Matt Yglesias

“Minority Rights” and the US Senate

Lamar Alexander on reconciliation:

The reconciliation procedure is a little-used legislative procedure — 19 times, it’s been used. It’s for the purpose of taxing, spending, and reducing deficits. But the difference here is, that there’s never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate, it would really be the end of the Senate as a protector of minority rights, the place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority.

As to the historical use of the budget reconciliation process this is hypocritical nonsense. But it’s also worth taking this “minority rights” business on.

As everyone knows, in a democracy you normally do things with a majority-rules or plurality-rules decision procedure. But as everyone also knows, part of building a sustainable liberal democratic polity is that you don’t just have “the tyranny of the majority.” A strong framework of individual rights is necessary. The idea is that you shouldn’t have the few subjected to oppression by the many. And all that’s fine as far as it goes. But it has to be seen clearly that the US Senate’s countermajoritarian aspects are rarely if ever used to protect “minority rights” in any relevant sense of the word. The Senate fought a lonely battle on behalf of Jim Crow segregation, not against it. And I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an example of a vulnerable minority being subjected to majoritarian persecution by the House, the White House, and the Supreme Court being saved by the heroics of the filibuster.

Luce & Machiavelli on Leadership

Edward Luce in the FT: “American presidents with the greatest record of bipartisan legislative achievement, notably Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, got their way by intimidating opponents, not by splitting the difference. As Machiavelli famously observed, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. For all his intelligence, nobody fears Mr Obama.”

Exactly. Arguably this trend started with the decision to appoint Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. I have no complaints with her job performance, but it didn’t exactly send an “I will crush my enemies” message.

Copyright and Author Starvation

Jason Epstein has a pretty thoughtful article in The New York Review of book about the future of digital publishing. It’s worth pointing out, however, that he engaged twice in a kind of badly overblown rhetoric about the consequences of a possible world in which copyright collapses and nobody can earn money selling books:

This future is a predictable inference from digitization in its current stage of development in the United States, its details widely discussed in the blogosphere by partisans of various outcomes, including the utopian fantasy that in the digital future content will be free of charge and authors will not have to eat. [...]

Traditional territorial rights will become superfluous and a worldwide, uniform copyright convention will be essential. Protecting content from unauthorized file sharers will remain a vexing problem that raises serious questions about the viability of authorship, for without protection authors will starve and civilization will decline, a prospect recognized by the United States Constitution, which calls for copyright to sustain writers not primarily as a matter of equity but for the greater good of public enlightenment.

Obviously, if you couldn’t make money selling books it’s not that people would write books full-time and starve to death. Nor is it that nobody would write books. Instead, an even larger share of books would be written by people with jobs at universities or other non-profit organizations (this blog is free to read!) or grants of some kind. You’d also no doubt still have an endless flood of self-help books that serve as loss-leaders for conferences or other sources of revenue. Presumably if books were free, then municipalities and universities wouldn’t need to spend money acquiring books for libraries—maybe that would free up more money for grants and stipends to support the creation of new works.

Maybe in the future the United States will be an Yglesias-style social democracy, and committed authors will work part-time jobs secure in the knowledge that even low-income people are served by excellent health care & mass transit and can live in safe neighborhoods that feature good schools for their kids. Or maybe it will be a Brazil-style center of massive inequality and authors will be patronized by vain billionaires.

I dunno. I don’t want to be too pollyannish about this. Realistically, all of the scenarios I can think of still lead to fewer books being published. And maybe more but more expensive books better serves the “greater good of public enlightenment.” Or maybe fewer but cheaper books does. Epstein, to his credit, has the right criteria in mind. But the subject of what actually meets that criteria deserves serious consideration. Books were being published, after all, long before there was effective copyright enforcement.

January Was the Warmest Temperature in World History

The world is a big place, so despite unseasonable blizzards in the media/political center of the US Northeast on average the planet is still getting warmer:

“January, according to satellite (data), was the hottest January we’ve ever seen,” said Nicholls of Monash University’s School of Geography and Environmental Science in Melbourne.

“Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen,” he said of the satellite data record since 1979.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000.

And yet, there’s still snow in my building courtyard. Obviously, Al Gore is a fool!

The Amphetamines Era

The new biography of Willie Mays sounds interesting, but the notion that “[a]bove all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy” is either naive or dishonest.

Amphetamines have been widely used for decades, dating well back into Mays’ time as a player and even earlier. And why wouldn’t they have been used? Using them without a prescription wasn’t illegal until the 1970s, and there was no baseball rule against using them until even earlier. There’s good reason to believe that uncontrolled amphetamine use is dangerous, so it makes perfect sense to try to create an enforceable ban on their use to prevent a downward spiral that has bad health consequences, but the fact of the matter is that there was no such enforceable ban when Mays played and amphetamines were widely used. They’re drugs and they enhanced performance.

There was no time “before” people tried to get an edge by ingesting useful substances (I drink a lot of coffee while writing blog posts in a rush in the morning) and there never will be. Sports have rules for a reason, and rules that aim to restrict consumption of potentially dangerous drugs seem like a good idea to me. And players shouldn’t break the rules. But the idea that some vast moral transformation occurred circa 1995 to which the great ones of yore were immune is silly.

Olympic Hockey

I’m not normally a big hockey fan, but I’ve been enjoying the Olympics and thought this was smart from Barry Petchesky:

The quality of players is simply better. Look at the rosters of the top teams in the Olympics. Not a third- or fourth-liner among them. No guys on the team just for the PK, or to neutralize the opponent’s first line. These teams are stronger, faster and generally more skilled than any NHL team.

This is what makes Olympic hockey really stand out for me compared to a lot of other international team sports competitions. Injecting a little nationalistic rivalry into sports is always fun, but if you look at something like basketball only the United States can regularly field a squad that’s better, talent-wise, than your average NBA team. At the moment the Spanish National Team would also probably be better than most NBA teams, and in the past that was true of Argentina, but the result is basically some slim pickings. Hockey delivers a tournament where you see really good teams going at it for their country. And of course this is part of what makes the World Cup great—soccer is a sufficiently popular sport worldwide that many countries can field excellent teams.

Food Taxes vs Food Subsidies

In principle, taxing unhealthy food and subsidizing healthy food ought to have similar impacts on consumer behavior. But as we know, actual human decision-making often varies from what that kind of theoretically-correct indifference. Tyler Cowen points to some evidence that taxes would have more impact:

The results, just published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, show that taxes were more effective in reducing calories purchased over subsides. Specifically, taxing unhealthy foods reduced overall calories purchased, while cutting the proportion of fat and carbohydrates and upping the proportion of protein in a typical week’s groceries.

By contrast, subsidizing the prices of healthy food actually increased overall calories purchased without changing the nutritional value at all. It appears that mothers took the money they saved on subsidized fruits and vegetables and treated the family to less healthy alternatives, such as chips and soda pop. Taxes had basically the opposite effect, shifting spending from less healthy to healthier choices.

When you think about it in a broader context, taxes look even more favorable. If you tax unhealthy food, you’ll wind up with a bunch of revenue that you can spend on subsidized preschool or fixing potholes or lower general sales taxes. By contrast, if you subsidize healthy food, you’ll wind up needing to make your preschool subsidies less generous or take longer to fix potholes or raise general sales taxes. If there’s some very compelling reason to think that subsidies will be more efficacious at promoting public health than taxes, then of course you have to consider it seriously. But insofar as the evidence implies the reverse, there’s a very strong case for taxing unhealthy foods. Of course as a first step in an ideal world we’d reduce our spending on agricultural programs that subsidize production/consumption of unhealthy foods, a crazy policy initiative supported by nobody except all the relevant members of congress.

If You Want to Get Things Done, Use Reconciliation

There’s a ton to chew on in this Washington Post piece by Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson about increasingly desperate efforts to find a legislative approach to the climate problem that can survive in Congress. I just wanted to highlight this one graf:

The change in policy, which might even include giving money raised through carbon pollution allowances directly back to consumers, a scheme known as “cap-and-dividend,” could appeal to some wavering senators. Senior Obama administration officials have also been studying the cap-and-dividend approach. But it remains unclear whether that would be enough to produce the 60 votes proponents need, especially when the Senate has yet to finish work on health-care legislation and a jobs package.

As I’ve been trying to warn since Election Day, I think it’s just not realistic to imagine that our country’s big problems can be solved under conditions of supermajority rule. The brief period during which there were 60 Democratic Senators was fluky and unsustainable. A big part of the key to tackling the climate issue has to be moving beyond this 60 vote business. Ideally, that would mean changing the rules of the Senate. But more modestly, it can mean the budget reconciliation process.

And in principle one thing that could be appealing about a “cap-and-dividend” approach is that it would be ideally suited to the rules governing reconciliation as it’s more or less a pure budgetary measure. And from a tactical point of view if you ask me this needs to be the top priority, not asking what kind of climate bill can get 60 votes, but what kind of climate bill only needs 50 votes.

Conservatives for Tax Frustration

There are two different things that make paying taxes undesirable. One is that after you pay taxes, you have less money. The other is that the act of paying can be annoying and stressful. Normal people, such as myself and Felix Salmon, favor steps to make taxpaying less annoying on the grounds that that would be less annoying. But Ed Felten says he wants to become annoyed and frustrated when he pays a tax or a fee, because “those are just the emotions I want to cultivate toward the entire enterprise” of financing government.

Well fair enough. But as the tax season is upon us, I do want people to understand that paying taxes is as annoying as it is largely because right-wing ideologues deliberately make it as annoying as possible. It would be fairly simple for the IRS to mail people “pre-completed” forms, subject to the taxpayers’ review and correction. Rich people would still want to hand their documents over to an account for analysis, but for normal people you’d just read the thing over and sign. But a coalition of tax preparation firms and outfits like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform always stands in the way.

The Cameras On

Igor Volsky’s right, of course, that the non-productive nature of last week’s health care summit illustrates exactly why it was silly of Barack Obama to ever promise that C-SPAN cameras would be “in the room” when legislators negotiate bills and it’s silly of his Republican critics to try to hold him to it: When you put politicians in a room full of cameras they just posture for the cameras and it’s not possible to get anything done.

There are plenty of other areas related to the health reform process where transparency is great. People need to be able to see and understand the details of the legislative proposals that negotiators come up with. And the public needs to be able to get a clear sense of what’s going on with the actual operations of our health care policy. But you put cameras in a room to create a TV spectacle. Sometimes a TV spectacle is a good idea, but it’s never going to be a negotiation.

Quasi-Experimental Data on KIPP

Interesting paper from Joshua D. Angrist, Susan M. Dynarski, Thomas J. Kane, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters titled “Who Benefits from KIPP” that’s able to look in a rigorous way at whether the high performance of KIPP students relative to demographically similar non-KIPP students is merely the result of some kind of selection effect. They confirm earlier studies that indicate that it is not, and KIPP provides genuine value-added beyond what’s typical of American schools:

We use applicant lotteries to evaluate the impact of KIPP Academy Lynn, a KIPP charter school that is mostly Hispanic and has a high concentration of limited English proficiency (LEP) and special-need students, groups that charter critics have argued are typically under-served. The results show overall gains of 0.35 standard deviations in math and 0.12 standard deviations in reading for each year spent at KIPP Lynn. LEP students, special education students, and those with low baseline scores benefit more from time spent at KIPP than do other students, with reading gains coming almost entirely from the LEP group.

KIPP’s approach to teaching is considerably more time-intensive (we do lots of extended learning time stuff at CAP) than what you typically see in American schools, and it continues to be not-so-clear to me how far KIPP will be able to scale-up in any given market. But it keeps expanding and thus far the results of that expansion seem quite positive.

Fun With Tax Deductions

Bruce Bartlett offers this sobering table that illustrates what a mess the current tax code is:

Furthermore, even within income classes of people with roughly similar incomes there is now a crazy quilt of effective rates that vary enormously depending on things like whether one owns a house or rents, whether one has children, how much of one’s income is derived from wages or capital, and various other factors. As one can see in the table below, for those in the middle quintile (20%) of income, 25% had no tax liability or a negative liability while the rest paid between 3.2% and 9% of their income in federal income taxes. Even among the ultra-wealthy, the top 1% of tax filers, effective tax rates vary 10-fold between 2.6% and 26.9%.

I think a fair amount of variation in effective tax rates based on the number of dependent children you have around makes sense. Realistically if John’s a single guy making $65,000 a year and Mary’s trying to raise two kids on $80,000 a year, there’s no reason to think distributive justice that requires Mary to pay a higher tax rate. But for the rest this is very dubious. In particular, the wide array of deductions & credits for people who do this or that, each with their own phase-out points (or not) and different levels of refundability (or not) is a mess.

Chile Earthquake

Earthquake hits Chile. This one is much more powerful than the Haitian earthquake—1000 times more powerful, I’m hearing—but fortunately looks like it will be much less devastating thanks toa Chile’s vastly superior infrastructure, government capacity, and general level of wealth.

Alphabetism

Given my last name, I’ve long been concerned about the last socially accepted form of systematic institutionalized arbitrary discrimination in the United States: Alphabetism. Nobody ever made Matt Yglesias and Rachel Zabarkes sit in the back of the bus, but we sure as hell did have to stand at the end of the line at snack time in school (worse, later she got married and changed her name to Rachel Zabarkes Friedman and briefly worked at National Review). By the time they handed me my diploma at college graduation, practically everyone and their families has already scattered elsewhere. And of course if I co-author anything with anyone, my name goes last.

So I want to heartily endorse David Lake’s proposals for reform. Personally as a matter of principle I try to list people in reverse alphabetical order, but often find myself overruled in formal contexts.

Endgame

Are you with me?

— I think if James Madison had meant the Senate to require a 60% supermajority he would have written that into the constitution instead of passing the message to George Will from beyond the grave.

— More lies from Carly Simon.

— Curitiba, Brazil is the world leader in Bus Rapid Transit.

— Premature deaths due to lack of health insurance are on the rise.

Song of the day, vote-counting edition. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart “I’m With You”

Creating Green Rental Homes

The ongoing foreclosure crisis is causing the Federal Housing Administration to become the owner of an increasing quantity of property around the country. CAP’s Andrew Jakabovic proposes that we seize the opportunity to retrofit them as green rental housing:

How? By pooling these houses by location, renting them out affordably, and then selling them in as a portfolio of already-occupied rental properties to institutional investors. Retrofitting and weatherizing these homes before renting them out provides even more value to taxpayers by reducing operating costs in the form of lower energy bills. Because the value of rental properties is driven by the net cash flow from the properties, demonstrable cost savings on operations increase the portfolio’s value.

In 2009 alone, FHA paid insurance claims and then took title on 75,000 single-family houses. As increasing numbers of foreclosed homes come into the possession of the FHA, the federal government could create long-term affordable rental housing in communities across our nation while minimizing losses to taxpayers who stand behind FHA mortgage payment guarantees. By repairing these foreclosed homes to meet the highest energy efficiency standards and then renting them out, taxpayers may well recover the most value after foreclosure.

The retrofitting would be a good jobs project at a period when the labor market for people in the building trades is terrible. What’s more, a variety of misguided housing policies have left the country lacking the sort of good, deep markets in rental housing that would be beneficial to families that need a place to live and shouldn’t be taking on big loans.

Coming Soon to Television News: Ugly People

ABC News is in the process of massive staff cutbacks that’s going to entail efficiency-seeking in terms of looking to have reporters who can do their own video shooting and presenting. According to industry consultant Steve Safran, that means more ugly people on camera:

“The economics of news simply don’t support high salaries anymore,” he says.

“This changes the paradigm of desirability from hiring someone who’s good-looking and can read to someone who’s well-rounded and can present.

“TV is always hiring good-looking people,” he adds, “but you’ll need more skills than that.”

Basically it’ll all be BHTV…..

Rep Trent Franks: Blacks Were Better Off Under Slavery

I’ve heard a lot of crazy things in my day, but this one from Rep Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona, takes the cake:

FRANK: In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say “How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can’t believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible.” And we’re right, we’re right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America’s soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

What’s the deal with Arizona politicians? They seem to really distinguish themselves among non-Dixie states—from Barry Goldwater’s bold stand against the Civil Rights Act to the long holdout against making MLK Day a holiday to this garbage from Rep Franks—in terms of racial cluelessness.

In the Fight

MoveOn takes a break from public option advocacy to hit a Republican over health care:

“As House Minority Leader and a favorite of the insurance industry, John’s shown the courage to stand up for the big guy,” MoveOn charges in the ad.

“He’s defended health insurance companies’ rights to jack up your premiums, to drop you whenever they feel like it, and most recently, to maintain monopolies that hurt consumers.”

I think that’s an example of the political upside to passing health reform. As is well-known by now, if you ask people about “Obama’s health care plan” or something along those lines, it polls very poorly. But many of the specific provisions poll well. Anyone who already voted for one or the other version of health reform is vulnerable—very vulnerable—to the attack that he or she voted for Barack Obama’s trillion dollar death panel boondoggle. But a candidate who’s willing and able to embrace that vote and say something passed at least has the chance to fight back with ads accusing his or her opponent of defending health insurance companies’ rights to jack up your premiums, to drop you whenever they feel like it, etc.

Even if they manage to make themselves somewhat more popular than Republicans, House Democrats are going to face big losses anyway so there’s no sense in being too pollyannish about any strategy. Bottom line is that when you’re facing trouble, it’s smart to at least give yourself a fighting chance.

Stuffed

The Onion: “Senator Dikembe Mutombo Blocks Record Amount Of Legislation”.

Something to note about the modern-day fad where Republican members of congress criticize the very idea of big, comprehensive bills is that the nature of Senate obstruction makes such bills necessary. Even when you have the requisite 60 votes to break a filibuster, a determined opponent can force to 30-hour periods of cloture “ripening.” That’s not a big deal if you’re trying to move your ideas through a few major bills. But it means that it would be totally impossible for the leader to just come to the floor with a series of a few dozen small-bore proposals on a related topic and then let each one be voted on individuallly.