birthright Citizenship
By Ryan McNeely
In the spring, Majority Leader Reid announced that he would attempt to tackle immigration reform before energy, a move that I thought was odd at the time. Both issues are incredibly important, but the House had already passed a decent energy bill, while work on immigration would have to start from scratch.
Lindsey Graham then released an open letter declaring that this move had so upset him that he could no longer support (and in fact would filibuster!) his own climate bill. This is coming from someone who purports to support comprehensive immigration reform. Graham’s stated rationale was that Reid’s proposal was a transparent attempt to rile up Latino voters in Nevada and that it would make passing immigration reform “exponentially more difficult in the future.”
But it appears President Obama and the Senate Democratic leadership have other more partisan, political objectives in mind.
Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy.
He then told reporters that “If immigration comes up then that’s the ultimate CYA politics,” and warned that “it will divide the country.” Tom Friedman agreed, calling Reid’s move a “travesty,” while Gloria Borger lauded Graham as the “new John McCain,” an “independent Republican, often a lonely soul” who always bravely negotiates with Democrats in good faith.
Strange, then, that Lindsey Graham is now — a few months closer to the November elections – pushing a Constitutional amendment to revoke birthright citizenship, which he calls a “mistake.” Since Lindsey Graham doesn’t engage in cheap political stunts, he must seriously believe that it’s possible for such an amendment to get through both houses of Congress with 2/3 majorities and then be ratified by 38 state legislatures. Otherwise, one may have to regretfully conclude that Graham is simply cynically pandering to the most radical, nativist elements of the Republican base in an attempt to divide the country.
The End of Probable Cause
This is excellent news for FBI agents who might want to misuse Bureau resources to see if their wife is having an affair:
The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.
The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.
Of course, checking out someone’s browser history could be very useful in a terrorism investigation. But if I had some kind of cause—probable cause, let’s say—to suspect someone of involvement in terrorism, I could just get a warrant. If I want to see whether my wife has a secret Match.com account, by contrast, I’m going to need some kind of authority to compel private companies to divulge this information without me needing to explain myself to a judge.
FBI personnel are, I’m sure, overwhelmingly decent and honorable people whose subjective understanding is that they want to use these enhanced powers for legitimate purposes. But who among us, when being honest, has never misused work resources a bit for personal purposes? Everyone slacks off on the job. Everyone has moments of prurient interest in the lives of other people. Taking the gloves off, surveillance-wise, is much more likely to lead to abusive behavior than to super-awesome counterterrorism operations.
A New Hope
Recovery might come one of these days:
On Thursday, James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, warned that the Fed’s current policies were putting the American economy at risk of becoming “enmeshed in a Japanese-style deflationary outcome within the next several years.” [...] Mr. Bullard had been viewed as a centrist and associated with the camp that sees inflation, the Fed’s traditional enemy, as a greater threat than deflation. [...] Mr. Obama’s two other nominees, Peter A. Diamond and Sarah Bloom Raskin, who like Ms. Yellen are on track to be confirmed by the Senate, have also expressed serious concerns about unemployment.
The President’s failure to make these nominations and secure their confirmation in a timely manner will, in retrospect, prove to have been his biggest mistake.
Priorities Abroad
Kristof: “In the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama promised to invest in a global education fund. Since then, he seems to have forgotten the idea — even though he is spending enough every five weeks in Afghanistan to ensure that practically every child on our planet gets a primary education.”
To get technical, I doubt you could really scale up in that way but the point stands. Maybe you get primary school for 80 percent of those who like it and spend the rest on something else. But at least we’ll be making it easier for the FBI to spy on people without warrants.
Mysteries of the Title I “Comparability” Proposal
Several of my colleagues made this video to try to explain the “comparability loophole” in Title I federal funding for schools for poor kids:
To try to explain it in words, the basic issue here is that the provision of the law designed to make sure that high-poverty schools get a fair share of resources lets you define a large share of this in terms of the number of teachers rather than the per student budget. This is like saying the Yankees and the Royals have the same resources because they both field a complete roster of baseball players, completely ignoring the fact that the Yankees are actually spending 3-4 times as much money. In education, just like in baseball, simply having more money doesn’t guarantee results—you need to spend that money effectively. But in both fields, it’s easier to spend money effectively if you have money to spend.
Congress needs to fix this.
Erskine Bowles’ 21 Percent Mistake
In addition to my previous concerns about Erskine Bowles’ approach to his job as co-chair of the president’s deficit commission, Matt Miller is adding some new ones:
In little-noticed remarks a few weeks ago, Bowles suggested that the long-term goal the commission should adopt for federal spending should be 21 percent of gross domestic product. This sounds like a bookkeeping matter. But Bowles’ goal would end progressive ambition, ratify America’s declining competitiveness and bury the American dream.
Why? For starters, federal spending under Ronald Reagan averaged 22 percent of GDP. Under Bowles’s view, therefore, the outer limits of the Democratic Party’s 21st-century aspirations would be to run government at a size smaller than did a 20th-century conservative icon.
I think it’s extremely unlikely that this commission is going to end up producing any kind of compromise, but in many ways that makes it all the more important that its members lay down markers in smart ways. We can’t have folks who are supposed to be from the commission’s more progressive half laying out ideas that would simply rule progressive policy out of bounds from the get-go.
My view, like Miller’s, is that “I’m all for ending ineffective programs and reallocating the cash.” But cuts should start with analysis of programs, not with arbitrary budget targets. Things that aren’t worth doing shouldn’t be done. But we shouldn’t simply cut for the sake of cutting.
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