Matt Yglesias

The Governator’s Odds

My Wonk Room colleague Brad Johnson runs the numbers and concludes that the odds are less than one in one trillion that you would have accidentally spelled out the “fuck you” message that was left encoded in a recent Arnold Schwarzenegger veto letter.

COIN/Conventional Divide is Real

Greg Jaffe, speaking to Andrew Exum, says “This whole conventional vs. irregular debate is stupid.”

War is war. And we waste far too much energy trying to categorize it. I think most lieutenants, captains and majors are beyond this false conventional vs. irregular frame that we try to impose on war. I wish I could say the same for the more senior people in the Pentagon.

I think there’s a lot of truth to that. At the same time, just because things look one way to “lieutenants, captains and majors” and another way to “senior people in the Pentagon” doesn’t mean we should take a dismissive view of the senior people’s outlook in a rush to celebrate the insights of the practical warfighter. United States military policy is, on one level, about brave men and women serving in uniform in difficult environments out of a sense of duty, honor, and patriotism. On another level, however, United States military policy is about control over by far the largest stream of public sector financing that exists in the world. Annual spending by the national security state (when you add in the spending that’s outside the “regular” Pentagon budget) is almost as high as the $900 billion ten year price tag for a universal health care bill.

And when you get down to the guts of defense budget politics, these high-level strategic concepts matter a great deal. Nobody, of course, is going to say that the U.S. should somehow completely abandon its ability to fight conventional wars. But the choice between a mindset that says “the main purpose of the military is to scare China & Russia” or a mindset that says “the main purpose of the military is to intervene effectively in third world backwaters” has very real implications for what kind of hardware purchases look cost effective. The 2017 budget deficit or the potential economic impact of a manufacturing plant closure in Georgia is not the kind of thing a lieutenant, captain, or major serving in the field is going to think about. But it’s still, in an objective sense, quite important and senior Pentagon figures are not mistaken to treat it as such.

And part of the subtext of the Afghanistan debate is that as a matter of bureaucratic warfare, it makes enormous sense for the currently ascendant COIN faction to try to press its advantages—to exaggerate the extent of what was achieved in Iraq in 2007, and to overstate the strategic significance of achieving some kind of comprehensive success in Afghanistan.

NY-23 Analysis

As you’ve probably heard by now, the official Republican nominee in the NY-23 special election, Dede Scozzafava, is dropping out of the race. A large number of national conservative figures have lined up behind Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman, and Scozzafava was lagging in third place. Under the circumstances, dropping out seems like a sensible choice. This election and the NJ gubernatorial are both reminders that it would probably make more sense to use an IRV/STV system in our elections. As for analysis of what this means in the real world, I’ll turn to Dave Weigel:

The best news for Owens in the Siena Poll might be the popularity of President Obama — his approval is at 59 percent in this district, the highest it’s been during the whole campaign. If Hoffman maintains his advantage with independents and Republicans and gets his excited activists — who are really walking on air today — to turn out the vote, he has a clear path to victory. The Democratic response is obvious — define Hoffman as a creature of the far right, max out their base turnout with the help of unions — and will be aided by a high-profile Monday campaign appearance from Vice President Joe Biden.

Of course, the fate of one congressional district that Republicans have held for more than a century might be less meaningful, in the long run, than the victory conservative activists have scored over their party’s establishment. Would-be Republican leaders such as Newt Gingrich, and to a lesser extent Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, have done themselves some damage by not getting on Hoffman’s bandwagon when it counted. Gingrich, in particular, who appeared on Fox News to make the case for Scozzafava, has quickly become a ridiculed figure among Tea Party activists.

It’s worth keeping in mind Andrew Gelman’s point that though Scozzafava was a moderate by national GOP standards she was in the more conservative half of her caucus in New York.

Afghan Public Opinion

Mark Kleiman summarizes some key bullet points from the Asia Foundation’s most recent survey of public opinion:

— In 2009, 42 percent of respondents say that the country is moving in the right direction.

— This figure is higher than in 2008 (38%). Similarly, 29 percent feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction compared to 32 percent in 2008, signaling a check on the trend of declining optimism that had been evident since 2006.

—The main reason for optimism continues to be good security which has been mentioned by an increasing proportion of respondents each year, from 31 percent in 2006 to 44 percent in 2009. More respondents in 2009 also mention reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

— Insecurity also remains the most important reason for pessimism, cited by 42 percent of respondents. However, the proportion of respondents that highlight insecurity in 2009 has fallen since 2008 when half of respondents (50%) emphasized this factor.

— Insecurity (including attacks, violence and terrorism) is identified as the biggest problem in Afghanistan by over a third of respondents (36%), particularly in the South East (48%), West (44%) and South West (41%). However, concern about other issues such as unemployment (35%), poor economy (20%), corruption (17%), poverty (11%) and education (11%) has increased in 2009 compared to 2008.

I think you can use this data to support a variety of policy conclusion. But it’s striking that the US debate between escalation and scaling-back tends to proceed from a shared assumption that Afghanistan is in a crisis point. But Afghans seem to think things are improving. Note also that corruption, which has been talked about a lot over the past month, rates relatively low on the complaint scale. In terms of unemployment it seems to me that the most helpful thing we can do would be to revise trade policies. Allow the duty free importation of Afghan textiles to the American market. See what it takes to persuade Turkey and India to stop putting such high taxes on Afghan agricultural products.

This kind of thing is very boring to talk about and isn’t amenable to David Brooks writing columns about how the real issue is whether or not Obama is manly enough to demand victory. But it’s really important. Poor labor market conditions make people disgruntled. In stable democracies they vote for opposition parties. In non-stable places they may take up arms.

Will The Public Option Fail?

Public option proponents knew they weren’t going to get the plan of their dreams when the House leadership agreed to drop the Medicare + 5% reimbursement rate formula, but may have been surprised when the CBO came back with an analysis saying that public plan premium rates will be higher than the private plans available in the exchange. How does that work? Well, as Brian Beutler explains the problem with putting a good health care option together is you might wind up with too many sick customers:

“The House bill does a very good job of setting up rules restricting cherry picking,” says Edwin Park, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. But, he adds, “private insurers have years of experience gaming rules,” and will continue to do so.

“Insurers, just in terms of how they do outreach, how they market, are still going to be able to cherry pick,” Park says.

The second is that the public option will just be a gentler creature–it won’t erect as many restrictions on available providers and services as its private competitors will, and that’s likely to attract riskier consumers.

This is the fundamental issue with any mandate/regulate/subsidize approach. A lot is hinging on the “regulate” part. You need to get the rules against cherry-picking and the implementation of the risk-adjustment payments right. Some people see the public option as an alternative to faith in the capacity of the regulators, but absent adequate regulation the distortions in the market could just wind up bringing the public plan down.

John Hannah, Patriot

By the time he left office, George W. Bush was hideously unpopular among the American people. Indeed, people hated him so much that the public continues to have extremely low confidence in the political party to which he belonged. Indeed, UFO conspiracy theories are more popular than the Republican Party. But as unpopular as Bush was at home, he was much more unpopular abroad.

Barack Obama’s election has drastically improved the world’s view of America to the extent that the Nobel Committee even saw fit to grant him a premature-seeming Nobel Peace Prize. Under the circumstances, any reasonable representative of American policy would try to emphasize as much as possible that he or she shared the world’s extremely low opinion of Obama’s predecessor and emphasize that whatever you may say about Obama, he’s not George W. Bush. For example Hillary Clinton is a smart woman:

Clinton told the students “there is a huge difference” between the Obama administration’s approach and that of former President George W. Bush. “I spent my entire eight years in the Senate opposing him,” she said to a burst of applause from the audience of several hundred students. “So to me, it’s like daylight and dark.”

John Hannah, despised and discredited former henchman to Dick Cheney, himself the the most despised and discredit of the many despised and discredited henchmen of the despised and discredited Bush administration, whines in response:

Does anyone advising President Obama and the secretary of state really believe that this kind of partisanship and trash-talking abroad about another American president is really going to buy us much long-term goodwill among either our friends or our adversaries? Do they imagine that this sort of thing really helps to advance U.S. national interests?

To which Mike Crowley offers the only reasonable response of course it will buy us goodwill.

Obviously, though, Hannah can’t really be so dumb as to not realize that there’s enormous, enormous, enormous good will to be gained through bashing the despised and discredited Bush administration. I take it that he savvily realizes that the world’s greatest fear about Obama is that he might not really be all that different from Bush. Hannah’s attacks, however, emphasize the reality of the change and thus improve America’s imagine in the world. So I say—nice work John Hannah!

Beck and Plato on Politics and Aesthetics

Glenn Beck’s bizarre Connect Four antics Thursday afternoon were amusing, but the best part of that segment was actually Beck’s thoughts on the relationship between art and politics:

Landsman gave an interesting description of his job interview with Valerie Jarrett saying he’d “use art to change the world.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t want art to change the world. I’d like people to change the world. Together, and out in the open. Not through some painting that makes me feel like that’s a great idea. Fox viewers are always called zombies and idiots. But who are the zombies, somebody who’s are getting real political discussion every day, or somebody making their decision through a painting or a broadway show?

At first glance, this seems like part of Glenn Beck’s continuing effort to get people to ensure the continuing relevance of Richard Hofstadter, by melding the paranoid style with anti-intellectualism. But another way of looking at it is that Beck is recapitulating an argument Plato makes in The Republic about the inferiority of art to philosophy. The complaint, essentially, is that art is a kind of cheating that bypasses the faculty of reason and can mislead the people. This leads him to the conclusion that poetry ought to be banned in a well-governed society.

In contrast to Plato, Beck at least superficially has a strong libertarian streak. But I think there’s reason to believe that authoritarianism is the main driver of right-wing politics in the contemporary United States. That’s part of the reason why these days some libertarians are strangely enthusiastic about unlimited government surveillance power (see also Jonah Goldberg who thinks cigarette taxes are fascism, but torture and indefinite detention are great) while others don’t seem very right-wing.

The Lessons of History

Spencer Ackerman observes the influence the lessons of Iraq are having on American operational thinking:

Second, yes, again: assuming what “worked” in Iraq will “work” in Afghanistan is to delude yourself, and to do so deliberately. Everyone says that he or she is not simply applying role lessons from one war to a different one, but I see more evidence, on balance, that that’s exactly what’s happening. How many times did I hear at the Marine Corps University’s COIN conference last month about what the lessons of Iraq were and how experience showed this-or-that. And that’s natural! You want to apply the benefit of experience — that’s what smart people do. But it’s also fraught with peril, and we all need to be rigorous here about checking our assumptions.

I think appeals to “the lessons of history” are, in general, dangerous. Efforts to make predictions based on observations of human history tend to fail. But it’s especially difficult when you’re basically talking about learning lessons based on a single case.

Endgame

He wears the same hat and sweater every day:

— TNR and guilt by association.

— On Saturday, October 31, at 3:30 p.m. EST, GESTURES will be meeting in Dupont Circle to perform ROUTINE EMERGENCY TRAINING. During this exercise, GESTURES will be testing and otherwise handling NO-JAZZ, NEW ORLEANS RHYTHMS, PUNK COMPOSITION and other hazardous materials.

— Tom Zarek was right.

— Ex-insurgent reintegration in Afghanistan.

— NBA salary cap projections.

Halloween weekend so it’s time for “Nightmare on My Street” — DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince.

Did Barack Obama Cause The Collapse in Private Investment

One thing’s for sure, the depths of the current recession can be seen in the low level of private investment. And this chart from Chris Edwards certain shows that despite the stimulus-driven return of GDP growth, private investment remains depressed. We won’t have a real recovery until it comes back:

That said, his interpretation of this data is ridiculous:

Business investment continues to be in a deep recession. Companies are simply not building factories or buying new machines and equipment.

Why not? I suspect that many firms are scared to death of higher taxes, inflation, health care mandates, increased labor regulation, and other profit-killers coming down the road from Washington. That is speculation, but I haven’t heard a better explanation of the death of private investment in America.

Note that though the steepest cliff-diving happened in 2008 Q4 and 2009 Q1, the decline actually began way back in 2006, so it’s hard to say how fear of Barack Obama could have caused it. As for a better explanation, how about the problems in the financial system that were accumulating during this period and then reached a true crisis point in the fall of 2008? Surely we haven’t forgotten about that already, have we? And since the collapse, we’ve been facing a problem of low aggregate demand and deflationary expectations, both of which discourage investment, combined with massive overcapacity in real estate. The idea that anticipating inflation would cause an investment drought is both illogical and flies in the face of the fact that markets are not anticipating inflation.

I would note that not only did the current decline in private investment start fully in the Bush years, but that there was a similar declining private investment phase during 2001. Does Edwards see that as caused by Bush embracing high taxes and health care mandates? Isn’t it more plausible that that was the dot-com bubble bursting just as this is the real estate bubble bursting?

On The Congressional Goldstone Resolution

I would associate myself with Spencer Ackerman’s remarks regarding the cynical resolution condemning the Goldstone Report that’s circulating in the congress.

A few additional points:

— Somewhere in hell, Slobodan Milosevic is smiling at the prospect of it becoming official US government policy that Richard Goldstone is biased in favor of Muslim terrorist organizations and his work therefore can and should be dismissed out of hand.

— For that matter, apartheid-era white supremacist militias and Nazis hiding gold in Argentina are going to be happy too.

— The resolution tellingly dwells a great deal on the real anti-Israel biases of the UN Human Rights Commission as a way of avoiding dealing with the actual content of the report.

— Also fans of this action will be authoritarian Arab governments hoping to make any future U.S. criticism of their human rights record look like a politically motivated joke undertaken by a hypocritical superpower.

Last, while I think Goldstone’s work was—despite the accusations in the resolution—clear in looking at human rights violations committed by both sides, it’s really not clear to me what allegations of the form “but he didn’t write about X!” would prove even if they were true. If credible accusations are leveled, an obligation exists to investigate them independently of whether or not accusations leveled against the other side are being investigated.

Barghouti on The Daily Show

Moustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian advocate of non-violent resistance and head of the Palestinian National Initiative alternative party to Hamas and Fatah, was on The Daily Show earlier this week. I had the opportunity to have dinner with Dr. Barghouti in a small group some time ago, and to hear him speak at a somewhat larger gathering last night. He’s a very interesting, very compelling person.

One thing that comes to mind thinking about this is how rare it is to see Palestinian perspectives in the American media. There’s not much of a percentage in it. If you present content that offends U.S. political orthodoxies you get in hot water and there’s no real upside. A wise man suggested to me yesterday that it might be helpful to not only watch the interview, but if you enjoy it write a note to The Daily Show telling them you appreciated it.

Might do some good.

The Public Wants Partisan Health Care; But Will They Get It?

Public opinion is in support of harsh measures to secure a public option:

“Which of these would you prefer – (a plan that includes some form of government-sponsored health insurance for people who can’t get affordable private insurance, but is approved without support from Republicans in Congress); or (a plan that is approved with support from Republicans in Congress, but does not include any form of government-sponsored health insurance for people who can’t get affordable private insurance)?”

Fifty one percent said they preferred the public option; 37 percent said they preferred a bill with some support from Republicans in Congress. Six percent said neither and seven percent expressed no opinion.

“Who will tell President Snowe and the rest of the Villagers” jokes Atrios.

I think it’s important, however, to remember that legislative outcomes are ultimately determined by raw vote counts and political power, not by semiotics and control of the media narrative. There are three ways to pass a health care bill:

One: Olympia Snowe votes for cloture.
Two: Ben Nelson votes for cloture.
Three: Fifty Democrats agree to try reconciliation.

Clearly Olympia Snowe doesn’t favor the “ignore Olympia Snowe” approach.

It’s pretty clear that there are fifty Democrats who favor a public option, and if they’re really willing to play procedural hardball there’s not much the parliamentarian or David Broder can do to stop them from enacting a bill with 50 votes. But we’ve seen very little enthusiasm for that approach, probably for reasons that have less to do with public opinion than with the fact that the 60 vote senate serves the interests of individual senators qua senators.

So you’re left with Ben Nelson—and everyone else. What does he want? Will joining with the Republicans to filibuster a health bill imperil his re-election?

Conditions Deteriorating in Guinea

In my safe havens piece I wrote that “Broken states, alas, are not all that rare.” This is a difficult point to raise without coming across as glib, but it is the reality. Neither the American public nor the American press has much taste for foreign affairs coverage. We basically see media attention and political controversy attach to either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there’s not the bandwidth to cover both of them simultaneously, much less the whole wide world.

But read, for example, Elizabeth Dickinson’s post about how Guinea’s year-old junta is unraveling:

All the comes at a time when the junta itself is falling apart. Dadis comes across as crazy, drugged, or bi-polar in his interviews and TV spots. He has become increasingly fragile, observers say, as the pressures of patronage and a fractured junta coalition weigh on him.

And fractured the junta certainly is. The group of 30 or so soldiers who came to power, with the backing of about 500 more, make up just a handful of the armies 20,000 forces. Within the high ranks, the most obvious split has emerged between Dadis and his defense minister, General Sekouba Konaté. The latter was an important figure in the military prior to the coup as is largely percieved as the biggest “threat” to Dadis’s rule — an impression codified by the fact that, since earlier this year, Dadis has refused to let his defense minister out of his sight for more than a few moments (they are pictured together above). When Konaté left the country several weeks ago to Morocco (the rumor mill claims he was sent to procure arms), many in Guinea wondered if he would be let back in to the country. His whereabouts now are unknown.

There’s also this Human Rights Watch account of the premeditated murder of protesters in the country, but we can probably safely dismiss that as part of HRW’s vast anti-Israel conspiracy.

Anyways, none of this is to say we should withdraw all our forces from Afghanistan and invade Guinea instead. It’s just that the real humanitarian and security issues involved in weak or fragile states need to be kept in some kind of perspective and our actual policy commitment should be balanced.

Where Have All The Investment Opportunities Gone?

Kevin Drum offers an interesting perspective on the “savings glut”:

I'm putting my money into American real estate! (cc photo by chi king)

But why weren’t there enough good, traditional places to invest that money? And by “traditional” I mean people who want to build factories or expand call centers or start up biotech ventures. That is, businesses that provide goods and services to meet demand from consumers and corporations. The supply side of the economy may have been going great guns, but the demand side wasn’t keeping up. This is why some people think it’s better to talk about this phenomenon as an “investment drought.”

Kevin offers an explanation for this that relates to the maldistribution of income in the United States. But isn’t the real issue here that the good investment opportunities were all in China?

That’s what was screwy about the global economy of the 2000s. For each and every one of those years, everyone believed that the short- and medium-term growth prospects in China were better than the prospects in the United States. And yet on net investment funds were flowing from China to the United States. Similarly, Americans had much more consumer goods than Chinese people, yet it was Americans borrowing money to finance present consumption. Borrowing it from China! That’s why Bernanke called it a savings glut.

But in a larger sense, this reflects the failing of the international financial architecture. The IMF wasn’t just created as a stimulus program for the makers of giant puppets—the architects of the postwar economic order thought the globe would be wracked by periodic crises without something to play its role. Nevertheless after the way the IMF handled things in the 1990s, Asian countries resolved to never again rely on the IMF and to instead start stockpiling dollars. But this effort to develop a workaround created a ton of problems. Bypassing the organization turns out to be a poor substitute for actually addressing the problems with it.

An Administration Win on Honduras

Unfortunately, foreign policy achievements have a way of not getting noticed if they don’t involve killing anyone with high explosives. This is too bad, since finding ways to resolve conflicts that don’t involve killing anyone with high explosives is generally preferable to approaches based on death and destruction.

So let’s take a time out to note that the Obama administration’s approach to Honduras looks to be paying off in the form of a deal that will temporarily re-instate President Zelaya in advance of new elections to be held in January. The US has an unfortunate history of backing coups in Latin America and an unfortunate history of heavy-handed involvement in Latin American domestic politics, so threading the needle between heavy-handed involvement and coup-backing was difficult. But they got the job done, and as Tim Fernholz says the results are likely to be appreciated throughout the region.

More Growth Needed

Paul Krugman posts a chart illustrating that 3.5 percent growth is not going to result in a rapid fall in the unemployment rate:

Ryan Avent offers more context:

And consider this: the last time the unemployment rate hit its current level was during the recession of 1981-1982 (during which the unemployment rate actually peaked at 10.8% during the final quarter of the recession). Here are the quarterly growth rates for the six quarters immediately following the end of that recession: 5.1%, 9.3%, 8.1%, 8.5%, 8.0%, 7.1%. And at the end of that period, the unemployment rate was still above 7%.

As he says, this implies that even if worried about the sustainability of the Q3 growth pattern prove misguided and we can keep growing at 3.5 percent, “American unemployment will remain near 10% through the end of 2010, at least.”

Two points: One is that incumbent members of congress need to get their heads out of the sand and recognize that they’re likely to be kicked out of office by angry mobs if this comes to pass. A lot of politicians and political operatives in DC are very impressed by polling that shows people concerned about the budget deficit. I think it would be really politically insane for people to take that too literally. If congress makes the deficit even bigger in a way that helps spur recovery, then come election day people will notice the recovery and be happy. If, by contrast, the labor market is still a disaster then people will be pissed off. It’s true that they might say they’re pissed off at the deficit, but the underlying source of anger is the objective bad conditions.

The other point is that we’re largely at the mercy of the Federal Reserve here. And this worries me. Ben Bernanke is a good economist with a good reputation. He’s also a conservative Republican appointed to his job by George W. Bush after loyal service in a previous government job to which he was appointed by George W. Bush. It seems extremely plausible to me that a scenario in which the US experiencing three years of modest economic growth, high unemployment, rising productivity, flat wages, rising corporate profits, and GOP election victories is one he’d consider just fine.

America’s Role in Afghan Corruption

Joanna Nathan, who lived in Kabul from 2003 to 2009 working for the Institute for War and then the International Crisis Group, says the United States needs to clean up its own act if we want to improve the corruption situation in Afghanistan:

But before the U.S. administration is in any real position to make demands of the Afghan government, it needs to get its own act together. Over-reliance on expensive private contractors needs to be severely curtailed with the focus put on injecting money through Afghan government systems in a way that strengths local institutions rather than subverts them. The measure of effectiveness needs to be on impact on the ground rather than the sheer amounts poured in. Overarching this must be a cohesive approach across U.S. government agencies as to who is being engaged and ensuring that that no one has impunity.

Up on the 11th floor here at CAP Caroline Wadhams, Colin Cookman, and Christina Misunas recently did a piece on America’s faustian bargains with Afghan warlords that makes many overlapping points.

The Final Frontier

Today in The National I have a new article out arguing that the fear of safe havens doesn’t make a great deal of sense and is part of a lack of strategic priority setting. After all, the truth about Afghanistan is that it’s not so much “the graveyard of empires” as it is simply a place empires eventually realize isn’t very important.

What the piece doesn’t deal with is the idea that a large American military deployment in Afghanistan is necessary for the stability of Pakistan and a broader South Asian security context. I’m not sure whether I think that argument is right or not, but for what it’s worth it strikes me as a much more plausible idea. Which is to say that if it’s true that our efforts in Afghanistan are playing a crucial stabilizing role in Pakistan, then that definitely seems like the kind of thing we should be pouring a lot of resources into. My colleague Brian Katulis has a smart recent take on Pakistan, but it doesn’t really delve into the Afghanistan connection.

The Trust Gap

Some data from Gallup:

Electorally vulnerable Democrats may have something to gain from the perception of triangulating away from their party leadership, but this sort of result tends not to support the idea that breaking with congressional Democrats to join congressional Republicans in a filibuster of Obama’s signature health initiatives would be a political winner.

Health Care Saves Lives, Lack of Coverage Contributes to Death

Among conservatives the view is that health care is so important that we don’t dare have the government give it to anyone because that might, through leaps of logic, lead to hypothetical future rationing. At the same time, even though health care’s important it’s rude to point out that America’s high uninsured rate kills people:

Lack of adequate health care may have contributed to the deaths of some 17,000 US children over the past two decades, according to a study released by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

The research, to be published Friday in the Journal of Public Health, was compiled from more than 23 million hospital records from 37 states between 1988 and 2005.

The study concluded that children without health insurance are far more likely to succumb to their illnesses than those with medical coverage.

Sadly, the life-and-death stakes for uninsured people don’t seem to move the hearts of centrist senators nearly as much as the plaintive cries of insurance company executives. Thus we continue to hear that people not only oppose creating a public option, they oppose such an option so vehemently that they would filibuster are large and multi-faceted health care bill merely in order to kill it.

Commitment to Development

The Center for Global Development has put together a cool web ap that lets you see how different countries do in terms of being helpful to the developing world:

The United States is about average overall. Our standout categories are trade and security, we do badly on environment and aid metrics. Nicest overall country is Sweden.

Endgame

There are rules to obey:

— Looking back at the infamous TNR endorsement of Joe Lieberman.

— Al Mubadara: The Palestinian National Movement.

— We need a Green Energy Bank.

— Palau sticking with the USA in unpopular UN votes while our greenhouse gas emissions are leading to the complete destruction of their country.

— J Street’s big achievement.

— But is it too late?

— On bus stops, listen to Lenin: Better fewer, but better.

The Future of the Left is playing at the Rock and Roll Hotel tonight. Here’s their “I Am Civil Service”.

Ricks Suggests Obama is Stalling on Afghanistan to Help John Corzine

He doesn’t endorse it, per se, but Tom Ricks sort of uncritically passes on the following fairly serious—and seriously weird—accusation against the White House:

Last but most importantly: Nov. 3, gubernatorial elections in both Virginia and New Jersey. The latter of which is my reasoning why the decision was delayed this long. Corzine is in the fight of his life and Obama is going to piss people off either way. Important special elections also in California and New York.

I’m not going to shift into faux-naive mode and pretend it’s outrageous to even insinuate that the administration thinks about politics when it comes to national security. No doubt the president is aware of the general state of public opinion and thinks about how his decisions on Afghanistan will impact his ability to work on other aspects of his agenda. That said, the idea that a decision is being specifically pushed back until after the election because somehow that will help John Corzine is kind of bizarre.

I mean, there’s not even any reason I can think of for believing that delay is helpful to Corzine. This sounds like a person so eager to dream up insidious motives to attribute to the president that he’s come up with one that doesn’t even make minimal sense. Ricks himself has been sharply critical of Obama’s slow decision-making pace. If he wants to endorse the claim, that the “most important” factor in the delay is a cynical effort to intervene in the NJ gubernatorial election he should say so plainly and back the argument up. If not, he should withdraw it. Just passing this on as an “interesting analysis” from “My book researcher, Kyle Flynn, a two-tour vet of Afghanistan (with extra points for duty in Oruzgan, the Pashtun answer to Arkansas) and now a graduate student at Georgetown University,” doesn’t really cut it.

Tax Expenditures Are a Poor Way of Subsidizing Infrastructure Investment

(cc photo by moaksey)

The intuitive consequence of the U.S. political system’s aversion to taxes is lower levels of public services and public infrastructure. In reality, however, one major consequence is a tendency to provide services and infrastructure through relatively inefficient methods. The reason is that there are two ways for the government to try to finance things. One is to spend more money and the other is to create a special tax break. Either of these things implies offsetting tax increases in the long run. But the tendency is for conservatives and centrists to treat “tax cuts” as good and “spending” as bad, thus putting a big thumb on the scales in favor of using tax expenditures rather than spending.

One special case of this is the use of tax-exempt bonds to finance infrastructure investment. The federal government exempts certain classes of bonds from income taxation, typically bonds issued by state and local governments to finance investments in school construction or transportation. This subsidizes infrastructure investment and it costs money. A different approach would be to just spend federal dollars on subsidizing infrastructure investment. The CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation have a new study out on the issue concluding that this tax expenditure approach is highly inefficient. As the Director’s Blog explains:

That study concludes that the amount that the federal government forgoes through tax-exempt bond financing is greater than the associated reduction in borrowing costs for state and local governments. Some analysts have estimated the magnitude of that differential and conclude that several billion dollars each year may simply accrue to bondholders in higher income-tax brackets without providing any cost savings to borrowers.

The reason is that the value of the subsidy is shared between the infrastructure project and the buyer of the bond. Consequently $1 in federal tax expenditure generates less than $1 in reduced borrowing costs. In fact, according to the report “only about 80 percent of the tax expenditure from tax-exempt bonds actually translates inot lower borrowing costs for states and localities, with the remaining 20 percent simply taking the form of a federal transfer to bondholders in higher tax brackets.”

In other words, the approximately $7.5 billion in annual lost tax revenue is generating only $6 billion in additional infrastructure investment.