Matt Yglesias

Endame

Being alone’s the only way to be:

— I’m going to be on Countdown tonight, circa 8:15 PM.

— The juice box turns thirty.

— On “chop shops” and Indian software firms.

— FOMC preview.

— US/EU sanctions on Iran not working, only multilateral sanctions would have bite.

— Unnecessary and damaging fashion copyright bill reintroduced.

— Grading the NBA free agent season.

Janelle Monae, “Cold War”

Interest Group Politics in China

If someone proposed that the United States adopt a policy that massively reduced the wages of every worker in America as a strategy to increase the profitability of US-based firms, everyone would recognize the policy for what it is. But when China holds its currency artificially low—which has the same impact—many people tend to see it as a cunning example of economic policy in action, rather than as special interests capturing the Chinese policy process and running it in a destructive way. Part of the issue is that people often don’t see that interest group politics exists in foreign countries, especially ones that aren’t democratic. But look at the latest reports out of China on Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s efforts to deliver on his promise to use an “iron hand” to increase energy efficiency:

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology quietly published a list late Sunday of 2,087 steel mills, cement works and other energy-intensive factories required to close by Sept. 30. [...] Over the years, provincial and municipal officials have sometimes tried to block Beijing’s attempts to close aging factories in their jurisdictions. These officials have particularly sought to protect older steel mills and other heavy industrial operations that frequently have thousands of employees and have sometimes provided workers with housing, athletic facilities and other benefits since the 1950s or 1960s.

To prevent such local obstruction this time, the ministry said in a statement on its Web site that the factories on its list would be barred from obtaining bank loans, export credits, business licenses and land. The ministry even warned that their electricity would be shut off, if necessary.

Chinese political institutions aren’t the same as American ones, but what you can see here is that they’re not totally different either. This is not at all dissimilar to the debate playing out over the EPA’s Clean Air Act mandate to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Public officials, whether in China or West Virginia or Ohio, often see it as their job to defend the interests of local employers and businessmen.

Problematics of Progressive Solidarity

By Ryan McNeely

You may have heard that retailer Target was caught up in a controversy last week after it was revealed that its corporate PAC had donated (thanks to the Citizens United decision) $150,000 to an organization backing extreme anti-gay Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. LGBT advocacy organizations and blogs expressed outrage, and MoveOn.org sent me an email arguing that since “Target just gave a huge contribution to a anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-progressive candidate for governor in Minnesota,” I should sign their petition calling for a boycott of the store. Somewhat surprisingly, this campaign actually worked, and the CEO took the unusual step of apologizing for the contribution and promising that “later this fall, Target will take a leadership role in bringing together a group of companies and partner organizations for a dialogue focused on diversity and inclusion in the workplace, including GLBT issues.”

So I thought this was the end of the story — until I received another email from MoveOn.org. They are still angry, and they want to hold Target accountable. “As long as corporations like Target think that it’s OK to plow money into political campaigns, we’re in trouble. Corporations are not people. We need to make sure that Target and each and every corporation in the country gets this message: Stay out of our elections!” So MoveOn has a problem with — as I do — corporate influence over elections as such. It turns out that Abe Sauer noticed the wording in MoveOn’s original campaign, and was concerned about their involvement from the beginning:

Jumping aboard, MoveOn.org launched a petition calling for 150,000 consumers to commit to a boycott. While welcomed by many, there is reason to be wary of MoveOn.org’s particular involvement. For starters, its statement reads “If we don’t push back hard, this will just be the tip of the iceberg. Other corporations will learn that they can pour money into elections to buy the outcome they want.” It essentially lessens the anti-gay rights part of the Target donation outrage in exchange for a focus on a larger battle about the post-Citizens United campaigning world… one in which MoveOn.org’s side benefits greatly. Some, like me, might use a stronger word than “lamentable” to characterize MoveOn’s failure to even once use the term “gay” in its petition.

My first reaction was that this is a perfect example of left-leaning advocacy groups engaging in turf wars rather than — like their right-leaning counterparts — keeping an eye on the big picture and working together in the spirit of solidarity. To put it bluntly, why can’t LGBT organizations keep hammering away at Target even after the apology as part of a common cause with the left regarding corporate influence over elections, much as the “pro-family” right backs the right-wing anti-tax movement?

But I’m not sure it’s so simple. For starters, a lot of the anti-gay family groups have lost a lot of credibility with Republican office holders, so it’s not clear that this strategy has worked to advance their narrow interests. But more broadly, there’s a simple incentive structure at work — you want to punish people who harm you and reward people who help you — and in this case, the Target CEO’s apology was something to be applauded.

Ironies of Empire

Who would have thought it figures: “U.S. forces are staying in Iraq to prevent foreign powers from meddling with the new government, Gen. Ray Odierno said Sunday.”

In defense of General Odierno, what he actually said was that his efforts will “make it less likely of others from the outside being able to interfere” which is probably true.

Better Fewer, But Better

Many commentaries today on the subject of public sector pay, my favorite of which are by Jonathan Cohn and Adam Ozimek.

But I would posit that the important issues here are different from the ones people are talking about. One key issue is the actuarial health of public sector defined benefit pensions. The issue here is that the health is poor. Whether or not the pensions are “too generous,” they’re as generous as they are and they generally aren’t funded properly. The other key issue is the quality of services. If it’s true that public sector workers earn more than superficially similar working in the private sector, then I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. After all, paying people more should mean you get better people. High quality people and high quality public services are important, and I’m happy to pay for them. But of course if we’re not getting high quality public services, then something’s gone wrong.

That strikes me as the crucial point. If there’s a change we could make that would reduce overall teacher compensation while not degrading the quality of education, then of course we should make it. My read of the landscape is that the reverse is probably true—there are changes we could make that would substantially improve the quality of American education, but they would almost certainly require an increase in overall teacher compensation since they involve decreasing teachers’ job security. Whether parallel situations exist in public safety services, I couldn’t say. Beyond that, at the state and local level I’m inclined to say that it’s more common to see people being paid to do things that really shouldn’t be done at all—does New York State really need people out there preventing the scourge of interior designing without a license?—than that they’re being paid too much per se. I would say that $0.00 is the right amount for Indiana to be paying people to oversee the licensing of hypnotists, and the Indiana legislature did the right thing by voting to abolish the hypnotist-licensing system as of this summer. But if I’m mistaken and it’s actually quite important to be licensing hypnotists, then we should probably be paying the licensers pretty well to make sure our candidates have sufficient psychic strength to resist being glamoured by the people they’re supposed to regulate.

When you think about the federal government, the people regulating the financial services industry pretty clearly need to be paid more so that their incentive is to do a good job and get promoted, rather than to do a bad job and cash in. Similarly, regulatory agencies with worthwhile missions need to be able to hire lawyers and scientists good enough to go toe-to-toe with industry stooges. But a regulatory agency with a non-worthwhile mission is by definition overpaying everyone it employs.

V.I. Lenin offered related thoughts in 1923 that I think are worth your time.

Desperately Seeking Confirmation of Federal Reserve Board of Governors Nominees

Paul Krugman observes that based on Ben Bernanke’s academic writings about monetary policy in Japan, Ben Bernanke should be having the Federal Reserve set an aggressive inflation target and catch up to the price level trend:

A problem with the current BOJ policy, however, is its vagueness. What precisely is meant by the phrase “until deflationary concerns subside”? Krugman (1999) and others have suggested that the BOJ quantify its objectives by announcing an inflation target, and further that it be a fairly high target. I agree that this approach would be helpful, in that it would give private decision-makers more information about the objectives of monetary policy. In particular, a target in the 3-4% range for inflation, to be maintained for a number of years, would confirm not only that the BOJ is intent on moving safely away from a deflationary regime, but also that it intends to make up some of the “price-level gap” created by eight years of zero or negative inflation.

This, it seems to me, is exactly what the Fed should do. But it’s not happening. Tim Duy observes:

That said, despite Fedspeak that appears resistant to further easing, the press has been fueling speculation that more easing – albeit largely symbolic – is imminent. From where does this chatter emanate, other that unnamed sources? Perhaps from high ranking staff. Word on the street is that Fed staff are increasingly frustrated with the lack of action from leadership. Why exactly is Bernanke showing such deference to the more hawkish elements such as Kansas City Federal Reserve President Thomas Hoenig, Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fischer, and Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser? If you seek more easing, you are not alone. Board staff are increasingly your allies.

Bernanke may be suffering from a fit of amnesia. Or maybe Bernanke is an ideologue who wants the economy to suffer long enough to produce a more conservative congress. Or maybe Bernanke is a smart economist who’s also an inept manager. Or maybe Bernanke simply knows he’s outvoted on the current Open Market Committee. Who knows? But in all cases, the solution is the same. The President needs to get his nominees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors confirmed, and then as a country we need to hope that they can switch the dynamic.

GOP Fantasy Agenda Leaves Public in the Dark

By Ryan McNeely

Via Greg Sargent, we learn from The Hill this morning that in addition to their push to consider changes to the 14th amendment regarding birthright citizenship, the GOP is also planning on calling for a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution after the August recess. The proposal is being spearheaded by Sens. DeMint, Graham, McCain, and Coburn.

There are a couple things to say about this, the first being that while the article describes the amendment as “the latest foray in a crusade that conservatives have waged for two decades,” this leaves out the fact that conservatives strangely declined to continue this crusade during the period when they controlled the entire federal government. Setting that aside, we see that the main thrust of this amendment is not to actually balance the budget, but rather to make it even more difficult to raise taxes:

A popular element of the amendment is the requirement of a supermajority to raise taxes.

“The point of that is so that raising taxes won’t be the default way to balance the budget,” said DeMint. “The whole idea is to cut spending.”

…A senior Senate Republican aide who works on tax policy said that creating a supermajority threshold could be part of a grand legislative compromise that emerges from the recommendations of the fiscal responsibility commission...

“I support a supermajority to raise taxes,” he said. “But to use it as leverage to agree to other tax increases, I’m not sure.”

To which I ask, if “the whole idea is to cut spending,” then why not propose spending cuts? It’s a lot easier to pass a budget than to pass a constitutional amendment. Surely, if a majority Americans are clamoring for “robust spending cuts” as DeMint claims, then the GOP would benefit in the midterms by proposing such cuts. Instead, the GOP either cannot or will not propose anything specific; rather, they continue to push for extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy without any spending offsets. That really should end any serious consideration of what this balanced budget amendment is all about.

But the larger point here is that the Republican Party is refusing to detail an actual agenda in advance of the November elections. There are plenty of things a Speaker Boehner really might do if the GOP were to regain the House majority in the fall. But instead of talking about which of those things they’ll attempt, Republican leaders continue to play to their base with notions of ACA repeal and radical changes to the constitution that require 2/3 majorities and approval of 38 states. The answer of the pundit class seems to be to sort of laugh off this talk of amending the constitution since it “won’t happen” — to which the follow-up should be, what will happen if the GOP takes over Congress? Voters should probably hear the answer before going to the polls.

Prejudice and Economic Threat

Interesting study from David A. Butza and Kumar Yogeeswaranb with implications for the impact of economic conditions on social tolerance:

Macroeconomic conditions have long been suspected of increasing hostility toward ethnic outgroups. Integrating prior work on macroeconomic threat with recent threat-based models of prejudice, the current work employs an experimental approach to examine the implications of economic threat for prejudice toward ethnic outgroups. In Study 1, participants primed with an economic threat (relative to a non-economic threat and neutral topic) reported more prejudice against Asian Americans, an ethnic group whose stereotype implies a threat to scarce employment opportunities. In addition, economic threat led to a heightened state of anxiety, which mediated the influence of economic threat on prejudice against Asian Americans. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating that economic threat heightened prejudice against Asian Americans, but not Black Americans, an ethnic group whose stereotype does not imply a threat to economic resources. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the role of macroeconomic conditions in potentiating antisocial responses to particular outgroups.

I think you can see this very clearly with immigration politics. Over the past three years, the net flow of undocumented migrants has declined sharply and even turned negative but the level of public concern about the issue keeps going up. That’s because overall labor market conditions are driving an increase in concern, despite a reduction in the “objective” scale of the “problem.” People are worried and people like to personify their emotions.

Douthat on Gay Marriage

Ross Douthat explains that opposition to gay marriage is about trying to uphold a certain kind of ideal of marriage:

This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

I think one could dispute that, but let’s grant it. The natural thing to observe is that very little of our current legal architecture of marriage has much to do with this. Actual marriages in 21st century America aren’t required to be lifelong or monogamous. Douthat concedes as much:

Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.

So at this point we’re upholding an ideal of lifelong heterosexual monogamy by legally requiring the heterosexual part, but not the lifelong or monogamous part. The unfairness of such a standard seems both obvious and overwhelming.

And the solution seems to me to be fairly clear—a separation of religious and quasi-religious ideals of marriage from the civil/legal aspects of marriage. You should have a defined legal state, that could be called “marriage” or “civil union” or “civil marriage” or whatever else we want that’s recognized by the state on a non-discriminatory basis. And then religious groups can also have whatever kind of ceremonies with whatever attendant status they like. If the Catholic Church doesn’t want to perform marriages for gay couples or allow divorced people to remarry, good for them.

But as Douthat’s piece makes clear, the status quo is really a cop out. Instead of holding heterosexuals up to a rigorous standard of conduct—no divorce, harsh & unforgiving attitude toward infidelity—we’re going to discriminate against the gay and lesbian minority and then congratulate ourselves on what a good job we’re doing of upholding our ideals.

Public Works

Spencer Ackerman reports that faced with 9.5 percent unemployment, the US Congress has appropriated the funds necessary for massive public works projects and infrastructure upgrades:

Then there are all the new facilities. West Disney has a fresh coat of cement –- something that’s easy to come by, now that the Turkish firm Yukcel manufactures cement right inside Bagram’s walls. [...] There on the flightline: the skeletons of new hangars. New towers with particleboard for terraces. A skyline of cranes. The omnipresent plastic banner on a girder-and-cement seedling advertising a new project built by cut-rate labor paid by Inglett and Stubbs International.

Oddly, though, the locals aren’t enthusiastic:

Troops here told me of shepherd boys scowling their way around Bagram’s outskirts, slingshotting off the occasional rock in hopes of braining an American. Again, something else I wouldn’t have believed two years ago.

Shepherd boys? Where’s that? And why do they want to brain Americans? Ah, because even as we’re turning the streetlights out in Colorado Springs for lack of funds, all this construction is happening in Afghanistan!

This is the oddity of American politics in 2010. To simply appropriate funds to give to poor foreigners (”foreign aid”) is hideously unpopular and politically unthinkable. To appropriate funds to give to state governments to keep the public sector operating is also politically untenable. But to appropriate the funds to build facilities for Americans but located in Afghanistan is easy.

The Food Assistance Debate in India

India’s seen a lot of economic growth over the past decade. But it’s still a very large and quite poor country, containing huge numbers of poor people. It’s become prosperous enough, however, that it seems like it should be possible to prevent widespread malnourishment from being a problem. Jim Yardley in the NYT looks at an ongoing debate between two different visions of how to do that. One, promoted by India’s traditional left, is “to create a constitutional right to food and expand the existing entitlement so that every Indian family would qualify for a monthly 77-pound bag of grain, sugar and kerosene.”

Another would be to scrap the existing ineffective food support system and replace it with something more like America’s SNAP (”food stamps”), a system that would distribute either money or coupons rather than food, and then let poor people buy the food themselves. Yardley’s view of the problems with the existing system:

The food system has existed for more than half a century and has become riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Studies show that 70 percent of a roughly $12 billion budget is wasted, stolen or absorbed by bureaucratic and transportation costs. Ms. Gandhi’s proposal, still far from becoming law, has been scaled back, for now, so that universal eligibility would initially be introduced only in the country’s 200 poorest districts, including here in Jhabua, at the western edge of the state of Madhya Pradesh.

With some of the highest levels of poverty and child malnutrition in the world, Madhya Pradesh underscores the need for change in the food system. Earlier this year, the official overseeing the state’s child development programs was arrested on charges of stealing money. In Jhabua, local news media recently reported a spate of child deaths linked to malnutrition in several villages. Investigators later discovered 3,500 fake food ration booklets in the district, believed to have been issued by low-level officials for themselves and their friends.

In terms of the empirical details, I’m sure there’s another side to the story. But it’s hard to think of any sound theoretical or ideological reasons to believe it would be better to try to give everyone a 77-pound bag of grain than to try to give everyone stamps or coupons. There’s a place for direct public provision of services in sectors where the private sector doesn’t deliver. But “stores that sell food” is something the private sector is more than capable of delivering. Poor people don’t get enough to eat because they can’t afford to buy the food, not because the private sector doesn’t create places to buy. Give people money and they’ll feed their families.

AFL-CIO Endorses Senate Reform

I think the odds are that John Boehner will be Speaker of the House in January and the question of Senate procedure will be (temporarily) moot in the eyes of most advocacy groups, but I believe in reform anyway so it’s good to see this from the AFL-CO:

Many Americans believe that the Senate has always lived with filibusters and that the current Senate logjam has its roots in 200 years of Senate history. In fact, during the entire 19th Century, there were only 23 filibusters. From 1917 (when the Senate first adopted cloture rules for cutting off debate) until 1969, there was an average of less than one filibuster a year. In the 1970 and 1980s, the annual average rose to around 17. It was not until the Republicans lost control following the 2006 election that the number of filibusters exploded (as measured by the number of “cloture” motions that the minority forced). In the 110th Congress, there were 139 cloture motions, the record by far, and in 2008 alone one out of every five Senate votes was a cloture vote. In the current 111th Congress, coinciding with the arrival of the Obama Administration, there already have been 113 to date. Today, holds and filibuster threats have become such a routine matter that no bill or nomination can move forward until the Majority Leader can demonstrate that there are 60 votes – a super-majority – for passage. [...]

The AFL-CIO calls on the Senate, when it convenes for the 112th Congress, to reform and democratize its procedures and rules. In the meantime, we will educate our members about the abuse of the filibuster and other Senate rules, join with other like-minded organizations in an effort to rally support for the reform of these rules, and use our political program to seek support from Senate candidates for a change in these rules.

Good to see.

The Anti-Mosque Movement

Laurie Goodstein has an excellent piece making the point that anti-Cordoba House sentiment is just part of a broader tide of anti-mosque sentiment around the country:

In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision, and hundreds of protesters have turned out for a march and a county meeting.

In late June, in Temecula, Calif., members of a local Tea Party group took dogs and picket signs to Friday prayers at a mosque that is seeking to build a new worship center on a vacant lot nearby.

In Sheboygan, Wis., a few Christian ministers led a noisy fight against a Muslim group that sought permission to open a mosque in a former health food store bought by a Muslim doctor.

On one level, there’s nothing new about this. Anti-Catholic sentiment used to be a major force in American life and Catholic values were seen as potentially inimical to liberalism, democracy, and the American way of life. But what’s noteworthy, as I’ve been saying, is that anti-Islamic politics seems more mainstream now than it was in 2002 or 2003. There are various factors playing into that, but ultimately I think it won’t turn around until we see falling unemployment and rising hours and compensation.

“Uncertainty”

Stan Collender has a sharp piece on the rhetoric of “uncertainty” that people are using to explain the need to extend the Bush tax cuts and therefore boost business investment and economic growth.

All the arguments around certainty and business “confidence” gain their superficial plausibility from the reality that business investment (and therefore growth) really is being impeded by poor expectations of future aggregate demand. But from this accurate point, the tendency has been for rich business executives to slip to the view that what’s needed to get the economy moving is to cater more heavily to the subjective political preferences of rich business executives. But while expectations definitely do matter economically, that’s not the same as saying that we need to kowtow to businessmen’s every desire for tax cuts, back rubs, endless pollution, or whatever. Rather you observe that right now the expectations are for low future inflation and there’s a high demand for cash. Policymakers have it within their power to meet that high demand for cash via expansionary monetary policy, raising expectations of future inflation and creating a situation in which demand for things-that-aren’t-cash rise.

The Summer of Fear

I’ve got a piece in today’s Washington Post outlook section on how economic stagnation is driving illiberal xenophobic politics:

For progressives, this dynamic will take some getting used to. After the 2008 election, many liberals saw the recession as an opportunity for change. Rahm Emanuel’s statement that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” was widely quoted, and comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt’s first term proliferated.

In reality, though, recessions lead to illiberal populist nationalism, not progressive reform. If anti-immigrant sentiment was somewhat muted in the early ’30s, it was because the doors from Europe had mostly been shut 10 years earlier, during another moment of economic dislocation — the recession that followed the end of World War I. And, muted or not, anti-immigrant bias nonetheless inspired the Mexican Repatriation Program, which Herbert Hoover launched in 1929. That program would continue throughout the Depression, deporting hundreds of thousands of people of Mexican ancestry, many of them U.S. citizens.

What’s often forgotten about the New Deal is that 1934-37 was the fastest four-year run of economic growth in American history, outside of World War II. In other words, it was the steep recovery from the Depression, not the Depression itself, that powered FDR’s agenda forward.

The other high-water mark of liberalism, the Great Society — including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid and the passage of the Civil Rights Act — was similarly a child of rapid growth and prosperity, not of crisis.

There are various morals of this story, but one aimed at the progressive community that the piece doesn’t focus on is that we all need to think harder about the way economic growth plays into our shared agendas. It’d be facile to run around saying things like “unemployment is a gay rights issue” or whatever, but the point is that we’re best-positioned to get people to care about issues of diversity and discrimination and fairness and equality and justice when people feel like their living standards are rising.

The New Honesty

A friend passes along the following, with a wink toward the Tax Policy Center’s curious defense of Paul Ryan’s honesty:

TPC did analyze Sam’s marriage-specific claims about being a faithful husband and found they fell short of his 100 percent no-cheating pledge. For example, Sam has actually cheated on his wife an average of 1 day per week, which amounts to a fourteen percent shortfall compared to the claimed 100 percent faithfulness scenario. But that doesn’t mean that Sam’s claim of faithfulness is fraudulent. Instead, it shows that Sam’s vision of having sex with women who aren’t his wife needs to be adjusted in order to meet his stated goal of being a faithful husband. This indeed poses a challenge to Sam to make specific changes to his actions in order to match his claims of faithfulness. Sam has explicitly stated that he is willing to do so.

Again, I think that to just say “my political priority is to make the overall level of federal taxes as low as proves feasible” is a more honest posture than to release a fake balanced budget plan.

Do We Need an NEC?

Bruce Bartlett makes what is, I think, the right point about alleged personality conflicts between Christina Romer and Larry Summers—it’s not clear that Bill Clinton’s decision to create the National Economic Council and the job Summers currently holds was a good idea. The genesis of the position was, in part, a political gambit. One of Clinton’s main themes in the 1992 campaign was the idea that George HW Bush was “out of touch” and spending too much time on foreign affairs and not enough on domestic matters. So with the Cold War over, we would create a National Economic Council comparable to the National Security Council and an NEC director comparable to the National Security Advisor.

Nothing terrible has resulted from this decision, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which both the NEC director and the CEA chair have a really high level of job satisfaction. Neither person has a large agency to oversee and they can’t both be the president’s “chief economic advisor.” When you consider that there’s also a Domestic Policy Council and an Office of Management and Budget in the White House, it seems like at least one chief too many. Given the current tradition of making the NEC director someone who’s more of a political operator and making the CEA chair more of an ivory tower type, the solution might be to abolish the CEA. After all, if the president wants to get a briefing on some subject from an academic macroeconomist I’m pretty sure that could be arranged at any time.

Americans Don’t Like Journalists

One of the oddest aspects of the various arguments around Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is the perennial fussing among self-proclaimed journalists over whether what he’s doing “really” counts as “journalism.” I’m interested in this topic because I sometimes find myself as the center of disputes on the same subject. And I always think it’s odd, because the way it plays out is that in the small world of self-proclaimed journalists it’s taken for granted that being a “journalist” is a very good thing and you should be very sad if you’re not one. The reality is that as best I can tell journalism is not a particularly high-status or well-regarded profession:

At any rate, none of my personal self-esteem is bound up in what ontological category people want to put my work in. I like to think that I write an interesting blog, that’s somewhat informative and somewhat entertaining. If I write a column, I like to hear it praised. Anytime someone tells me they liked my book, that makes me happy. And so I’m egomaniacal enough that if journalists were widely respected in America the way that nurses and cops are, I’d be eager to claim that status for myself. But they’re not and nobody really knows how to define media occupational categories in the digital age, so my advice to Assange and his critics would be to both let this point of contention drop. WikiLeaks needs to be more careful about redacting names from military documents, and the military needs to stop stamping “classified” on everything in sight.

Rent/Buy Combos

Random local real estate news:

Dan Ford at Ellisdale said a mix of rentals and for-sale condos is technically possible but not exactly the most attractive option from a marketing standpoint; however, their team has accounted for each scenario in their budgeting strategies, and SGA effectively opted for that on Capitol Hill when its Butterfield House condominium real estate project failed to sell all its units after 3 years of marketing and rented unsold units.

It seems to me that it’s too bad that you don’t see more developments offering rent and sales options simultaneously. If there were, you’d end up with a more transparent market and it would be clearer to people what kind of financial play they’re making when they choose to buy. Of course that may be what makes it not-so-attractive “from a marketing standpoint.”

Saving The Economy Reduced The Deficit

An important point from my colleague Heather Boushey who wants you to realize that far from causing the current budget deficit, the policy responses that put a floor under economic collapse have made the deficit smaller:

The more general point is that a deficit is a ratio, and the denominator—determined by growth—is very important. Austerity policies that boost growth by allowing for steep cuts in interest rates can reduce the deficit. But austerity policies that merely reduce demand and stifle growth won’t get you anywhere.

Battle for the Nixon Library

I was invited to do a book talk at the Nixon Presidential Library a couple of years ago, and while out there I naturally saw the museum itself. It was at the time a fascinating project in a state of transition from being run by an organization of Nixon loyalists to one being run by real historians from the National Archives. Adam Nagourney has a really interesting piece in the NYT about the latest battles playing out as the new management unveils their version of the exhibit on Watergate.

Good Enough

Kevin Carey on UC Berkeley Law School Dean Christopher Edley’s drive to use information technology to educate many more students:

Unsurprisingly, Edley’s bold plan to reach students “from Kentucky to Kuala Lumpur” has garnered opposition. The thoughtful critique is that the Internet can’t replicate the intellectual and personal experience of going to college in person. That’s true (if overstated, and becoming more so as technology improves). But it’s also the wrong way to think about the issue.

The challenge isn’t to perfectly replicate the current UC experience, not all of which is ideal. The challenge is to create an educational experience that’s of high enough quality to be associated with the globally recognized academic tradition of the University of California. It can be different, as long as it’s good.

I would go stronger. It’s not just okay if it’s different, it’s okay if it’s actually worse. Historically, a lot of important improvements involve downgrades in technology. Ready to wear shirts are not as good as tailored or handmade ones. Nonetheless, developing the technology of mass produced ready to wear shirts was a huge advance in improving the world’s stock of apparel. Frozen vegetables aren’t as good as fresh ones, but again the advantages in convenience still make them an important advance. One very important reason we’ve seen such disappointing productivity in the health and education sectors over the past few decades is precisely that we’ve tended to lack these kind of quality-degrading innovations. But if you could find a means of educating students that’s 80% as good as what Berkeley currently does at 10% of the per capita cost, then you’d be opening up vast new frontiers of potential learning.

The Future of Growth

The long-term actuarial balance of Social Security is heavily dependent on assumptions about long-term economic growth. Thus, the actuaries report is an annual exercise in basically making things up about future population growth and productivity growth. Consequently, if you’re Jagadeesh Gokhale and your job is to be a professional complainer about how Social Security is doomed, you can always offer this kind of critique:

The trustees are discounting the possibility that the unemployment rate may remain higher than was assumed last year and that, therefore, earnings may not rebound any faster compared to last year’s assumptions. It appears that that incoming data on unemployment and GDP growth played little if any role in informing assumptions about future earnings growth rates.

Totally true. Conversely, the trustees are discounting basically all possibilities. Their projections about future productivity, future population growth, future disability rate, etc. are all extremely crude extrapolations that have no real basis. Which is why I think it’s perverse to spend a lot of time worrying about these things.

But one thing that I do think is worth keeping an eye on is people’s consistency about these kind of projections. I normally associate right-of-center people and institutions, like Gokhale’s Cato Institute, with an extremely sunny optimism about the future growth prospects of market democracies like the United States of America. But insofar as you’re sunny and optimistic about US long-term growth prospects, you should be quite sanguine about this Social Security situation. Conversely, if you think the Trustees are too sanguine you ought to be a pessimist about US growth prospects in general. And if you think the long-term growth outlook is bad, then that’s a huge problem for reasons that are much larger than Social Security.

Paul Ryan is a Fraud

Paul Ryan says he has a plan to balance the budget. He’s been saying this for months, and his proposals have been scrutinized by experts. So I see two possibilities. One is that Paul Ryan’s plan would balance the budget. The other is that Paul Ryan is dishonest. And yet while it’s uncontroversial among wonky center and center-left types in Washington DC that Ryan’s would not balance the budget, it remains bizarrely controversial whether he deserves a reputation for honesty.

Paul Krugman, standing up for common sense and citing a Tax Policy Center analysis of Ryan’s proposals says he is not honest. The Tax Policy Center, however, is standing up for Ryan before conceding the substance of his point:

TPC did analyze Ryan’s tax-specific proposals and found they would fall short of this revenue goal. For example, Ryan’s proposal would lead to federal tax revenue of approximately 16 percent of GDP, which amounts to a $4 trillion revenue shortfall over ten years compared to the alternative fiscal scenario. But that doesn’t mean that Ryan’s plan is a fraud. Instead, it shows that Ryan’s vision of broad-based tax reform, which essentially would shift us toward a consumption tax, needs to be adjusted in order to meet his stated goal of matching historical levels of revenue as a proportion of GDP. This indeed poses a challenge to Congressman Ryan to make specific changes to his tax reform plan in order to meet his revenue goal.

For Ryan’s plan to work, he needs 19 percent of GDP, which is what he claims to have. The Tax Policy Center pointed out months ago that he has 16, not 19. And Ryan hasn’t offered any new ideas. Instead, he’s still walking around DC dining out on his reputation for honesty and bold thinking. But to offer an honest plan to balance the budget your plan needs to balance the budget. I don’t really understand why this has become the subject of dispute. It seems to me that the 90 percent of members of congress who don’t claim to have a 70-year budget plan are the honest ones. For one thing, they’re not lying! For another thing, why do we even care about Paul Ryan’s plan to balance the budget in 2080? Ryan will almost certainly be dead in 2080. But of course maybe by 2080 we’ll all be disembodied immortals, with our consciousnesses downloaded into computers. It’s bizarre to make (pretending to) tackle this pseudo-issue the prime criterion for serious policy thinking.

Consistency

Republicans who’ve availed themselves of lame duck sessions of congress before are now loudly objecting to the idea of Democrats holding a lame duck session. This is often described as “hypocrisy” but I actually think it isn’t.

Something I really like and respect about Republican members of congress is that on issues of political process they maintain an admirable level of consistency. Their view is something like “one should do whatever one can within the bounds of the law to ensure that the right substantive outcome happens.” So if holding a lame duck session produces more conservative policy, they hold one. But if stigmatizing a lame duck session would block progressive policy, they stigmatize. It seems to me that this is how politics ought to be done. No country has competing political coalitions organized around rival views of process issues, they’re organized around rival views of important questions of substance. One problem with the structure of American politics is that we only have one team that plays this way. But the fault for that lies with the Democrats, who it seems to me have a tendency to not take their own jobs and ideas seriously, rather than with Republicans.

Politics in a democracy isn’t a blood sport. We don’t kill members of the other side or intimidate them with violence. But it’s not a parlor game either. It’s serious stuff, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Republicans do a good job of that, and their approach to process “hypocrisy” merely reflects the fact that they have a reasonable sense of priorities.