Domestic Policy ArchivesMay 11, 2008Why You Shouldn't Donate Money to HarvardBrad DeLong explains in a great posts that tours us from the contrasting course of the University of California and the Ivy League by way of a detour into the economics of working-owned firms in Communist Yugoslavia. Long story short if you, like me, are a graduate of a fancy college and the development people come around asking you for money don't do it save your money for institutions that (a) have less money and (b) do more to help people in need. Jingle MailMichael Hiltzik says the much-discussed trend of "jingle mail" or "walkaways" where homeowners who could afford to make their monthly payments simply choose not to because declining home prices have made it not worth their while may not be a real trend at all -- there's no real evidence that this is happening. Ignorance is StrengthWhat Mark Kleiman said. But to recap, Glenn Reynolds said Barack Obama's economic policy views were socialism. I pointed out that they were not, in fact, socialism. Reynolds, rather than conceded that he was wrong, pointed out that Obama favors tighter fuel efficiency regulations for auto makers which Reynolds thinks is bad policy. That's a fine opinion to have -- I'm not enthusiastic about efficiency mandates myself -- but that's still no reason to mislead your readers by misdescribing the content of Obama's economic agenda. May 10, 2008Obama and SeniorsFor all the somewhat vague talk about "white working class" voters, the more specific issue facing Barack Obama concerns older white people. The initial battle lines of an Obama-McCain fight feature a level of age polarization that's really unusual. Andrew Kohut, Jonathan Alter, and J.P. Green all have interesting commentary on this. I would only add that this kind of consideration, combined with Obama's lead over McCain in the polls is fundamentally what makes me optimistic about his chances in November. There's no telling how many McCainiac seniors will be swayed by the Obama campaign pointing out that McCain has spent years waging war on Social Security and Medicare and basically thinks everyone should get on the "marry a wealthy heiress" retirement plan, but it's going to be more than zero people. Seniors have already hears a good deal of the sort of culture war attacks on Obama that are likely to be the biggest thing driving them toward McCain, but they've heard essentially nothing of the retirement policy attacks on McCain that are likely to be the biggest thing driving them toward Obama. Consequently, Obama's senior deficit is very big. But he's winning anyway, and though he'll probably never close the senior gap he'll almost certainly narrow it. National Train Day
Today is National Train Day, which would be my favorite day of the year but it's actually the first one ever so I have no particular opinions about it. Transit UpVia Atrios, we learn that people are price sensitive: With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead. The question is: What happens next? What really shouldn't happen is for politicians to run around talking as if expensive gasoline is a temporary phenomenon. Responsible leaders will tell people that prices will fluctuate, but that as long as the Chinese and Indian economies keep growing, the general trajectory will be upward. Then they should sympathize with people who would like to take transit, but find it prohibitively inconvenient and with people who've just started taking transit and are finding it annoying and they should commit to making transit better and more available. Alternatively, you could act like southern Florida and propose steep service reductions on your commuter rail system. But that'd be crazy. Jurisdictions with existing commuter rail lines need to make service more frequent. With transit, you can get into good equilibria and bad equilibria. On the good path, you have tons and tons of people who want to ride your line and as a result service is very frequent so as to accommodate all the traffic. And because service is so frequent, lots of people find the line convenient to use. On the bad path, infrequent service leads to low ridership which leads to infrequent service which leads to low ridership. Supply and DemandWhat a crazy notion! If you adjust parking meter fees to be higher when and where demand is higher and lower at non-peak times and locations, then you might make it easier to find parking, reducing congestion (fewer people circling looking for a spot), and generate revenue that could be used to upgrade non-car options, further reducing congestion for those trips that truly require a car. Sounds like a bad idea to me. May 9, 2008Bury The Trees!Fundamentally, to avoid catastrophic climate change we're going to need to reduce fossil fuel consumption. But it's also going to be necessary to look at other things we can do, so this bury trees to sequester their carbon scheme is probably worth exploring. It Takes TwoDavid Brooks has an interesting column about David Cameron and his successful repositioning of the Tory Party in the UK. He concludes: Cameron describes a new global movement, with rising center-right parties in Sweden, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, California and New York (he admires Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg). American conservatives won’t simply import this model. But there’s a lot to learn from it. The only question is whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness. Ultimately, my hope would be to see the GOP reposition sooner rather than later. The way American political institutions work, it's very difficult to govern on a pure party line basis. I would prefer European-style institutions, but we don't have them. Consequently, a hard-right GOP -- even a hard-right GOP minority -- can make progressive change extremely difficult, whereas a more moderate GOP would make it easier to do things, even if that more moderate GOP were more electorally successful. Many conservatives will, I assume, agree with me about this and therefore want to resist the sort of changes Brooks favors. Scary Charts
Ezra Klein draws my attention to this chart which Business Week's Michael Mandel calls "the world's scariest chart." It's certainly a bit scary, but I'm not really sure how scared of it we should be. I imagine, for example, that you could make some kind of chart plotting the ratio of iPod/iPhone expenses to GDP over time. You'd see that after decades of virtuous zero, the ratio has been steadily climbing at a clearly unsustainable rate. You'd see a similar trend in other countries, but with the U.S. far ahead of the pack. Now that's a scary chart. But of course all it would show is that Apple has succeeded in introducing some new products that people like to buy. Likable new products = growing share of GDP going to the products. And that's not scary at all, it's a good thing. Loans, meanwhile, are, like iPods, a kind of product. And when new debt products are invented, the total amount of debt goes up. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The ability to take on debt from time to time is very useful for individuals and institutions alike. And certainly I think most people believe the invention of the 30 year mortgage was a good thing. And while it's of course better not to be carrying massive credit card debts, the whole existence of credit card debt is a consequence of the existence of credit cards and credit cards are, on the whole, useful things to have around. That's why they're so popular, and that's why there's credit card debt. Which isn't to say that there's nothing to worry about in household debt figures, only that to see what, if anything, we should be worried about we need to know more than the bare fact that debt is on the rise. There are, moreover, some reasons to think that the savings rate in the country is being understated by the fact that things like expenditures on education are counted as consumption when they probably should be looked at as a kind of investment in human capital. After all, a 22 year-old college graduate who paid for school with some loans will be more indebted than a 22 year-old who's been working full-time for the past four years, but the one with the college degree probably has the better financial outlook. The Next Eisenhower
Judith Rodin has an insightful op-ed about the transportation policy crossroads the country faces next year as it comes time for congress to reauthorize the main federal transportation funding legislation. Will the next administration show the vision of a Dwight Eisenhower and give us the fundamental rethink of infrastructure policy we need: Another critical danger is environmental. Today, the transportation sector consumes 90 percent of the United States' imported oil while producing one-third of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions -- and one-twelfth of the world's. Yet the federal government clings to a backward funding formula: The more a state's residents drive, the more money that state receives. In fact, projected increases in automotive travel will release so much greenhouse gas by 2020 that environmental protections achieved through higher gas-mileage requirements and anticipated advances in low-emissions fuels will be completely negated. Her op-ed seems designed to promote the America 2050 project which I'll confess to not being familiar with, but she's succeeding in piquing my interest and hopefully yours as well. Photo by Flickr user paulkimo9 used under a Creative Commons license May 8, 2008Nice HouseI'm sure the Metropole condo will be lovely, and I do like the location at 15th and P, but who's really going to want to spend $6 million on a five bedroom Logan Circle condo? It just doesn't seem plausible to me; DC doesn't really have the young rich hedge fund demographic that might buy something like that. Whose Mistake?An odd bit from an article on the housing bust in Maricopa, AZ (via Atrios): Many people blame the bubble and bust on investors — both amateur and professional — who speculated in new homes. "I think that was part of the mistake that the builders made, was that they allowed investors to come in and buy," Abdullah said. "Allowed them to buy tracts of homes, you know, five, six, 10 houses, and they bought them on speculation." What's the mistake here. Builders bought a bunch of cheap land, then built houses on it, then resold the houses to speculators willing to pay a premium above construction costs despite the lack of objective supply constraints. That's a savvy business strategy, not a mistake. The people who made the mistake were the ones who bought the houses, not the ones who sold them. Rush to JudgmentUm . . . I guess I'll follow the Philly PD's lead and avoid a "rush to judgment" about this video: That certainly doesn't seem open to a wide variety of interpretations. Good for Carper
Delaware Senator Tom Carper does the unthinkable and talks about the vital importance of rail and transit to building a coherent national energy policy. Good for him! Photo by Flickr user mllerustad used under a Creative Commons license Obama and Affordable HousingI think Ezra's giving short shrift to Barack Obama's housing policy commitments. It's true that, as for every president, affordable housing issues aren't going to be priority number one in the Obama administration. But his support for creating an Affordable Housing Trust Fund isn't just boilerplate, this is actual legislation that's a top priority for affordable housing advocates. Note, conversely, that programs conservatives claim to believe in like Section 8 housing vouchers suffered a lot under the GOP congress and would suffer much, much, much more under John McCain's proposed cutbacks of domestic discretionary spending. May 7, 2008After Gas TaxMaybe this is just wishful thinking, but it seems to me that the failure of the Hillary Clinton gas tax holiday gambit may prove to be something of a watershed in the politics of climate policy. A lot of thinking by political people over the years has been dominated by the idea that the public is absolutely fixated on cheap gasoline by any means possible. We seem to be seeing, however, that that's not necessarily the case. Obviously, that's not to say that the public is now going to run to embrace Yglesias-esque schemes overnight, but it does show that the boundaries of political possibility may not be quite where most folks thought they were. Meanwhile, I think it continues to be noteworthy that most of Barack Obama's most impressive moments have been essentially counterattacks to silly gambits from Team Clinton -- not just this gas tax business, but the "naive and irresponsible" diplomacy, etc. -- and I'm not really sure if it's noteworthy in a good way or noteworthy in a bad way. SoCal TragedyThe thing you really forget about the deplorable land use and development patterns in southern California (and the Soutwest more generally) until you come back out here is how goddamn nice the weather is, a fact that takes the situation out of the realm of farce and into tragedy. You know what a good place to never walk anywhere would be? Boston or Chicago in the winter. Or maybe DC or New York in the summer. That's some nasty weather to be walking around in. But LA would be a great place to walk or ride a bike to work all year 'round. But it's our bad weather belt that has the walkable cities, and our sunny and temperate all the time region that barely has sidewalks. Pill Kills
Jessica Valenti draws our attention to the latest initiative from the American Life League -- the Pill Kills campaign dedicated, it seems, to complaining about the Griswold decision that overturned bans on contraceptives. That's a terrible, terrible agenda the League is pushing but you've got to give them credit for seriousness of purpose -- all too often you see social conservatives aiming at what amount to marginal targets like gay marriage and abortion when the logic of their critique is aimed at stuff like divorce and basic birth control. May 5, 2008Clinton vs. OPECThis Clinton campaign idea of somehow busting up the OPEC cartel not only seems impractical (how, exactly would this get done?) but it also bespeaks a real ignorance of what's happening with the price of gas. It's just not the case that the current price escalation is driven by OPEC-induced supply restrictions -- all indications are that everyone's producing as much oil as they possibly can. After all, with prices this high how could you afford not to pump as much oil as you could? It's just that demand for oil is high and rising, so the price goes up. Time MachineRyan Avent says we can't go back in time "and redo the last ten years" of transporation policy. But wouldn't it be nice if we could? And not just on transportation, either. There are tons and tons of policy areas in which a time machine would be an enormous help. Of course kill a butterfly in the past and the next thing you know fascists take over in the present so maybe it's a bad idea. Get Out of Jail FreeFacing budgetary pressures, states are looking to save money by letting some folks out of jail early. One can only have mixed feelings about this sort of development. We do over-imprison people in the United States, so from a humanitarian point of view this is nice to see. On the other hand, it's also true that the crime rate in the United States remains at what I'd consider an unacceptably high level and there are some indications that it's on the rise again. Much better than simply letting people out of jail to save money would be a more focused effort to switch our anti-crime priorities away from such a heavy reliance on incarceration and toward more cost-effective methods. Drug treatment programs that work are great, but not just anything called a drug treatment program actually works. Coerced abstinence (PDF) seems promising, as does simply hiring more police officers. It also wouldn't hurt to see more states and localities trying harder to identify and implement "best practices" from elsewhere on the policing front since some jurisdictions have much more success than others at successfully preventing crime. One could imagine a valuable federal role here beyond the money provided by something like a revived COPS program. Inducing Demand
This Washington Post article on severe traffic problems in Northern Virginia is perhaps a good opportunity to try to explain the concept of "induced demand." I feel like transit advocates sometimes talk about this like it's a mysterious phenomenon where you build the roads and, mystically, the road calls into existence its own traffic. Realistically, it is, of course, true that if you widened the major NOVA highways the traffic would start flowing faster on them. But you need to consider what happens next. Right now, many Virginians commute to work by taking Metro or the VRE commuter rail or one of several buses. If there were less traffic, fewer of those people would be inclined to do so. Similarly, right now the very long commute is one reason people might not want to move to certain parts of Prince William or Loudon Counties. But if the commutes got shorter due to reduced traffic, them more people would move. Soon enough the roads are congested again. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just illustrates the point that the purposes of building new roads is to expand the area under development not to relieve traffic congestion. Small dirt roads rarely feature traffic jams, not because they have high capacity but because nobody wants to drive on them. You replace a small dirt road with a better paved one not to improve the flow of traffic, but to encourage people to locate stuff -- homes, businesses, etc. -- along the route of the road. The goal, in short, is to induce demand for driving on the road. At the end of the day, an uncongested road is an excellent thing and driving on one is a fast and convenient way to get places. And when you have a valuable commodity that's not priced, over the long run people wind up over-consuming it and creating shortages. If the government set up a "french fries trust fund" to cook that were then given away for free, they'd soon enough run out of french fries. It's the same with the effort to build uncongested highways. Over the long run, it only really works for absurd pork barrel schemes that involve building giant roads in places nobody wants to go. If you want an uncongested road in a desirable location, you need to put a price on using the road during peak times and then you need to take the funds raised by the congestion charge to finance alternatives. Photo by Flickr user ethandb used under a Creative Commons license If You Build It...Despite a hefty and unfortunate fare increase, Metro ridership is way up in recent months. It's almost as if when regions invest in creating reasonable alternatives to driving, commuters are able to adapt to increased fuel prices by switching their travel patterns around. Some might say further such investments would be a good idea. "Windfall" ProfitsI'd say that John Cole is right and a "windfall profits" tax on oil companies is a pretty bad idea -- it doesn't really make sense to say that we're going to try to pass laws explaining exactly how profitable different kinds of companies should be. Now, "windfall profits tax to raise revenue" (Obama) is a better idea than "windfall profits tax to finance gas tax cut" (Clinton) or "gas tax cut paid for by magic" (McCain) but if you're really willing to hurt the oil companies in the name of the public interest what you really should be doing is raising the gas tax and rebating about half of the revenues to taxpayers. Half is about the consumer share of the gas tax burden. Some folks will plow all of their rebated cash back into gasoline purchases (thus leaving things about where they were) but others will reduce consumption and use some of that money in other ways ways. Meanwhile, the remaining revenue raised can be spent on alternative modes of transportation. With that done, how profitable oil companies are will just be a question of how cleverly their executives adapt to a new policy environment. Something like BP's claim to be "beyond petroleum" is largely greenwashing, but in principle there's no reason why hugely profitable oil companies couldn't turn themselves into hugely profitably energy companies of another sort. The problem is the oil not the profit. May 4, 2008Good To KnowI had no idea that the economic interests of oil companies were identical with those of the vast majority of Americans. Good thing we've got Hillary Clinton, Populist Extraordinaire around to tell us otherwise: She did not. “I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” program. A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.” Economists, environmentalists, everyone who's thought about the issue for ten minutes, etc. I'm not going to say that our public policy should blindly conform to the consensus among the economics profession, but the gas tax holiday is an illiteracy on a much deeper level -- there's simply no support for this idea among people who've looked at it in a serious way. That's not elitism, that's reality, and what Clinton's selling is Bush-style misgovernment. Friends of BFriends of the Earth, which had earlier endorsed John Edwards (like Peter and a certain Trust Fund Scumbag), hops on the Obama bandwagon, citing his solid climate change plan and his principled stand in favor of good sense on the gas tax question. The High Price of Cheap GasSteve Mufson has a good item up on the Washington Post website about how many countries, especially in the developing world, actually subsidize gasoline consumption which, among other things, keeps demand high even in the face of soaring oil prices because customers don't necessary see the price at the pump. From an environmental point of view this is, obviously, terrible public policy. It's also not terribly sound economics. Particularly damaging, however, is the long-run implications of this sort of thing. China has a golden opportunity to look at the problems currently afflicting the United States and decide to pour its burgeoning wealth into building sustainable transportation infrastructure and lifestyles from the ground up, instead of first building all-cars-all-the-time and then trying to retrofit to 21st century realities. Instead, though, they're subsidizing gas consumption. May 3, 2008No Bike For You
It seems that students at Bridgewater-Raritan High School high school in Jersey raised $2,000 to pay for a new bike rack at their school. Sounds like a pretty good idea. Biking isn't for everyone, and it's not for every trip, but it's an appealing option for many trips and promoting biking reduces congestion and pollution while promoting public health and exercise. Indeed, the only problem with the "students raise $2,000 for a bike rack" story seems to me to be that this is the kind of thing a school district ought to be willing to shell out for (wouldn't build a suburban school with no car parking, would you). But the school said no! Katherine Dransfield, who was trying to start a school bike club, explained that "Essentially what they told us was that they didn't want to promote biking as a way to get to school." May 2, 2008DC MadamI hadn't realized that the "DC Madam" has now killed herself after being publicly humiliated, arrested, etc. for the grievous crime of brokering an exchange of services for money between consenting adults. David Vitter, of course, is sitting pretty in the US Senate. Taxing
Today's Paul Krugman column on John McCain's tax cut mania directs us to this analysis from the Brookings/Urban Tax Policy Center where they note that "Even with the loophole closers, these proposals would reduce federal revenues by about $5.7 trillion over ten years if they could be enacted immediately." Since they can't be enacted immediately, the true cost of what he's proposing to do if he becomes president is something more like $5.4 trillion which is still an awful lot of money, way more than could possibly be saved by porkbusting and the like. Krugman calls it "a gap so large that eliminating it would require cutting Social Security benefits by three-quarters, eliminating Medicare, or something equivalently drastic" but even that is probably an underestimate of the budgetary implications of McCainism. After all, alongside Social Security and Medicare the other big ticket item is defense, where McCain has called, albeit somewhat vaguely, for large increases in defense spending over and above the costs of eight more years' worth of war in Iraq. Photo by Flickr user Paul Keleher used under a Creative Commons license Stupidest Bike LaneSlate went looking for the dumbest bike lane in America and the winner turned out to be right in nearby Silver Spring: That is pretty dumb. An awful lot of bike lane creation seems to have been done with the common sense switch in the off position. Credit Card AbuseCould it really be true that initiatives to curb abusive and deceptive credit card practices are starting to bubble up from the bowels of the Bush administration regulatory apparatus? That doesn't sound like the kind of thing that would happen, but it seems to be happening. And if it does happen, I say not a moment too soon as an awful lot of this stuff is just awful. Dr. McCain
Gas tax stuff aside, I've been remiss in not really dealing with the foolhardy health care plan John McCain put out recently. To my eye, McCain's health care ad looks like a pretty good ad but unfortunately he's mantra that there's no quality problem with American health care is just false. An awful lot of the cost/access problem stems specifically from the fact that we spend a substantial amount of money on useless or counterproductive care. If you could take the resources currently expended in useless or counterproductive ways, and redirect them to useful things, then you'd have plenty of resources available to resolve access issues. It's too bad McCain doesn't seem to understand this, because it's integral to the rationale behind the conservative notion that we need to shift costs off insurers and on to individuals. I don't agree with that prescription for resolving the quality problem, but the general idea is that if people have more personal responsibility for paying for what they're getting, they'll start holding providers more accountable and quality will rise. As I say, I don't think that's the best solution, but that's the general idea behind shifting risk onto individuals. And this just happens to be at the core of McCain's plan whose "main thrust," as Jon Cohn put it, is "to change the tax treatment of health benefits, which sounds arcane but could actually have far-reaching effects" in terms of unraveling employer-based health care in favor of individual markets. The downside of this is that people with a history of medical problems (like, um, John McCain, except he'll be insulated from these changes by his job, age, and wealth) won't be able to get decent coverage, which is a pretty bad problem in my view. But McCain doesn't even really seem to know what the justification for this step is supposed to be. Which is too bad, because I really do think a reform-minded conservatism could contribute to improving health care by focusing on regulatory cartels and other drivers of higher costs, but to appreciate those points I think you'd need to have more of a taste for domestic policy than McCain seems able to muster. Photo by Flickr user soggydan used under a Creative Commons licensE May 1, 2008No Dentist For YouInability to afford basic dental services is a large problem for many poorer Americans, so naturally when an entrepreneur comes along ready to offer basic dental services at a more affordable price dentists' trade organizations leap into the fray to get the operation shut down. It's proprietor, after all, isn't a dentist and just because it only takes a dental hygenist to do a basic cleaning is no reason you should be able to get a basic cleaning without paying top dollar for a dental school graduate. No reason, that is, unless you want to make dental care affordable. The focus on America's horrible, horrible system of financing health care tends to obscure the fact that it's layered on top of a horrible, horrible system of delivering health care in which there are all kinds of restrictions on the supply of services that make basic care substantially more expensive than it ought to be. If You Build It
You often hear that there are huge swathes of the country in which it's just not feasible to make changes that will lead to people driving less -- there's no other way to get around! This is often quite true in a literal sense. But oftentimes it would be possible to make non-drastic changes that would still make a difference at the margins. Here's a satellite photo of a swathe of Virginia near Tyson's Corner. You'll note that the housing north of the highway is actually very close to all this non-housing stuff south of the highway. But if you live north of the highway you can't walk to the south of the highway stuff just because the streets aren't designed to make that possible. The necessary changes would, however, be relatively simple to make and would even provide money and jobs for people in the road-building sector -- it's just a case of making sure that roads actually link up with one another (rather than being cul-de-sacs strung together to reach a handful of arterials) and feature sidewalks or bike paths. People are still going to drive for some -- maybe even many -- trips, but at least some of suburban American's trips could be replaced by walking or biking without radically overhauling neighborhoods or constructing massive new transit systems. Among other things, that would take pressure off the roads and fuel supply, leaving those resources available for trips where there genuinely is no reasonable alternative. If You Build It
You often hear that there are huge swathes of the country in which it's just not feasible to make changes that will lead to people driving less -- there's no other way to get around! This is often quite true in a literal sense. But oftentimes it would be possible to make non-drastic changes that would still make a difference at the margins. Here's a satellite photo of a swathe of Virginia near Tyson's Corner. You'll note that the housing north of the highway is actually very close to all this non-housing stuff south of the highway. But if you live north of the highway you can't walk to the south of the highway stuff just because the streets aren't designed to make that possible. The necessary changes would, however, be relatively simple to make and would even provide money and jobs for people in the road-building sector -- it's just a case of making sure that roads actually link up with one another (rather than being cul-de-sacs strung together to reach a handful of arterials) and feature sidewalks or bike paths. People are still going to drive for some -- maybe even many -- trips, but at least some of suburban American's trips could be replaced by walking or biking without radically overhauling neighborhoods or constructing massive new transit systems. Among other things, that would take pressure off the roads and fuel supply, leaving those resources available for trips where there genuinely is no reasonable alternative. New York States of Mind
Streetsblog notes that right along side Hillary Clinton, New York's senior senator Chuck Schumer has been another leading advocate of gas tax demagoguery. This is really a bizarre position for the Senators from New York, of all places, to be taking. After all, they represent the densest, most transit-intensive, least car-using major population cluster in the United States. If anyone statewide politicians ought to be in a position to resist political pressure to do something pointless, and to show the way to alternative transportation and lifestyle schemes, it ought to be them. Clinton, of course, is only a very nominal New Yorker, but Schumer is an honest-to-God Brooklynite. Note that these are also people who, nominally, believe that catastrophic climate change is a real problem and that action ought to be taken against it. That's nice, but when you combine that conviction with the set of political beliefs they're operating under, you get the result that catastrophic climate change is a real problem that should be dealt with, but won't be due to sheer cowardice. It's something Al Gore might want to consider. Perhaps his own 2000-vintage SPR gambit would prevent him from speaking out on this controversy, but I think most of Gore's post-2000 career has been aimed at getting away from the style of political engagement that made his 2000 campaign such a hollow one. Photo by Flickr user Aturkus used under a Creative Commons license Changing Demographics"The Hispanic population has taken on a momentum of its own," said Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute. "If you close the borders tomorrow, there is still going to be a large Hispanic increase." That's from a Wall Street Journal writeup of a Census report on the fast-growing Hispanic population, showing that a bit over 60 percent of the increase is attributable to the Hispanic birthrate rather than to immigration. This is why I think the GOP has probably dodged an important medium-term bullet by nominating John McCain. For a while it looked like there was a very real chance that the Republicans were going to abandon the immigrant-friendly posture that's helped their party do well with more prosperous Latinos in favor of embracing a politics of Anglo ethnic panic that could have been enormously harmful over time. At the non-presidential level, though, the right still seems quite invested in crackdown policies and McCain has made some significant gestures in that direction during the primaries so it remains to be seen what they'll start busting out if things look bad in the fall. April 30, 2008Solutions, Not SpeechesSam Stein: "Expert Support For Gas Tax Holiday Appears Nonexistent". By getting on board the holiday bandwagon, John McCain mostly reenforces one's impression of him as someone who doesn't have real ideas, principles, interest in, etc. domestic policy issues. I think that, by contrast, Hillary Clinton is managing to undermine the perception -- something she'd embedded in even a lot of people who aren't hugely sympathetic to her campaign -- that she's the candidate of substance, the earnest policy wonk type who really knows how to fix America's problems. It's a reminder that Bill Clinton, who certainly stands out among presidents for his wonkishness and interest in policy detail, also wound up gravitating toward a political strategy that leaned heavily on what you might call "policy gimmicks" rather than a serious effort to grapple with national problems. Cheney Versus WhalesJust to prove that he is, in fact, evil Dick Cheney seems to have decided to launch a secret OVP effort to stop government scientists from helping whale preservation. GassyWhat Jonathan Alter said about the gas tax. Beyond that, though, it's worth saying that real harm is done to people's lives by this sort of gimmickry. It's not at all clear to me that ordinary voters understand that the underlying supply and demand trends make it overwhelmingly likely that the cost of gasoline will continue, on the whole, to move upwards in the future. But that's the reality -- the market will fluctuate and it's possible that policy choices about the SPR can influence those fluctuations, but we're not finding new sources of cheap oil at the same rate that global economic growth is making people want to burn more oil. Both as a country, and as individuals, we need to plan accordingly. Not everyone will agree with my preferred policy prescriptions, which tend toward denser land use and more transit, but we need some long-term policy response. And people need to respond in their own lives when they make decisions about which car to buy and where to live. But when national leaders act as if they believe current fuel costs are a passing phenomenon to be weathered with short-term measures, then at least some voters are going to believe them and make bad personal and political decisions that we can ill afford. A lot of electoral gambits are nonsense without being actually harmful, but McCain and Clinton are making problems worse just with their rhetoric. The Good FriedmanI feel kind of bad that my book opens with something about the evils of Tom Friedman at just the moment when he's returned to columnizing with a new focus on environment and energy issues where I generally agree with him. Today column, for example, is all good. At any rate, if Friedman or anyone else wants to throw some pie at me, the place to do it would be tomorrow at 6PM (that's the correct time, I messed up and mentioned 6:30PM earlier) at the Borders at 18th and L. Alternatively, you could just hear me talk about the book, answer questions, sign copies, whatever else you might like. More Powerful Than a Less Powerful Locomotive
Via Ryan Avent, true high-speed rail is coming to Argentina which will make them the first in the Western Hemisphere. Someday maybe we'll get some, too. Predictions About the FutureThe news that Q1 economic growth, though extremely low, came in somewhat above recession levels is a good opportunity to once again remind people that the big sources of uncertainty in the general election have to do with objective reality rather than candidate-attributes or campaign tactics. That stuff can matter, but the evidence suggests that it doesn't matter as much as the fundamentals, and the fundamentals are, in a sense, unknowable. Certainly if you made me pick, I'd say the economy will continue to be lousy and Iraq will continue to be a mess, and the Democrats will have a big advantage, but neither of those predictions can be offered by me (or anyone else) with any real degree of confidence at this point. And yet those factors will probably determine the outcome in November to a much greater extent than controversies about lapel pins or McCain's bizarre campaign finance shenanigans. What About the Good News?There's some good local news out today. For one thing, the city government's public private partnership with ClearChannel to launch a bike sharing/rental service is getting off the ground. Good! And the "silver line" new Metro spur to Dulles Airport is back on track with the Bush administration deciding to un-kill the proposal in a rare triumph of sound policymaking from this crew. Good! And last, Prince Williams County is starting to edge away from the draconian anti-immigrant policies it implemented during last year's hysteria. ChangeNice ad from Obama hitting back on the gas tax thing, tying his process/change argument to the concrete issue of energy prices: If only there'd been a bullet point about transit. Fast LaneSecretary of Transportation Mary Peters, now my favorite Bush cabinet official (admittedly, the competition's not that tough) thanks to changing her mind on the Dulles rail project, has also started a blog called "Fast Lane." Conveniently enough, this also happens to be the title of one of my favorite short0lived bad TV series. April 29, 2008Elastic GasI started out thinking that Hillary Clinton was just making a clever dodge on the gas tax holiday, but now she's lighting in to Barack Obama for having the correct position on John McCain's stupid idea. This is basically the environment/energy/transportation equivalent equivalent of Obama's anti-mandate fliers and it makes it very hard to imagine that she's prepared to try to do anything about climate change. Meanwhile, short-term demand elasticity for gasoline is low, because the main things you can do to use less of it -- buy a new car or move -- aren't really short-term decisions. But this inelasticity goes both ways and a temporary (though of course one doubts it really would be temporary) cut in gas taxes doesn't give anyone much incentive to cut consumers a break. What's needed are measures that can increase the short-run elasticity of demand. Making federal funds available to increase the frequency of bus service and/or reduce fares to give people better alternatives to driving might work. Or some kind of program designed to facilitate/encourage the trading in of inefficient vehicles for ones that don't guzzle as much gas. I've heard over and over again about Clinton's vast powers of wonkery and incredibly command of policy, so maybe she should show us some with some creative thinking on a tough problem rather than mindlessly parroting John McCain's proposals. Suffer the ChildrenThe right likes to emphasize the role that educational attainment plays in rising inequality, and it also likes to undermine efforts to improve educational outcomes for poor kids. Thus, the Bush brew of tax cuts for the rich, and declining per capita spending on preschool: Discretionary grants under the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) were flat funded at $2.1 billion, meaning that 200,000 children may loose assistance. Funding for HeadStart and Title I increased only at sub-inflation levels, leaving states to pick up the tab and putting more kids at risk of loosing access to early education. We wouldn't want five year-olds showing up for kindergarden well-prepared now would we? But of course if your dividend earnings are almost large enough to pay out of pocket for preschool, Bush's prescient tax cutting has now put the dream within reach. Department of Bad IdeasTruckers demand congressional cap on gas prices. Admittedly, this could be a good idea for truckers since when we need to start rationing gas I bet they'd get preferential treatment. Then again, I sort of despair of persuading people to adopt reasonable policies like congestion pricing and -- yes -- higher gas taxes, so maybe price controls, shortages, and rationing is the way to get us thinking about ways to get folks out of their cars and onto sidewalks, bikes, buses, trains, etc. Transgendered MarriageHilzoy has an eloquent post on the infuriatingly ambiguous legal status of a New Jersey couple wherein husband Donald has now become Denise, thus rendering theirs an illegal same-sex union. In The ZoneIn response to Tyler Cowen's post on zoning I'd say the beginning of wisdom is the simple recognition that if you're hoping for deregulation to allow people to build in a higher-density manner, looking to deregulate Manhattan doesn't make a ton of sense as a first step. Not that Manhattan doesn't have a ton of zoning and other regulations (it does) but it's already pretty damn dense. Even restricting yourself to the NYC area, the things to do would be to permit Manhattan-scale building in all the parts of the outer boroughs that are near Subway stations and create more transit-oriented development near LIRR/MetroNorth/NJTransit stations in the suburbs. But in general, almost everywhere is overzoned. If you start paying attention to hyper-local politics almost everywhere, you'll quickly see the political economy behind this, namely that zoning rules are often made to be broken. But to break the rules, you need to get a variance. And to get a variance you need to do, well, something to persuade the people empowered to grant variances to give you one. So at the margin, regulators will prefer to make restrictions that are too stringent even according to them and then grant variances that involve sundry side payments rather than simply loosen regulations. Last, it's always worth saying that if every spot of the planet allowed Sao Paulo levels of density it doesn't follow that such density would actually emerge all across the planet. The density of any given American city is determined by (among other things) the regulatory environment, but the overall density of the country is determined by the birth, death, and immigration rates. If all our major metro areas simultaneously allowed for increased density, the short-term impact on any particular place would be relatively modest. April 28, 2008ParkingThe fetish for government-subsidized parking is truly an odd thing. In any society with as many cars as ours, there are going to need to be a lot of parking spaces. But normally there's a case for government subsidies when there's some kind of positive externality associated with some form of behavior. That's just really not the case with driving and parking. People like the convenience of driving right up to a store or office or whatever and parking there -- indeed, they like it enough to pay for! How much will they pay? Well, it's hard to know in advance which is why you need markets. But that's what you should have -- as much parking as the market will bear. Not government-mandated parking, and not government-provided free or discount parking. Let people build garages and if it's more economical to provide less parking, let there be less parking. InnumeracyBrendan Nyhan flags this preposterous lede: 3 Candidates With 3 Financial Plans, but One Deficit Brendan thinks the problem here is a tendency toward false equivalence. I'd say it may be simple innumeracy. Later in the article we find out that McCain's proposals "if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade." Conversely, "even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan." Let's do some math. McCain's plans will at "at least $5.7 trillion" whereas the Democratic plans will add "less than" $1.9 trillion to the deficit. The difference between them, in short, is at least $3.8 trillion. That, obviously, is a huge difference -- larger than the net worth of Bill Gates or the GDP of Italy. There's no grounds for saying that two plans' costs have something "in common" when they differ in cost by at least $3.8 trillion, but to understand this you need to understand what you're talking about. After all, if one candidate was offering budget-busting on the Democratic scale, and another candidate was offering $2 trillion in deficit reduction nobody would have trouble distinguishing between the budget hawk and the deficit spender. But the difference in magnitude is the same in either case. RedundancyI'm in NYC for a few days, and over the weekend it got a bit confusing to take the subway because an awful lot of routes had been re-routed for the purpose of track maintenance. Confusing, but still doable -- if you followed the signs and were willing to put up with perhaps a bit of a hassle, you could get where you wanted to go. That highlights one of the advantages an extensive rail system like the NYC Subway has over a small one like Metro in DC -- the proliferation of lines and existence of separate express and local tracks on many of them creates redundancies in many parts of the system and makes it possible to shut some sections down without causing the entire network to crash. DC, by contrast, is essentially operating with no margin for error so problems anywhere near the middle of the city spill over and create huge problems for the whole system. Capital GainsMostly what Atrios said. But beyond that, a political movement that's interested in providing new public services requires revenue to pay for those services. To get the revenue, there have to be increases in the overall level of taxation. Those increase should take a progressive form -- the rich should pay more. But it's absolutely crippling to any effort to outline policy with any level of ambition to concede the idea that any tax that places any burden whatsoever on the non-rich is therefore unacceptable. It's fairly easy to design revenue measures that fall mostly on the rich, but extraordinarily difficult to design measures that exclusively snag people who fit a conventional definition of rich. It's true that a married couple composed of an NYPD detective who pulls lots of overtime and a NYC public high school teacher with a lot of seniority can have a joint income of over $200,000 a year but a tax hike on the $200,000k+ crowd is still, all things considered, an extremely progressive measure. April 27, 2008The House/School TreadmillRobert Frank says the positional nature of school quality helped fuel the housing boom, making it difficult for families to borrow responsibly when purchasing a home: But what works for any individual family does not work for society as a whole. The problem is that a "good" school is a relative concept: It is one that is better than other schools in the same area. When we all bid for houses in better school districts, we merely bid up the prices of those houses.[...] I don't think it makes sense to view the quality of local public schools as a pure positional good (there would be a real difference between a society where the graduates of even the worst high school all had basic reading and math skills and the society we actually live in) but there clearly is some positional component here and I think Frank's analysis explains at least some of what we've seen. Let Them Sell RiceTyler Cowen argues that restrictions on trade in and sale of agricultural commodities are contributing to the current food crisis. The result of all these various protections and restrictions is to reduce overall production and to create an inefficient market where it's relatively difficult to get goods to where they're needed. This is all why I find it difficult to get too upset one way or the other about things like CAFTA or the Colombia trade deal. The real gains to be realized from further liberalization of trade at this point have to do with farm stuff that's been kept off the table in all these negotiations. April 26, 2008Bad MathSome new research indicates that teaching kids all these word problems about speeding trains and slices of pie may be a mistake, and that children actually learn math better if you just teach them abstract equations from the get-go. Obviously, I'm in no position to judge (my boring guess is that different approaches work best for different people and there should be some diversity of classroom methods available for different students), but it's a bit bizarre how little effort we put into developing serious research-based pedagogical methods. You'd think this would be a major component of federal education policy, but it's really not. Growing Cooler
For the urbanist in your family, Growing Cooler from Smart Growth America is all about how better urban planning and land use policies can help us reduce carbon emission. Relatedly, Brad Plumer observes that the needed changes can often be reasonable subtle: Compare Vancouver and Seattle. Similar cities in similar areas with similar sorts of people. Yet the former has promoted downtown development and limited freeway expansion and, as a result, has considerably less sprawl. As that World Bank study suggests, that can really have a dramatic effect on emissions. Food for thought. April 25, 2008The Tax Cut FlopJonathan Weisman profiles John McCain's tax cut flip-floppery. It seems worth adding a few points here for context. One is that the sum of money involved is enormous -- this isn't some small point of detail, but a fundamental, really large public policy issue. The other is that McCain hasn't made any real effort to explain himself, he's just misportrayed his past position and sent Doug Holt-Eakin out to say things like "He's looking forward, not back." And that's great -- a campaign should focus on the future. But still, we're normally interested in understanding the thinking of our candidates for public office. When a candidate can't explain a change of position, it's usually just that he doesn't really give a damn about the underlying question so figured he should blow with the wind. And so far as that goes, fine -- I don't really care if McCain has flip-flopped on tobacco regulations or not. But what we're seeing here is that McCain takes a devil may care attitude to the largest macroeconomic policy decisions the president faces. O Canada
According to George Will, "Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures." But as Kevin Carey observes it's highly unlikely that Moynihan meant any such thing -- since the highest-spending states are all near Canada. April 24, 2008McCain and LedbetterJohn McCain's against discrimination against women in the workplace, he just wants to make sure that the victims have no legal remedy when they're discriminated against. Congress: Where Laws are WrittenThe Hill has a disappointing (in terms of its content, the journalism is good) article about congressional Democrats being not-so-enthusiastic about the ambitious health care reform plans from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. This is one of several reasons why I've been unable to get too worked up about the superiority of Clinton's health plan -- in my assessment what Clinton is proposing isn't ambitious enough on the merits, while Obama's less ambitious plan is still more ambitious than what's legislatively feasible. Various legislators' concerns about cost also remind us of the dog that should be barking louder in the domestic debate -- the budget. Insofar as the next president intends to pursue a serious program of deficit reduction, it's just not going to be possible to enact a very ambitious agenda of new programmatic spending -- it won't be politically possible to raise taxes by a sufficient amount to do both. John Edwards clearly marked himself out as someone who was willing to put deficit concerns aside for his programs, but neither Clinton nor Obama have followed him down that path. But in context, a promise to reduce the deficit amounts to both candidates having their fingers crossed behind their backs when they talk about substantial new spending on health care, education, or anything else. April 23, 2008Prison in ContextHere's one reader's take on America's sky-high incarceration rate: One thing to considered when considering this issue is that China has a much lower prisoner population because they summarily execute a lot of prisoners and what I would call unreliable record keeping of prisons as they are an autocratic regime. That isn't to say that the high prison population in the US is something to ignore, it's important to put everything into context. Those are some decent points, but I'm not really sure that context changes the fact that we still have a frighteningly large proportion of people incarcerated here. Only in AmericaYikes: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners." Needless to say, we lead the world in imprisonment. This seems like a serious problem, especially when you consider Tyler Cowen's point that our prisoners face unusually dire circumstances by developed world standards. April 22, 2008FootprintI really worry sometimes about things like The New York Times Magazine giving advice on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Not only are these kind of "personal virtue" efforts insufficient to tackling the challenge of global warming, I think talking about them too much is actually counterproductive. The calculations involved in figuring out the aggregate carbon impact of this or that are just far too difficult for anyone to carry out. What's more, it's generally not going to be possible for a single person through his or her own exertions to really bring about dramatic cuts, and the last thing you need is people sitting around thinking "I drive a Prius, I've done my part" and then not voting the right way or otherwise being disengaged from the political process. Beyond all that, the market in trendy "green" products has certain counterproductive effects -- it creates a profitable niche market in expensive green-branded goods that most people can't afford and lowers the price of carbon-intensive goods. But in a fundamental sense, the only way to make a green economy work is to make carbon-intensive goods expensive not render them stigmatized and uncool, which should, in tandem, help spur the development of more sustainable alternatives for a not-particularly-cool-or-trendy mass market. |
