The company is scrambling to retool for small cars, and I'm sure we'll hear a loud chorus of voices saying that GM did this to themselves by becoming so dependent on light trucks. Well, they did, but I'm not sure it's fair to blame management. GM's historical pension and healthcare obligations, and the vast difficulties they have in permanently laying off workers, mean that the company had to maximize cash flow as best they could.
But look: This is all management. GM could have struck a different bargain with its workforce that entailed higher salaries and lower long-term pension obligations. Its management thought it would be wiser to strike a different bargain, and the results have wound up being non-pretty. Running a large enterprise is difficult which, I think, is why the executives make the big bucks. But when decisions don't pan out, you take the blame. Meanwhile, car company management could have strongly backed the Clinton administration's effort to get health care under control back in 1993.
Ezra's damn right about this. Go to pretty much any populated part of the United States, buy some land, and try to build something on it and you'll find that there are a lot of land-use restrictions in place. Some of these rules are good, some of them are bad (on balance I'd say we're over-regulated in this regard) but they're really all-pervasive. Then along comes the LA City Council to say you can't open a new fast food restaurant in South LA and libertarians and Will Saletan are freaking out. It's about freedom, damnit.
Well, it is on some level, but this is hardly unique. Is Saletan for abolishing liquor license regulations? Maybe he is. I don't think that's a crazy position but that would be a radical change in the way we do business. Banning fast food outlets, by contrast, is very much in line with the status quo. And though it might shock Saletan to hear about it, there are lots of upscale towns and neighborhoods all across the country that do the same thing.
Meanwhile, according to Wikipedia Saletan lives in Chevy Chase Maryland. According to the zoning regulations I downloaded from the Chevy Chase town website, it is illegal in Saletan's town to build a house on a lot of fewer than 6,000 square feet. It is also illegal to build a house that covers more than 35 percent of a lot. [UPDATE: I originally posted some erroneous math here, which you can read about in comments but I've now deleted]. This makes housing more expensive than it would be if you were allowed to use the land more intensive, or if you were allowed to slice lots up into smaller homes.
I'm pretty skeptical that these proposed South LA regulations will do any good. But it's not unique or unusual for land use regulations to exist. And working class people around the country suffer dramatically larger concrete harms from the sort of commonplace suburbanist regulations that Saletan's been living with, without apparent complaint, in Chevy Chase. Those kind of regulations are bad for the environment, bad for public health, and serve to use the power of the state to redistribute upwards. So if you're going to rail against land use regulations, maybe pick the ones that really hurt people.
WSJ: "But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them." Obama's also taller than average, which is well-known to be a disadvantage in presidential politics.
In all seriousness, if the predominant aspect of superficial physical appearance that voters have in their head is anything other than race, I think Obama should consider himself lucky. America can handle a skinny president.
As sometimes happens when I read Marc Ambinder's blog, today I'm puzzled by the mentality of the campaign reporter:
While we've been focusing on the race card, the Republican echo chamber has been sounding full tilt about Barack Obama's Jimmy Carter-esque turn as advice columnist to Americans about energy. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity spent part of their broadcast mocking Obama for urging Americans to inflate their tires to help conserve gasoline.
Obama had a point, and the auto industry recommends the same thing as do governors Schwarzenegger and Crist, but nevermind; the ridicule fix is in. An effective GOP shot.
Here's my understanding of the sequence of events. Gas prices are on the rise. Consumers are feeling pain, harm is being done to the economy. Oil companies begin posting record profits. John McCain and the GOP propose a series of giveaways to oil companies that economists doubt will do anything to reduce gasoline prices in the short run. These measures will, however, starve the government of revenue for infrastructure, harm the environment, and devastate coastal economies. Barack Obama counters with a tip that will do no harm to the economy or the public purse but will allow people to save money in the short, medium, and long runs. Obama's proposal is endorsed by the auto industry as sound (similarly, fully inflated bike tires make you go faster), and has been embraced by the most successful politicians in the Republican Party today. But Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity mock it along with the rest of the "Republican echo chamber."
The upshot is deemed to be . . . success for the echo chamber, "an effective GOP shot." But why? Maybe the attack will be reported in a way that's helpful to Republicans. But why should it be reported that way? Why should slamming Obama for offering sound, bipartisan, industry-endorsed advice by an effective attack?
Photo by Flickr user Eric Castro used under a Creative Commons license
Despite yesterday's news that the economy is back to growing (albeit slowly) it seems job losses are still mounting. With inflation also on the rise, my understanding is that basically we're screwed.
For reasons that remain a bit murky, the Bush administration, which has a terrible record on everything, seems to have a great record on homelessness. There was a HUD report out earlier this week indicating that some reforms in approach that the administration -- more specifically, a guy Philip Mangano -- has implemented are being stunningly successful and we've seen a 30 percent drop in homelessness between 2005 and 2007. Dana Goldstein has an informative brief interview with the New America Foundation's Douglas McGray about Mangano's philosophy and you can read this McGray article on Mangano from back in 2004. Hopefully the next administration of either party will continue to build on this foundation.
Pivoting off the news about John McCain's $520 shoes, Chris Hayes wonders if the press will ever notice that John McCain is a rich, out of touch elitist. Well, I have my doubts. But this stuff is relevant. Clearly, it's possible for people who've lived lives of privilege (FDR is the famous example) to promote policies that are beneficial to people who are struggling. But you really do see with McCain a lot of proposals that seem to reflect a lack of understanding of how people live their lives.
It's easy, for example, for someone on the "I married an heiress" plan to talk about the need to privatize Social Security or cut benefits. And someone who, like John McCain, has never actually experienced private sector health insurance might well not understand what it is about it that has so many people agitated. And McCain, it's worth recalling, isn't even someone who got rich by earning a fortune in business and thus might have learned something about upward mobility. He just married into it. But he doesn't appear to have any of that FDR-like sense of noblesse oblige -- he just has a lot of policies that are well-suited to the interests of people like himself.
The Hill takes a look at what smart growth and transit advocates are doing to try to take advantage of high gas prices to convince people that a shift of federal policy away from encouraging auto-dependency is the right way to go. Apparently folks have "coalesced around a bill introduced by Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) called the Transportation and Housing Choices for Gas Price Relief Act of 2008." In preparation for shifting to 501 (c) 4 status, I won't by any means endorse the bill or urge congress to pass it. Instead, I'll merely note that various people I respect seem to be hoping that congress passes this bill.
UPDATE: Also -- if you live in DC and want to do something good for smart growth, the environment, public health, and the local economy you should come to the Zoning Commission meeting on parking minimum's today at 6:30 PM (441 4th Street NW) and join me in advocating that minimums be lowered or abolished.
Energy efficiency is probably the cheapest, easiest renewable resource we have available to us. For a long time, energy was cheap and national policy was to make it as cheap as possible. That's left us with a legacy of infrastructure and appliances built on the assumption that wasteful use of energy is no big deal. But it is a bit deal and we have a lot of the needed technology and know-how needed to deal with it. Which I assume is what Barack Obama was getting at when he said this at an energy town hall meeting today:
Finally, one of the fastest, easiest, and cheapest ways to conserve energy and use less oil is to make America more energy efficient and more competitive with the world. That’s why, when I’m President, I will call on business, government, and the American people to make America 50 percent more energy efficient by 2030.
But what does it mean to become "50 percent more energy efficient"? Does that mean we'll use half as much energy? That our GDP's energy intensity will be cut in half? Or that there's some measure of "energy efficiency" such that 2030 energy efficiency will be fifty percent larger than in 2008? Unfortunately, efficiency is a difficult subject to talk about. An SUV could have an engine that's "more efficient" than the engine on a moped (i.e., it does a better job of converting a given quantity of gasoline into horsepower) while still getting many fewer miles per gallon. I was in an elevator earlier today where the lights were freakishly dim, and a woman in there with me speculated that it might be for energy efficiency purposes, but dimming the lights isn't really the same as making them more efficient.
Photo by Flickr user thingermajig used under a Creative Commons license
Say the word "HMO" and most Americans start reaching for their revolver. But most people who look at health policy and health economics agree that the HMOs were actually on to something, and that there really needs to be more scrutiny of which procedures are actually helpful and more emphasis on prevention rather than costly treatment. One question is why didn't this work out better? Paul Krugman's theory:
[I]f costs are to be controlled, someone has to act as a referee on doctors' medical decisions. During the 1990's it seemed, briefly, as if private H.M.O.'s could play that role. But then there was a public backlash. It turns out that even in America, with its faith in the free market, people don't trust for-profit corporations to make decisions about their health.
In my view what people objected to was not the for-profit status of HMOs per se but rather that they could be told they can't get all the care they want. That view will remain.
I don't think Cowen's got this right. Or, rather, while people will naturally always want "all the care they want," people's desire to obtain health care is large part a result of their interaction with the health care system. If I'm feeling ill and want the doctor to prescribe me some antibiotics, but then he says "no no no, you have madeupitis and if you take antibiotics you'll die" then suddenly it seems I don't want the antibiotics anymore. Medical treatment isn't fun, people don't just want treatment for no reason. If you convince them that the treatment isn't useful, they really won't want it.
But that means the person saying "no" needs to be credible, needs to be someone you trust. And I agree with Krugman that a representative of a for-profit company probably isn't it. The company has good reason to deny you coverage that may really be useful -- they just don't want to pay. And if the circumstances are right, it can even be in the HMO's interest for you to do. That's an ugly business and naturally people react differently to being told "no" by a company like that than they would to being counseled by someone they trust.
I think the real question for liberals looking for cost controls is whether the government can play that role. In many countries, public employees and public agencies really are trusted as custodians of the public interest in the necessary sort of way. And in America some public employees and agencies are trusted like that -- the military is treated with extraordinary respect and deference, as are firefighters and in some communities the police are. Vast power is granted to the Federal Reserve with a general sense that it's well-staffed by well-meaning people who can be counted on to do the right thing. But most agencies don't attract that level of respect. The challenge would be to build not just a public agency, but a public agency that people think of as being like the Fed or the Marines, rather than one like the DC Child and Family Services Agency. That's a tall order, but not necessarily an impossible one.
Profits way up at Exxon and Shell. That sounds to me like a good time to implement John McCain's plan for a "summer holiday" tax cut for oil companies! After all, with all these skyrocketing profits their tax bill must be on the rise as well.
I criticized Michael Scherer's article comparing the McCain and Obama tax plans, but he's done a great post at Swampland following up on the article and laying out very clearly why it is that Barack Obama's plan would cut taxes for most people and how it differs from McCain's plan.
Paul Krugman writes that you can't think correctly about climate change unless you take adequate consideration of relatively unlikely scenarios for disaster. Psychologically, if there's only a one or two percent change of something happening, we tend to put it in the "not going to happen" file. But sound policymaking would consider a one percent chance of a scenario in which billions die to be something worth worrying about.
I've been thinking about this lately as I re-read Watchmen inspired by the trailer for the forthcoming film adaptation. It's a reminder that in the 1980s, and especially before the Reykjavik Summit there was enormous anxiety about nuclear war. In particular, the criticism that Ronald Reagan's policies were likely to lead to a nuclear war was, though clearly not embraced by a majority, a fairly widespread and mainstream opinion. This comes out in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and "99 Red Balloons" among other places:
Obviously, in retrospect this was wrong. Consequently, from a certain point of view the Nuclear Freeze Movement people and critics of Reagan's "evil empire" rhetoric look foolish. But when you think in terms of probabilities this isn't necessarily right. Say that under Jimmy Carter's policies there would have been a one percent chance of a nuclear war in the 1981-84 period whereas under Reagan's more aggressive policies there was a three percent chance of such a war. That still gives a very good chance that Reaganism will work out -- 97 percent is good odds -- but still probably means that the Reagan option is a bad idea. But then of course things will probably turn out okay, making the skeptics look foolish, and perhaps unduly biasing future policymaking toward aggressive options.
If I may return to the question of John McCain's $520 Salvatore Ferragamo Pregiato Moccasins imported from Italy, I want to say that I think the fact that McCain is an extremely wealthy man is more legitimately relevant to the campaign than a lot of liberals seem willing to credit. If it turned out that back in his State Senate days Barack Obama passed some laws that massively increased the value of a parcel of land he owned, people would report on that story. Or if John McCain was a major stockholder in a defense contracting firm and used his clout on the Armed Services Committee to steer contracts in their direction, people would consider that a relevant factor. And if a governor somewhere were dipping into the state treasury and transferring the money into personal accounts, people would care.
So when you look at something like the distributive impact of Barack Obama's tax plans versus the distributive impact of John McCain's tax plans, it doesn't strike me as ludicrous to say that people ought to spend some time pondering the fact that McCain is a member of the small minority of people who would have higher after tax income under his plan than under Obama's:
On the merits, of course, bad policy is bad policy irrespective of who proposes it. Repealing the estate tax would be a bad idea even if John McCain had no kids, and even if the McCain family didn't own eleven houses. But still, self-dealing holds a special role in conventional political discussions, and it's not for nothing that McCain makes a big deal out of the ideas of honor and sacrifice as campaign themes.
Greg Anrig and Harold Pollack argue that Hannah Rosin was overreading the evidence when she concluded that Section 8 rental vouchers were responsible for a crime spike in the Memphis area.
The LA City Council adopted a measure yesterday to prevent new fast food restaurants from opening in South LA. The theory is that this will enhance the diversity of dining options in the area in a manner conducive to public health. Cato's David Boaz throws a fit:
But I was particularly struck by this statement from Councilwoman Jan Perry, sponsor of the measure: “I believe this is a victory for the people of South and southeast Los Angeles, for them to have greater food options.”
Greater food options? All the council is doing is banning some restaurants. How will that give residents more options? Maybe — maybe — other restaurants will open in South Los Angeles because fewer fast food restaurants will open over the coming year. But residents will still not have “greater food options,” just different options, courtesy of those who know best.
I don't find Perry's reasoning all that baffling. It seems that the most profitable kind of food service business to run in South LA is a fast food business. It further seems that this is the case to such an extent that there are almost no sit-down restaurants in the area. But it's possible that a sit-down restaurant in South LA could be profitable, while still being a less efficient use of the space than would a fast food outlet. Prevent new fast food outlets from opening and some sit-down restaurants may open to fill the gap. That will probably result in a smaller overall number of eating establishments than would have existed without the ban, but a greater diversity of choices since the hypothetical new fast food outlets would be similar to the existing options.
Now that said, it's far from clear to me that this is a good idea. The notion is to reduce obesity by bringing healthier choices into play. But what's banned is "any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers." That doesn't have anything to do with the nutritional content of the food being served and as such seems unlikely to have any kind of dramatic impact on the variable they're trying to nail. My neighborhood's beloved Florida Avenue Grill isn't fast food, but it's not health food either.
PPI has launched a new blog, MovingUp USA on issues of poverty and social mobility. Over there Katie Campbell has a post on "States and Cities Take a Lead in Poverty Reduction" noting various things and then arguing that "Due to the skyrocketing federal deficit, which Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post writes today will grow to a whopping $490 billion dollars this year, it looks like states and cities will have to continue to lead the way and find creative solutions to reduce poverty and boost social mobility regardless of who wins the White House this fall."
Since urban areas tend to contain both pockets of poor people and pockets of liberals, it's to some extent inevitable that city governments will wind up taking the lead on poverty issues. But for the sake of poor people, we shouldn't be content to leave it that way. On the local level, after all, the easiest and most effective way to eliminate poverty is just to make it too expensive for poor people to live there. Your typical low-poverty suburb hasn't discovered some miracle formula that turns all its citizens non-poor. Instead, land in the suburb is relatively expensive and its enacted regulations that prevent you from building small houses, from building dense apartment buildings, from crowding a lot of people into a single family home, etc. Basically, if you make it illegal to do anything that would make it possible for a poor person to rent a home in your town, you can ensure yourself a low poverty rate.
This could work in big cities, too. New York City could eliminate its existing public housing, enact regulations to make it even harder than it currently is to build new housing units, and end rent control and soon enough the number of poor people would plummet. But you wouldn't be actually helping anyone this way, you'd just be pushing them out. Conversely, a city that does maintain a reasonable level of services for poor people (and note that the ability to get around without a car is an important service for many poor Americans) will likely become something of a magnet for the impoverished. Even -- or in some ways especially -- if such a city establishes a track record of helping people get on their feet on move up the economic ladder, its actual poverty rate may not decline as new waves of poor people show up.
Which isn't to say that state and local government can't do good things. Often they do very good things. But ultimately the incentives facing a lot of local governments are bad, and the resources aren't distributed in the right way. National leadership is vital to making really sustainable progress, especially considering that the number of people in need of help goes up in downturns at just the time when state and local governments usually need to cut spending.
Photo by Flickr user padraic used under a Creative Commons license
Henry Farrell finds himself surprised to see "so little of the usual bombast" in the recent Phoenix Initiative report from CNAS. In general, I think it's a pretty remarkable document for typifying how the boundaries of what counts as a mainstream view have shifted over the past few years in a very positive direction. It's been, at times, a frustrating process but there are real result.
US Senator Sam Brownback is outraged that China may monitor the internet use of hotel guests in Beijing for the Olympics. I mean, what kind of a country would engage in electronic surveillance without any kind of warrant or due process? Only an authoritarian nightmare like China. Or, well, the United States of America. Brownback explains the difference thusly:
We don't put the hardware and software on hotels. If there is a targeted individual that seems to be a likely prospect of terrorists, they must go through the FISA court and ask for a court to determine that there is probable cause to be able to listen in on that information.
That's great. That really is the difference between a bad policy and a good one. In a country with meaningful privacy rights, the government would need to go to a court and get someone to agree that there's probably cause before they're allowed to listen in. But that's exactly what the Bush administration didn't do and what the new legal framework will let them get away with not doing. Maybe Brownback wasn't briefed?
Ezra Klein called attention earlier today to some alarming predictions about the future of the American waistline. Often when people contemplate the unsound eating habits of the average American they suggest that the typical diet of Mediterranean countries would be a better model to emulate. Unfortunately John Boonstra notes that the reverse seems to be happening and Mediterranean people are shifting to American-style larger portions, more meat, and worse health outcomes.
The proximate cause is that these traditionally middle income countries are getting rich, and thus adopting the bad eating habits of richer countries. All of which points to a fairly profound challenge. Everyone understands that GDP is not the be-all and end-all of human flourishing. But still, typically as countries get richer you see an amelioration of conditions across the board. Beyond a certain point, however, this badly breaks down with regard to certain aspects of diet and public health. Our bodies are programmed to strongly desire certain kinds of foodstuffs that are assumed to be objectively scarce. Wealth undermines that assumption of scarcity in ways that are extremely deleterious to human well-being.
The good news, such as it is, is that we have a very robust tradition of government intervention in the agricultural sector. No free marketeers on the farm, no laissez faire in the refrigerator. Meaning that instead of our current policies, which are designed to do God-knows-what, we could have policies that discouraged the production and consumption of delicious French Fries, Combos, and steak and encouraged the production and consumption of not-so-delicious vegetables and quinoa.
Photo by Flickr user Jimmy MacDonald used under a Creative Commons license
As he got his presidential campaign going, John McCain wound up flip-flopping on several crucial issues saying he would vote against his own immigration bill, repudiating his record on taxes to embrace Bush's record, etc. But lately the campaign just seems to be off the rails, and unable to decide what McCain's stance is on various topics. For example, McCain and McCain's spokesman can't agree on whether or not increasing the payroll tax cap should be "on the table" in terms of changing Social Security. It's a point McCain has gone back-and-forth on many, many times over the course of the campaign.
Similarly, just yesterday we had McCain surrogates suggesting that McCain was going to abandon his support for cap and trade. Is he? Maybe with the Olympics coming up and the expected attendant lull in campaign coverage, Team McCain can slow down and huddle for a couple of weeks in Arizona to just go down the checklist and figure out where they stand on these issues. Hold some conference calls. Something. Is it possible that if McCain knew how to use email that he could maybe send some remarks out and get everyone on the same page?
It seems the price-induced reductions in miles driven we're experiencing is significant enough that it's producing a shortfall in gas tax money going into the Highway Trust Fund. In response, I would note that John McCain's call for a gas tax "holiday" seems likely to exacerbate this problem significantly. On top of that, it seems to me that this would be an opportune moment to revisit some of our national priorities. With Trust Fund revenue falling, we ought to dedicate what remains to maintaining our existing road infrastructure but stop funding new highway projects.
Instead, general revenues can and should be used to pay for substantial increases in the quantity and quality of non-car transportation options. After all, the striking thing about the modest decline in driving that we've seen in 2008 is that it's happened even though essentially no effort has been put into providing anyone with reasonable alternatives. Insofar as state and local governments have responded at all, it's tended to be by cutting back on rail and bus service to save money at a time when the economic slowdown is hurting state budgets and the federal government is acting cluelessly.
New rail lines would, obviously, take time to build. But one could easily enough increase frequency and decrease fares on bus lines all across the country as a short-term measure. And there are a lot of commuter rail lines around the country that could have their non-rush hour frequency boosted in the short run. And of course we ought to be planning for the long run. Right now, only a smallish minority of Americans have access to decent quality alternatives to daily driving but it doesn't need to be that way and we shouldn't leave ourselves this exposed to future energy shocks.
Photo by Flickr user Rene S used under a Creative Commons license
In a new Brookings paper, Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine reach the startling conclusion that when you increase the number of teenagers eligible to receive family planning services through Medicaid you get fewer teen pregnancies. Imagine that! It seems worth mocking but, honestly, the absurd thing isn't so much the research as that the relevant policies aren't already in place. For the record: "The authors estimate the policy cost of preventing an unwanted birth to be around $6,800. They conclude that this is a cost-effective policy intervention relative to other policies and programs targeted at reducing teen and unwanted births."
Former Justice Department counselor Monica M. Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson routinely broke the law by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs as immigration judges and line prosecutors, according to an inspector general's report released today.
In addition to inappropriate and illegal politicization, Goodling's habit of asking candidates for career positions "What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?" is also rather bizarre and creepy. Goodling, it seems, couldn't even see herself and her subordinates as serving alongside Bush in an effort to advance the larger cause of conservatism. Instead, the entire government is conceived of as existing to personally serve the greater glory of George W. Bush.
Traditionally, one of the sources of America's advantage in wealth vis-a-vis the rest of the world has been higher overall levels of educational attainment. What's more, over time the overall level of educational attainment in the United States trended upwards. One of the most disturbing facts about the contemporary United States is that both of those trends have halted -- overall attainment levels have flatlined, and we've been overtaken by a number of other wealthy democracies. The causes of this remain somewhat mysterious, but (via Sara Mead) economists David Deming and Susan Dynarski suggest that the practice of so-called "Kindergarten Redshirting," where you keep your kid (usually a boy) out of kindergarten for an extra year so he'll be older than his peers and theoretically gain some kind of advantage, may be partially to blame:
Forty years ago, 96% of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade or above. As of 2005, the figure was just 84%. The school attendance rate of six-year-olds has not decreased; rather, they are increasingly likely to be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first grade. This paper documents this historical shift. We show that only about a quarter of the change can be proximately explained by changes in school entry laws; the rest reflects "academic redshirting," the practice of enrolling a child in a grade lower than the one for which he is eligible. We show that the decreased grade attainment of six-year-olds reverberates well beyond the kindergarten classroom. Recent stagnation in the high school and college completion rates of young people is partly explained by their later start in primary school. The relatively late start of boys in primary school explains a small but significant portion of the rising gender gaps in high school graduation and college completion. Increases in the age of legal school entry intensify socioeconomic differences in educational attainment, since lower-income children are at greater risk of dropping out of school when they reach the legal age of school exit.
The basic causal mechanism, as Sara explains, is simple "Children (particularly boys) who are held back a year before entering kindergarten are a year older than their peers, which allows them to legally drop out of school a year earlier than they could have if they had started kindergarten when they were eligible, depressing educational attainment." Now individual choice plays a large role here so there's a limited amount policymakers can do to reverse this trend, but public policy does play a role here and we ought to try to make sure it's playing a constructive role.
Photo by Flickr user Leonid Mamchekov used under a Creative Commons license
John McCain likes to point to his record on climate change as an example of an issue on which he differs with the Bush administration. But over time his once good-for-a-Republican record on this has started to look more and more threadbare. He wound up abandoning the legislative process formerly known as McCain-Lieberman, and actively opposed its successor, the McCain-Warner bill. McCain opposes all known efforts to encourage renewable electrical sources, and he's repeatedly promised to try to encourage low gasoline prices through increased drilling and reductions in taxes on oil companies. And now here's McCain economic adviser Steve Forbes more-or-less promising that McCain would, in practice, abandon cap and trade on carbon emissions:
Brad Johnson notes that if McCain follows Forbes here, he'll be following in the footsteps of Bush who promised to regulate carbon dioxide on the campaign trail in 2000 before deciding he liked pollution a lot.
McCain's increasingly watered-down position on climate has managed to pay dividends in terms of a huge spike in campaign contributions from oil and gas interests. It's McCain's right to sell out on this topic, but one hopes that if executives for polluting companies can notice that McCain's changes his stripes here that campaign reporters can as well.
UPDATE: Two things. First, clearly, that should be the "Lieberman-Warner" bill that McCain now opposes. Also, I'm told that McCain now says he favors renewable energy tax incentives even though he's always voted against them in the past.
In this scenario, the government would operate the GSEs as public corporations for several years. They would then be in a position to extend credit where appropriate to support resolution of the housing crisis. Once the crisis has passed, the federal government would divide their functions into government and private components, the latter of which would be sold off in multiple pieces. The proceeds could be used to fund the low-income housing support activity that was previously mandated to the GSEs.
I'm not going to pretend to have any real expertise in this field, but a surprisingly broad (surprising to me, at least) range of knowledgeable people has taken something like this position and it's the one that seemed intuitively correct to me in the first instance. I've yet to hear any convincing arguments to the contrary or, indeed, any real effort on the part of either the administration or the congress to so much as explain why these sterner measures aren't on the table.
Many analysts believe that the incidence of the gas tax falls mostly on oil companies rather than on gasoline consumers and that, therefore, a "gas tax holiday" as proposed by John McCain would do much more to increase the profitability of oil firms than to help out average Americans. Michael Cohen notes that when McCain was asked about this he gave a notably unimpressive answer not disputing the analysis, but instead underscoring that he really has no capacity to discuss domestic policy:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Not a single economist in the country said it’d work.
MCCAIN: Yes. And there’s no economist in the country that knows very well the low-income American who drives the furthest, in the oldest automobile, that sometimes can’t even afford to go to work.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But they all say that . . . the oil companies, the gas companies are going to absorb … any reduction.
MCCAIN: … they say that. But one, it didn’t happen before, and two, we wouldn’t let it happen. We wouldn’t let it — Americans wouldn’t let them absorb that.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How would you prevent that?
MCCAIN: We would make them shamed into it. We, of course, know how to — American public opinion. And we would penalize them, if necessary. But they wouldn’t. They would pass it on.
Yes, that's right, McCain will combine a tax cut with a program to shame oil companies into cutting prices.
Meanwhile, though it's true that lower income people generally spend a higher proportion of their income on gasoline, the claim McCain is making here about poorer people having higher absolute levels of gasoline consumption is wrong. Cars are pretty expensive (obviously) and consequently the carless is a disproportionately poor group. Beyond that, a relatively low-income family is more likely to be getting by with one car whereas a well-off family will have two cars for the grownups plus one for every driving age kid.
But all that aside, McCain's total non-response to this critique of one of the main elements of his energy policy is really staggering.
Photo by Flickr user North Bay Wanderer used under a Creative Commons license
For reasons that I try not to speculate on before 9am, the media likes to make policy disputes sound incredibly complicated. Much too complicated for mortals to understand, or base electoral behavior on. Take this Time article on the various tax plans floating around the election. The piece argues that the plans are composed of loosely connected soundbites, lacking numbers or details or real information. To read it, you'd think the two proposals were impossible to estimate, or understand, or in any way summarize. But they're not.
Right. The article is over 1,400 words long and mostly consists of moaning over how the candidates lack specifics or like to distort their plans or distort other people's plans. But the article itself actually contains perfectly clear-cut information about the plans it's just buried amidst tons of other verbiage.
Obama's tax plan would result in somewhat higher overall levels of federal revenue and somewhat lower tax rates for middle income people than would McCain's. McCain's tax plan would result in somewhat lower overall levels of federal revenue and substantially lower tax rates for high income people than would Obama's. The details of the plans are somewhat complicated, but the overall impact on revenues and income distribution is very easy to summarize. And, indeed, the Tax Policy Center has already done the summary in a report I know Time is aware of because it's referenced in the article. They even went through the trouble of making a chart:
Unlike Ezra, I'm willing to speculate and to be somewhat generous to author. If you read a concise, accurate summary of candidate's proposals you come away being a little bit smarter about what's happening in American politics. But if you read a cynicism-laden thing about how it's all incredibly murky and dishonest and everyone's using fuzzy numbers then you come away feeling smarter than all those clueless partisans out there yelling on behalf of McCain or Obama.
The health policy reform world has, in my view, a tragic if understandable tendency to get bogged down in the swamps of the politically viable so I'm always glad when someone puts something obviously unpassable on the table. Here's Robert Waldman:
One politically unfeasible approach to this would be to assign people randomly to HMO's and pay the HMO's based on their health but have the HMO's pay for their health care. Then the HMO decides incentives. You have to decide how much a life is worth (and eyesight and all that) but it doesn't depend on individual income and the decisions are made by an organization with tons of data.
No way this is going to fly in the real world. But unlike a lot of other state-market hybrids that are really just a way to try to buy off the interests of incumbent firms, this really would capture some important benefits of market competition. Firms would become more profitable insofar as they promoted better health outcomes and also become more profitable insofar as they avoid costly medical expenditures. Importantly, the HMO is rewarded not only for delivering effective medical care (though they are rewarded for that) but also for getting their patients to do things that aren't strictly "medical" (walk more, stop smoking) but do improve health.
It's a total non-starter for a whole bunch of reasons, including most notably that nobody is going to accept the total lack of consumer choice this involves, but thinking about infeasible plans serves a useful function in terms of structuring our thinking.
The Tax Policy Center discovered a $2.8 trillion gap between between the various promising John McCain has been making throughout the campaign and what his economic policy advisers have been describing more quietly to expert analysts. Slate reports on McCain's explanation:
“This is parsing words out of campaign appearances to an unreasonable degree,” Holtz-Eakin said. “He has certainly I’m sure said things in town halls” that don’t jibe perfectly with his written plan. But that doesn’t mean it’s official.
Basically, the McCain campaign's position is that their candidate should be allowed to produce one set of "official" numbers for the purposes of expert scrutiny. But when going around the country talking to voters, McCain should be allowed to produce a different set of "unofficial" proposals -- perhaps made with his fingers crossed behind his back -- that are designed to trick voters into believing he means what he says, while really they're just unoffocial proposals he doesn't mean. Or something.
Pat Leahy used to have two different bills aimed at tilting the legal playing field more firmly in the direction of large for-profit content producers that he's now folding into a single larger bill. As you would expect, this isn't a step that ameliorates copyright reformers' serious concerns about some provisions of these bills.
Marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples leads naturally enough to gay divorce. Along those lines, I was thinking recently that if you really wanted to do something to shore up the sanctity of marriage then rather than ban gay marriages you ought to ban, say, fourth marriages. It's one thing to say that people who make a mistake ought to get a second chance, but serial nuptuals really do make a mockery of the institution's basic premises in a way that same-sex couples don't. Maybe some people just need to admit to themselves that they have no business making promises of life-long commitment.
Initially, I wanted to ban third marriages, but it seems worth watering the proposal down in order to enhance political feasibility and secure access to the much-vaunted "three strikes and you're out" catchphrase.
Back yards are an interesting phenomenon. Most people, even confirmed city-dwellers like myself, see their appeal. Certainly the thing I miss most about my previous DC rowhouse was that it, unlike my current one, had a yard that while very small was definitely big enough to pass some time in and even cultivate some vegetables. But at the same time, in practice people don't utilize lawn space for a very high proportion of the time -- considering how often you're either not at home, or asleep, or watching television and the like the yard is most often standing unoccupied.
Jonathan Zasloff observes that shared yard space (as in according to him a show for kids called Backyardigans or else perhaps Big Love) where several separate single-family homes would converge on a single back yard might be appealing to some people. But of course like a lot of things that might increase residential density with the various positive impacts on affordable housing, transit accessibility, climate, public health, etc. that entails it's generally illegal to build this way.
Photo by Flickr user D'Arcy Norman used under a Creative Commons license
Richard Kahlenberg responds on the school integration issue with several points, including most notably that (a) many poor students aren't in big city schools, and (b) school district boundaries are created by state legislatures not by God.
On point (a), I'd need to see more information. Point (a) is well-taken. I'd need to see a more detailed analysis, though, to really understand how much good playing around with district lines can do. It's one thing to fold Raleigh's school district into a larger Wake County district, and another thing entirely to try that with a large city like New York or Chicago. But obviously to observe that there are limits to where integration policies are going to be feasible isn't to say that they shouldn't be implemented where they are feasible. But I don't want to see the DC government sit on its hands and wait for congress to work out some scheme to work out a way for our kids to go to school in Virginia or Maryland in lieu of trying to figure out what we can do to improve DCPS performance.
To step back from this a little, though, it's worth noting a substantial housing and urban policy issue here. Many large cities combine substantial concentrations of poverty with neighborhoods where housing is so expensive that families can't afford to live there. Here's a nice family-sized rowhouse near where I live but you need $700,000 to buy it amidst a nationwise real estate bust. If we built more housing units in our non-basketcase cities, more middle class families might live in them which would greatly facilitate economic integration in schools.
As you may have heard, the McCain campaign's been having some surrogate trouble lately with folks like Carly Fiorina saying that McCain favors "fully funding" No Child Left Behind (i.e., appropriating a level of federal funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that's as high as the authorized funding level) even though that doesn't reflect his voting record or his formal campaign promises. Education adviser Lisa Graham Keegan tried to square the circle today at a New America Foundation event, saying McCain will "fund ESEA fully where it is."
What that means in practice is that at a time when inflation is rising is the number of school-age children is growing, McCain's tax and budget policies require him to keep federal education spending flat in nominal terms -- implying substantial real per capita cuts.
Washington, DC is in need of a new transportation commissioner, and Greater Greater Washington is looking for signatures on a letter urging Mayor Fenty to find a visionary like New York City's Jeanette Sadik-Kahn. I signed.
Catherine notes that while hitting a pedestrian with a car in this city nets you just a $50 fine, biking the wrong way on a one-way street gets a $25 fine. That's madness. Cyclists probably shouldn't bike in the wrong direction (though the particular block where the tickets were handed out is an odd case where they should probably implement a special "wrong way" bike lane) but those who do so aren't endangering anyone but themselves. Conservative pundits who ram pedestrians with their car, by contrast, are rolling the dice with other people's lives.
Using our estimates and Census data we find that immigration (1990-2006) had small negative effects in the short run on native workers with no high school degree (-0.7%) and on average wages (-0.4%) while it had small positive effects on native workers with no high school degree (+0.3%) and on average native wages (+0.6%) in the long run. These results are perfectly in line with the estimated aggregate elasticities in the labor literature since Katz and Murphy (1992). We also find a wage effect of new immigrants on previous immigrants in the order of negative 6%.
When you take into account the fact that immigration is beneficial to the immigrants and to the recipients of their remittances, and that cracking down effectively on illegal immigration would entail large direct costs, this makes the case for a crack-down look extremely un-compelling. You're talking about very small short-term losses that are offset by very small long-term gains.
A little while back I was getting very excited about racial and economic integration plans as a way to improve school performance. Evidence suggests that kids do better in integrated schools, and a lot of cities have come up with clever schemes to ensure a reasonable degree of integration. The trouble, as Sara explained to me, is that given the actual patterns of residency in the United States an extremely large proportion of poor and minority students live in places where you couldn't possibly make this work. As Kevin Drum says today "No amount of busing, magnet schools, charter schools, carrots, sticks, or anything else will reduce the number of low-income students in each school below 40% when the entire school district is 80% low-income."
I don't have a ton of occasions to offer unvarnished praise to Bush administration officials but Transportation Secretary Mary Peters' op-ed about airport congestion is right on the money. Her idea, basically, is that airlines should pay money in exchange for permission to use runways with the price being higher at high-demand times and lower at low-demand times. This is commonsense and should do something to mitigate the spike in delayed flights over the past couple of years, but incumbent airlines don't want to upset the status quo and are lobbying to keep the current flat-rate system in place.
Megan McArdle has a good post about why you may feel that airline deregulation has been a disaster -- if you're someone who flies primarily for work it really has been a disaster. We moved from a high price / high quality equilibrium to a low price / low quality equilibrium, which is a terrible move if you're not the one paying for the tickets. Meanwhile, the middle class tourist trying to move a family of four across the country for a vacation has seen significant benefits.
But what's missing from this analysis is the executive suite. This is where folks have been able to give their employees a de facto pay cut in terms of subjecting them to cheaper, lower-quality air travel and plow the profits thereby gained into corporate jets and first class tickets. A sweet deal for them, indeed. In other words, business travelers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your missed connections!
I'd really been hoping that the Bush administration could find some way to use their lame duck status to make it easier to expose workers to toxins, so imagine my delight when it turned out they were actually "moving with unusual speed" (which turns out to mean breaking the law) to do so. Heck of a job.
Dana Goldstein draws out attention to this somewhat absurd Ed in '08 ad warning that unless we heed their message of reform, Finland will bury us:
Among other things, as Dana says, this kid down at the yacht club is probably going to do fine: "the American children most in need of school reform aren't white kids standing on docks (like the boy in this commercial), but rather the rural and inner-city children whose schools have the fewest resources and who tend to be taught by the least qualified teachers." But beyond that, Finland is a model for skeptics of the education reform agenda, not its proponents -- its a country whose stellar educational results are founded on a comprehensive social democratic framework that extends far beyond the school system. This is what the "Broader, Bolder" people are supposed to be talking about not the school reformers.
To reiterate something I said yesterday, the idea that road spending is entirely paid for by the gasoline tax is simply mistaken. Public sector budgets are complicated things, especially in situations like America's road network where a large variety of agencies are involved, so sometimes different studies get different results but under no circumstances is it the case that the gas tax covers everything. Here, via Aaron Naparstek is a study from UC Davis' Institute for Transportation Studies. The abstract:
I make a comprehensive analysis of all possible expenditures and payments, and then compare them according to three of the four ways of counting expenditures and payments. The analysis indicates that in the US current tax and fee payments to the government by motor-vehicle users fall short of government expenditures related to motor-vehicle use by approximately 20–70 cents per gallon of all motor fuel. (Note that in this accounting we include only government expenditures; we do not include any "external" costs of motor-vehicle use.) The extent to which one counts indirect government expenditures related to motor-vehicle use is a key factor in the comparison.
And, look, that's fine. There's no particular reason why the fiscal cost of infrastructure investment should be entirely borne by user fees. But critics of transit systems are forever moaning that these systems require subsidies to stay viable. As indeed they do. But so does the highway network. The issue isn't whether to subsidize, it's what to subsidize and to what extent.
Photo by Flickr user bike used under a Creative Commons license
Feisty rhetoric aside, the policy point here is that health insurance companies are a weird beast relative to our social aspiration to provide everyone with adequate health care. Sometimes you might want something widely provided with a government guarantee, but still want to keep private firms in business making the product. Every child needs a desk in school, but the government doesn't need to build the desks. We want private firms in the desk-building business getting as good as they can at building desks. But insurance companies are in the business of screening people based on risk, and of finding reasons to deny people's claims. And we don't want them to do that.
The simplest way would be to just cut them out of the process and put the "insurance" function directly in the hands of the government. Most likely that's not a politically feasible objective, but they could perhaps be put in competition with a public sector entity.
Stunning stuff as National Review's Peter Robinson asks John Cogan a question:
Q: The chart shows the increase in spending in dollar terms. Haven't you been able to find a chart that shows the increase in spending as a proportion of GDP?
A: No, I haven't—not in the time I've had available for Googling this weekend, which, since I've been scrambling to get the family ready to go back East for a couple of weeks (we're off at 4.30 this very morning) amounted to a little under half an hour. Sorry about that. And I'll check in the from the beach when I can.
According to Cogan's bio, he's a professor in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University, and his "current research is focused on U.S. budget and fiscal policy, social security, and health care" - yet he can't find a chart showing one of the most relevant statistics to a debate about whether George W. Bush is a wild and crazy overspender? I know where to find those statistics right off the top of my head, and I'm a rank amateur: Just head to CBO.gov, click on Historical Budget Data, and flip to page 8, where you'll discover that in 2001, when Bush took office, discretionary domestic spending accounted for 3.1 percent of GDP, and in 2007 it accounted for ... 3.3 percent of GDP. In the years between, it rose as high as 3.6 percent of GDP, which is on the high side by post-Reagan standards (we averaged 3.25 percent a year in the 1990s), but way lower than in the profligate, post-Great Society Seventies, when we were spending as much as 4.8 percent of GDP a year on domestic programs.
It also shows that if you combine homeland security appropriations with military appropriations, that the residual domestic spending component has actually shrunk as a share of GDP:
Now of course this raises the question of whether Stanford University really has budget experts on its faculty who don't know anything about the federal budget. The answer turns out to be "sort of." It turns out that Cogan isn't part of the regular Stanford faculty at all, instead he's appointed at the Hoover Institution, the conservative think tank that's embedded inside Stanford. But they do seem to have him teaching undergraduates in some capacity.
Via Tapped, a report on private jets from the Institute for Policy Studies:
As Americans prepare to pay extra for checked bags, wait in long lines, and endure increasingly crowded commercial flights, super-wealthy private jet owners are enjoying tax breaks and luxury at the public’s expense. “High Flyers: How Private Jet Travel Is Straining the System, Warming the Planet, and Costing You Money,” a report from the Institute for Policy Studies and Essential Action, exposes the impacts of private aviation on the air traffic system, carbon emissions, and everyday travelers. The report criticizes government inaction to rein in gas-guzzling, sky-crowding private jets, and the super-wealthy High Flyers who dodge security restrictions, carbon costs, and taxes.
It seems that a commercial flight pays $2,014 in taxes to fly from New York to Miami, whereas a private jet only pays $236 even though the impact on air traffic control is the same.
My Austin cab ride experience was nothing like Rick Hertzberg's and exactly like Ezra Klein's (presumably because we were in the same cab) and I, too, would like to know why Austin taxi meters charge you per 1/11th of a mile when expressing the price in terms of 1/10th of a mile suggests itself as an obvious alternative.
Speaking of war crimes, nobody in the Bush administration has done anything on a Karadzic scale, but we've had a number of clear violations of domestic and international law -- most notably on the issue of torture. Under the circumstances, you've got to think it's pretty considerate of conservative lawyers to be urging Bush to offer preemptive pardons to his lawbreaking subordinates, since without pardons they could probably get a lot of work doing legal defense for these crooks.
From Bush's perspective, however, pardons make a lot of sense. The relevant precedent would be his dad, who pardoned people for breaking the law preemptively in order to prevent any investigation from muddying his reputation too badly. Judging from the coverage of the Marc Rich pardon and the Scooter Libby commutation, I feel like Bush would be hailed as a hero by the mainstream for ensuring that nobody is called to account for his administration's crimes. Basically, some small-time cash-for-favors is the worst thing in the world (big-time cash-for-favors is the legislative process at work), but wholesale violations of the constitution are just a policy fight.
John McCain's new ad says that Barack Obama's refusal to open America's coastline to drilling is to blame for high gas prices:
They say nobody ever went wrong underestimating the intelligence of the voting public, but it is staggering that you can't find any credible people anywhere prepared to argue that McCain's drilling schemes will bring any short-term relief from high gas prices or that the long-run price reductions would be anything other than tiny. Meanwhile, it's McCain who has no plan to help bolster alternative fuels and no plan to bolster alternatives to driving.
Meanwhile, take something like the accessory dwellings issue. Here you have a bunch of regulations that make it illegal for people to live more densely. Illegal, in other words, to build the kind of communities where the gas price issue wouldn't hurt so much. But there's a movement afoot to change things. Similarly with minimum parking rules -- regulations that interfere with the operation of the free market in such a way as to make it more difficult for people to live energy efficient lives. And again, there are people trying to change this. These things are regulatory barriers to solving our energy problems every bit as much as the ban on offshore drilling is. And conservatives are against regulation, right? Except the anti-drilling regulation is good for the environment and for coastal economies whereas anti-urbanist regulation is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. Naturally, conservatives have chosen to aim all of their fire at anti-drilling regulations. And that's the sort of thing that makes the conservative movement hard to take seriously -- it's an organized defense of existing power and privilege that now and again adopts principled rhetorical modes of various kinds but basically can't be moved to act unless some lobbyists pay them too.
Read the chart. And, no, highways don't pay for themselves. Also there are large negative externalities associated with driving that militate in favor of making drivers subsidize transit users (or pedestrians, cyclists, etc.) rather than the reverse.
UPDATE: Of course you can't bring this subject up without legions of people informing you that the gas tax pays for the highways. This simply isn't true. All the funds raised by the gas tax are spent on highways, and then a bunch of additional money is also spent on highways. It's exactly the same as with transit, financed by a mix of user fees and subsidies in order to encourage the economic benefits of infrastructure investment. But one kind of investment is better for the environment and for public health. So naturally we give the other kind radically more money.
Donna St. George reports for The Washington Post on the new adolescence: "Gas prices are too high for a day trip to Dewey Beach. They are too high for a quick visit to see a friend in College Park. They consume enough of 18-year-old Ashleigh Krudys's paycheck that she second-guesses her social plans."
This is going to be a critical issue for our future. If we stay on our current course, more and more folks are going to find that discretionary trips -- teens driving to hang out with friends, etc. -- are something of an unaffordable luxury. Of course you don't have that problem if you live in a walkable neighborhood with good transit links, but there are so few such neighborhoods that most families can't afford them. But if we increase density in the vicinity of our existing transit nodes, and build new nodes and new networks that are planned for dense walkable growth, that we can shift out of that equilibrium.
There was a curious Peter Robinson post on the Corner the other day attacking David Brooks and other apostles of changing the nature of the conservative movement away from dogmatic tax cutting that, it seems, his fellow NROniks deemed very intelligent. I found it to display a curious lack of familiarity with the intellectual giants of the right:
Milton Friedman argued that government spending will always prove pernicious for the simple but profound reason that “nobody spends somebody else’s money as well as he spends his own.” Has Brooks ever refuted Friedman? No. He writes instead as if Friedman had simply never existed. Hayek argued that government intervention in the economy will always prove grossly inefficient because government planners can never acquire all the information they’d need to do a good job of allocating resources.
As John Holbo says "if Friedman proved that, and if no one has refuted him, then Milton Friedman proved that all forms of government should be abolished – including the American system of government, presumably." I think Friedman just offered a quip that's not really supported by the bulk of his work or by any serious position in political philosophy -- the irrefuted line, if taken seriously, would be a universal acid that dissolves the police and fire departments, the sidewalks, the army, everything. And Robinson is clearly searching here for a defense of orthodox American conservatism, not some novel radical doctrine.
Hayek, meanwhile, argued that Hayek argued that central planning as in the Soviet Union will always prove grossly inefficient because government planners can never acquire all the information they’d need to do a good job of allocating resources. It's an important argument. But it hardly applies to all possible intervention int he economy. It doesn't show that the provision of subsidies to the poor so as to improve their quality of life are doomed to fail. Nor does it show that there are no negative externalities that can be usefully taxed or that there are no activities featuring positive externalities that can be usefully subsidized. The point about central planning was crucially important when many people and many governments were enthusiastic about central planning. These days, in part because of the influence of Hayek's arguments, you don't see nearly so many such people and arguments tend to be about issues where Hayek's planning argument is less clearly relevant. Certainly I take it that David Brooks isn't a Communist.
Quinnipiac poll shows that the public is more inclined to call the current Supreme Court too conservative than too liberal by a 31-25 margin. The liberal lead follows earlier Quinnipiac results, but they show a declining number of people calling the Court about right. Also the number of people who say they've never heard of John Roberts is on the rise.
Austin, Texas, as you've probably heard, is a pretty fun town that lots of people like. Washington, DC by contrast certainly has its defenders and apologists, but isn't generally viewed in the same light. And while I don't necessarily see the gap as quite as big as most folks seem to (to this born-and-raised New Yorker, one's much greater ability to get around DC without a car is a big consideration) the conventional wisdom isn't far from the truth here. But one thing I always find extremely frustrating about talk about how one town is awesome and another sucks is that even though folks spend a lot of time talking about such matters, they spend exceedingly little time trying to understand the actual reasons that places differ and things that could be done to change them.
As an example, Friday night I took in a movie at the famous Alamo Draft House Cinema where, among other things, a server comes and brings you food and beer orders as you watch. It's totally awesome. But the failure of such a theater to exist in DC doesn't come about because of some stubborn DC unwillingness to open anything cool, it comes about in large part because the regulatory hurdles facing someone who wanted to open such an establishment would be gargantuan. And movie theaters aside DC would, in general, have more bars that feature nice outdoor areas (a) easier to get a license to open a bar, and (b) easier to get a license to establish outdoor tables.
A relatively strict licensing regime keeps the number of drinking establishments relatively low. That reduces one's set of options. But beyond that, it makes for a less competitive environment with higher prices and less effort going into making an establishment appealing. Laxer licensing regimes and more liberal zoning policies about where you can open retail would produce lower prices and more options. To make that observation is to begin rather than to end the argument about whether we should prefer the "plentiful, cheap bars" equilibrium to the "rare, expensive bars" equilibrium. But the point is that instead of just vaguely complaining about this or that aspect of the place where they live, or musing about moving elsewhere, it would serve people well to educate themselves about policy in their own communities and make things better. When we don't do that, the policy just gets set by incumbent interest groups whose main concern is to block competition rather than build a livable community.
To perhaps make Ezra Klein's point a bit more briefly there's no reason to frame the question of whether or not we should reduce meat consumption for environmental reasons as a question or whether or not we should all become vegetarians. Most of us who eat meat in the developed world eat a sufficient amount of meat that we could eat less meat without giving meat up entirely. And since people eat food multiple times every day, this is the kind of thing where small reductions in the meat content of the average meal would have a substantial impact over the course of a year.
The Speaker prefers to bargain from a position of strength: "The bigger our victories, the more bipartisanship there'll be in the congress." I think that's about right -- you see a lot of bipartisanship when one party's running scared.
Wow. I hadn't realized that Al Gore gave a speech recently calling on us to move to 100 percent renewable sources of electricity in ten years. That's audacious seemingly to the point of madness. Why focus so exclusively on cleaner electricity generation rather than on a balanced approach that involves efficiency (i.e., using less electricity) and also the transportation, heating, etc. sectors. After all, replacing a conventional car with an electric one -- or a bus with a trolleybus or tram -- reduces emissions regardless of how you get your electricity.
In that sense, it makes way more sense to put some of our existing dirty electricity infrastructure to use in the short-term as a substitute for our currently lamentable transportation infrastructure, while we switch the nature of our electrical infrastructure on a more tempered pace. Of course there's nothing wrong with big ideas to expand the overton window, so I don't think it's terrible to see some folks pushing radical ideas, but on the other hand I do worry about the public becoming polarized between a "holy shit we need to do something crazy and extreme" faction and a "that sounds crazy and extreme so let's do nothing" faction. It's more important to start taking some concrete steps down the path to mitigation than to spend too much time drawing up the outlines of ecotopia.
To me one of the oddest aspects of endless discussions about affordable housing is how little emphasis there is on the fact that many areas have straightforward rules in place that just make it illegal for housing to be affordable. For example, in Arlington County Virginia you might own a nice big house. And maybe you're an empty nester who doesn't need as much space in the home anymore now that the kids are out of the house. So maybe you want to modify the structure somewhat to create a so-called "accessory dwelling" in the garage or the basement that you can rent out to people looking for a cheap place to live.
Well, you can't. It's illegal. But there's a proposal on the table to make it legal as long as no more than two people live in your accessory dwelling. That'd be a good idea, though of course families need affordable housing, too, so I wouldn't favor that kind of arbitrary restriction. Still, babies steps, babies steps.
I wanted to talk a bit more about my proposal for a standard nationwide farecard system. The main objectives to this, interrelated, are that changing all the transit systems to have a new farecard system would be expensive and that the actual benefits of doing this would be rather modest.
I completely agree. I wasn't really envisioning a massive outlay to totally change existing systems. But I do think that more uniformity would be better. What I would have in mind would be the creation of a new standard "federal system" that would be based on the existing system of some large city that was willing to cooperate. Then one would hope to see the new standard spread over time. Cities that don't currently have rail systems but are building them could adopt the new standard, as could any city that for whatever reason is considering changes to its bus or rail network that would involve making the switch.
As I'll happily concede, the benefits of doing this would be non-enormous. But I think there would be some benefits, and the cost would be low.
Rob Goodspeed says that "n aspiring planner I met with yesterday asked me whether there’s a massive effort afoot to make every American city more bikable" and offers some thoughts. One thing to note about this is that part of the nature of biking is that having more people bike around your city is one of the things that does the most to make your city more bikable. When cyclists are relatively common, cars become conscious that cyclists may be on the street and adjust their behavior accordingly. When bikes are rare, nobody expects there to be a bike on the road, which is a very dangerous situation.
And of course the safer biking becomes, the more people will do it, which makes it safer. And, again, just socially speaking people generally prefer not to be weirdos and so if you see more people riding bikes, you're more likely to think that's a reasonable way to behave. Higher gas prices naturally lead to some increase in the number of bike trips around the margin, which in turn has some positive feedback effects. Which is why this is a great time for cities to take the opportunity to take some pro-bike steps in terms of lanes, parking, etc. -- the present circumstances of expensive gas are an opportunity to shift to a new, more bike-friendly equilibrium, that will have benefits for public health and the environment while leaving the roads less congested and more open for high-value car and truck trips.
Mark Kleiman seems a bit confused about this. When Hillary Clinton proposed a silly gas tax holiday during the primaries, the press widely reported the fact that every knowledgeable expert regarded this as absurd because the idea was (a) absurd and (b) endorsed by Hillary Clinton. When John McCain proposes a somewhat more pernicious version of the same bad idea, its badness must be ignored because it's being proposed by John McCain and nothing is more vital to the future of the American public than for John McCain's flaws to be covered up.
After all, if the press were to start reporting that bad ideas are bad ideas even when proposed by John McCain the next thing you know they'd be talking about McCain's repeated flip-flops on the central issues of our time, characterizing Wesley Clark's attacks on McCain correctly, etc. And we can't have that!
I'm generally sympathetic to policies aimed at opening up the teaching profession, because it seems clear that success in the classroom is a function of multiple factors (experience, subject matter knowledge, pedagogical skills, training, work ethic, verbal ability, general smartness, innate talent for teaching) some of which are given undue weight under the current system and some of which are basically ignored. The world's greatest teacher would have all of these qualities in spades, but of course such people are few and far between and it's apparent from the track record of initiatives like Teach for America and some of the better alt-cert programs that people can be reasonably successful with less of some things (experience, training) if they have enough of the others.
That said, I hate this sentence: "They don't have all the proper credits in educational "theory" or "methodology" -- all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it." Putting words like theory and methodology between contemptuous quotes (shouldn't we invent a new punctuation mark to distinguish those from regular quotes?) is ridiculous. Teaching is an extremely complicated endeavor. A teacher's ability to share knowledge (which is in itself an extremely reductive conception of what teaching actually means) is naturally going to be improved by a solid understanding of theory and methods. Of course some ed schools teach those things badly or over-emphasize them, but that's no reason to dismiss them out of hand.
As Kevin says, this sort of ugly anti-intellectualism doesn't give you a ton of confidence about McCain's approach to formulating policy. Running against eggheads has been a longstanding conservative trope, but one gets the sense that in recent years it's more and more come to play a corrosive role in preventing conservative politicians from engaging in any kind of serious thought.
Of course Ryan Avent is right to say that you can't fully grasp the stupidity of the Bush line against energy conservation without mentioning the subject of externalities. When you burn coal or oil, or take up space on the road, current policy lets you get away with not paying the full cost of those endeavors. Under the circumstances, there are more coal plants and cars on the road than is socially optimal. Price this stuff correctly and people will use it less and we'll all be better off.
People seem to have been more upset about my support for market-based water pricing than anything else I've written in a good while. And they found it particularly egregious that I dared take a stance on this questions without being a full-time expert. Well, if you want a full-time water expert who agrees with me check out this blog Aguanomics.
You should, naturally, check out Sara Mead's take on John McCain's recent education speech and the policy proposals therein. She notes, among other things, that his ability to get behind meaningful reforms is constrained by the fact that he doesn't want to propose any net increase in funding (thus, he thinks school choice will solve all our problems, but doesn't propose doing anything to boost school choice for the vast majority of Americans who don't live in DC).
I would only extend that to note that once again his nonsense budget figures are being constrained by his unwillingness to propose the sort of specific, massive cuts in domestic spending that are implied by his combination of tax and defense policies. If you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, and add new tax cuts, and continue an aggressive posture in Iraq, and increase the overall defense budget, then we need to cut domestic spending a lot. And the McCain campaign has proposed doing this in various hand-wavy ways but doesn't really put the rubber to the road anywhere. He doesn't want to gut federal education spending, which is nice, but he would more or less have to gut it -- along with everything else -- to implement his big picture ideas.
Interesting NYT article about the MTA's MetroCard and how farecard policy shapes things. One policy idea I've never seen anyone but me propose but that I maintain would be a good idea would be for the federal government to pony up the relatively small amount of money it would cost to start constructing a nationwide transit farecard system that local rail and bus authorities could join if they were so inclined (and they should be encouraged to be inclined).
Actual fares would still be different in DC, Boston, Chicago, New York, LA, etc. but the idea would be to make it the case that over time a single card and single account could get you on the train or the bus all across America. Just like how these days EZ Pass works on highway systems all over the place. It wouldn't work for things like unlimited ride weekly passes, but it should work great for single ride trips, and would make it much easier for visitors to this place or that to take advantage of local transit offerings.
I, for one, am absolutely shocked to see a pro-life administration taking action to reduce the availability of contraceptives. Up until now, I had always thought that the pro-life movement was a totally sincere effort to reduce the incidence of abortions by any means necessary. This makes it look like their convictions about the metaphysical status of the fetus are really just of a piece with a whole set of reactionary attitudes about women's sexuality and gender roles.
Meanwhile, does anyone else find it interesting that yesterday's Washington Post poll showed that people prefer Obama over McCain on "Social issues, such as abortion and gay civil unions" by a gigantic 56-32 margin? That's not even close, but the conventional wisdom usually holds that these topics give the GOP an edge. Social conservatives like to say they do, of course, but economic populists tend to say the same thing, too. But that's a bigger lead than Obama has on, say, "the economy" as an issue.
K-Lo proclaimed a "Dubya-Love Moment" over this answer to a question about why he doesn't support a federal energy conservation program at yesterday's press conference:
"The American people are smart enough to figure it out. They know the price of gas. They're already driving less and seeking smaller cars. I don't need to tell them; they can balance their checkbook."
This is pretty silly. When I go to National Airport, I take the Metro -- an energy efficient option. That's a personal decision I make based on assessing the relevant factors. But one of the relevant factors is that there's a Metro station near my house and another one right by the airport. And of course more people would live near the U Street / Cardozo Metro Station were there more housing units located near the U Street / Cardozo Metro Station which there would be if more residential density were legally permitted. And I would take the Metro to Dulles Airport if there were a Metro line that went to Dulles Airport.
The point being, of course we all make decisions that are relevant to our energy consumption. But the choices we make are affected by public policy decisions in dozens of different ways. To suggest individual action as an alternative to changing policy is to ignore the fact that different policies would produce different individual choices.
Inflation up, or as the NYTputs it "Consumer Prices Surge 1.1% in June." This leads me to once again wonder whether we haven't been seeing a surge of "surges" ever since Bush announce the surge back in early 2007. My sense is that people didn't used to use that word very much, but now it's everywhere.
Via Kevin Drum, Business Week says they've got the goods on Saudi oil reserves and there's not as much goo down there as the Saudis want us to believe:
The detailed document, obtained from a person with access to Saudi oil officials, suggests that Saudi Aramco will be limited to sustained production of just 12 million barrels a day in 2010, and will be able to maintain that volume only for short, temporary periods such as emergencies. Then it will scale back to a sustainable production level of about 10.4 million barrels a day, according to the data.
Now I imagine there's some uncertainty about this and other documents that back up the Saudis' official line that they can go up to 15 million barrels. But this reporting is hardly the first slice of evidence to suggest the Saudis are exaggerating and it indicates that we should really expect the price of oil to keep going up over the long haul.
Here comes Bush, echoing John McCain by conceding that offshore drilling won't actually do anything to reduce oil prices but saying it's a good idea for psychological reasons:
The Green Lantern Theory as applied to foreign policy is wrongheaded, but as applied to energy supplies it's downright bizarre. Demand for oil is growing faster than supply, leading to high prices and over the long run global demand will probably keep growing. The smart strategy would be to start reorienting our infrastructure to build a less oil-dependent country. Psychology has nothing to do with it.
In order to afford extending Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, plus his own new proposed tax cuts for the wealthy, John McCain has proposed some unspecified cuts in Social Security. Why won't he specify? Well:
"The lesson of history is that too many specifics at this point polarize the debate, that is the argument Carly was trying to make," Taylor Griffin said. "However, John McCain does believe that we can fix Social Security without raising taxes. As president, John McCain will call on Congress to develop a bi-partisan solution to Social Security — and if they won't, he will."
As Mark Kleiman says "'Too many specifics at this point polarize the debate' translates into English as 'If we told the retirees how completely we plan to shaft them, they might not vote for us.'"
I hasten to add: Not just retirees! One common scheme is to try to propose cuts that exempt current retirees and the soon-to-be-retired from any pain in favor of huge planned cuts for folks my age down the road on the theory that we don't really care about our future.
Marc Ambinder has an excellent rundown of the right's dishonest efforts to label Barack Obama's tax plans as a huge hit to small business owners:
The Republicans and John McCain in particular are trotting out a tiresome and thoroughly debunkable claim about Barack Obama's tax plans -- namely, that could hit as many as 23 million small businesses. The McCain campaign credulously cites the obviously self-interested Chamber of Commerce, which counts as a small business any entity or individual who reports any income under Schedule C of the federal income tax return or anyone who organizes a Subchapter S corporation. Hence: 23 million. As Factcheck.org says, that's misleading -- generously put. The real pool of small businesses with employees is around six million, and an estimate of the number of proprietorship paying into the top two income brackets is less than 700,000 -- a lot, but about 2.5% of 23 million.
The Bush campaign did this throughout 2004 and I believe also a few years before that when selling the initial tax cuts and it's just a simple, easily disproven lie. The sort of thing that would, one would think, lose a man his reputation for straight-talk. As far as these things go, it doesn't even really make sense as 23 million is incredibly large relative to the American population -- once you threw in the high-earners who aren't small business owners, and the small businesses that aren't organized as Schedule C or Subchapter S, and the people out of the workforce there'd be nary a waitress or construction worker or chain store manager or professional blogger in sight.
Alex Tabarrok explains why even if disaster is somehow averted this time around, a Fannie/Freddie bailout is essentially inevitable:
A government bailout of the GSEs should not be a surprise. After all, for a long time the markets have been predicting that sooner or later there will be a very expensive bailout. What do I mean? According to Freddie Mac (quoting the OMB) "mortgage rates are 25 – 50 basis points lower because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exist in the form and size they do." Now, that is almost certainly an exaggeration but to the extent that interest rates are lower due to the GSEs some significant part of that is due to the market valuing the government's implicit guarantee. In other words, interest rates are lower because the market is valuing the implied insurance. Now, the whole point of insurance is that sometimes the insurer must pay. Thus market has been telling us all along that sooner or later the taxpayer was going to pay.
Meanwhile, it's of course nice to have mortgage interest rates be lower rather than higher. But as a policy objective to devote actual resources to, this seems like a pretty poor choice of priorities. For the most desirable homes, cheaper mortgage rates is only going to bid up the price. And for every person at the margin who's able to afford a home this way, but wouldn't otherwise, you have a large number of people who are simply buying somewhat larger homes than they otherwise would have (and, concurrently, developers building somewhat larger homes).
A big house is nice, obviously, but that kind of thing is substantially a positional arms race. But beyond that, houses -- unlike most kinds of comparably durable infrastructure -- aren't really productive investments that do anything. If we had fewer schemes to subsidize home purchasing then, over the long run people would buy smaller cheaper homes and more of the country's capital would be devoted to productive investments making us all wealthier (on average) over time, albeit without quite so many extra rooms.
Barack Obama, out of touch with the working man as usual, has an aggressive program for carbon emissions reductions and has spoken of the need for such frou-frou measures as increased investment in transit infrastructure, intercity rail, and even bicycling. The McCains, by contrast, dole out such homespun wisdom as "in Arizona, the only way to get around the state is by small private plane" and understand that in this crazy modern world where the typical family owns eleven homes and spends hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on household staff, you can't possibly expect transportation alternatives to gain popularity.
Not since John demonstrated that he was a true "man of the people" by riding first class on the Acela has his family's fundamental in touchness been so underscored, and the fundamental elitism of the Obama's been laid bare so clearly.
One thing to keep in mind when considering John McCain's bogus balanced budget plan is that the wound here is entirely self-inflicted. Given the present circumstances, I can't think of any good reason for a presidential candidate to be promising to that we'll be at balanced budgets in four years. It would be nice to see the deficit on a decreasing trajectory rather than an increasing one, but achieving short-term balance isn't necessary or even necessarily desirable.
But since there's a supply-side faction on the right and also a deficit hawk faction on the right, and since McCain doesn't really seem very interested in whether or not his proposals make sense, he seems to have just decided to do both -- flip-flop on the Bush tax cuts and propose large new tax cuts and promise to balance the budget even though he has no way of doing it.
Paul Krugman wrote in today's column that the vote this week on Medicare (that Ted Kennedy returned to take part in) encouraged him to believe that universal health care stands a good chance of becoming a reality should Obama win and the Democrats increase their majority in both Houses. If this is true, and you can comment on this, what are the chances of us ever seeing single payer? I would think the greatest obstacles to this would be the Socialist, Government Medicine charge (gov't selects your doctor, the gov't can't run anything right) and the "loss of jobs" from the insurers.
I think the odds are really bad. And I think that the greatest political vulnerability a single-payer scheme would face is not so much the "socialist, government medicine" charge as it is desire among liberals to do something to ease the plight of the uninsured. Substantively, the most likely route to a single-payer health care system would be something along the lines of what John Edwards proposed during his late presidential campaign. That would have built upon the current system with the mandate/regulate/subsidize troika but would also have created a public sector health plan modeled on Medicare. The idea, then, is that if liberals and conservatives both have the courage of our convictions, we'll see over time whether or not people like the public plan. If they do, we transition over time to a single payer system.
Fannie Mae didn't start out as a "GSE," it started out as a government agency. It can go back to being a government agency if the government needs to further the economic goals of liquidity in the home mortgage market--and maybe it can go back to doing business with Podunk National, rather than lavishing its capital on mega-lenders who aren't going to be subject to regional liquidity crunches. All this uproar over "nationalizing" the GSEs seems to me the part that is really overblown. If they can't raise enough capital as shareholder-owned entities to prevent the necessity of periodic bailouts, then let's end the experiment with "GSEs" and make them agencies of the government. Any "rescue" that doesn't wipe out the shareholders is simply making a bad thing worse.
Brad Delong says this is the "Laura d'Andrea Tyson line on the GSEs" as well which reminds me that I've been meaning to wonder aloud if she's going to be our next Secretary of the Treasury.
At any rate, I'm only a lowly blogger but the idea of "government sponsored entities" doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. The things we need government agencies to do should be done by government agencies, other things should be done by market actors who are subject to ordinary risks.
Paulson made clear last night that he favors a minority stake. But from a purely financial perspective, it would be better to buy the whole caboodle. If the government is going to supply a rescue, why share the upside? The worry about adding to the federal debt turns out to be a digression. Although Fannie and Freddie owe an astronomical amount, they are owed a roughly similar amount. The net effect of nationalization on the federal debt would be modest. [...]
As long as Fannie and Freddie retain their private/public form, private managers will invent reasons to grow courtesy of public assistance. The best shot at taming them is to bring them into the government. Then, once financial markets have stabilized, the government should shrink the institutions radically and spin them off in pieces, creating maximum space in the mortgage market for smaller private players.
This sounds good to me and if Mallaby can say it then why not progressive politicians, too? Meanwhile, based on his column this didn't seem to me to be where Paul Krugman was heading, but he writes in a followup "So what should be done about the GSEs? If they must be rescued, the stockholders should be cleaned out — which would, in effect, return us to the situation pre-1968."
Supreme Court ruling aside, it actually seems extremely unlikely that DC residents will be able to buy handguns any time soon. Why? As Rob Goodspeed explains it's all in the zoning. You can't legally buy a gun in DC because there are no gun stores here. And to sell a gun to an out-of-state resident, a gun shop needs to actually ship the weapon to an in-state store that accepts responsibility for background checks, etc. And, again, there are no gun stores in DC. And there never will be gun stores in DC unless some part of the city is zoned so as to allow a gun store. And the city has no intention of doing any such thing.
Most DC residents will be happy with this substantive outcome, but either way it points to the larger lesson that zoning is really important. Most people I know find it idiosyncratic, at best, that I make efforts to familiarize myself with elements of DC's zoning and business license rules. But this is really something that people should do wherever it is they live. A lot of the sort of questions people ask semi-rhetorically about why things are the way they are in Town/Neighborhood X turn out to come down to zoning and business licensing rules that people do well to have some understanding of.
Photo by Flickr user kcdstm used under a Creative Commons license
So John McCain has promised to balance the budget, but has also promised a series of lavish tax cuts for the rich, defense spending hikes, and endless wars that makes balancing the budget impossible. So far, so good, just a little of the old straight talk. But then for some reason he actually provided the Washington Post editorial page with a budget plan, perhaps counting on their love of Bush/McCain-style foreign policy to cause them to forget how to add, resulting in an editorial about how their numbers are nonsense.
In a reality development, the video professor is offering to help McCain learn how to use a computer:
Between the built-in calculator, and widely available spreadsheet and financial planning software, maybe once the professor's through with him McCain will have his budget problems figured out.
Photo by Flickr user Akash_k used under a Creative Commons license
And let’s be clear: Fannie and Freddie can’t be allowed to fail. With the collapse of subprime lending, they’re now more central than ever to the housing market, and the economy as a whole.
That seems about right. But it's one thing to say that the enterprises can't be allowed to fail and it's another thing to say that the shareholders' investments in the enterprises can't be allowed to fail. Why can't the whole thing be nationalized? There seem to be sound economic reasons for letting the executives press the big red "Come Save Us" button, but surely there should be consequences.
"I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption."
I think that's a great argument against allowing gays and lesbians to steal children from happy two-parent heterosexual families, but why on earth is the importance of both parents a good reason to prevent gay couples from adopting orphans?
Hank Paulson's announced some dramatic measures to prevent a Fannie/Freddie collapse where, among other things, he's going to ask congress to approve an increase in the debt ceiling so that the government can buy up a lot of their stock. Basically, it seems like a quasi-nationalization to me though I'll be interested to see what more serious econ types think in the morning.
Meanwhile -- the shocking true tale of how these companies managed to evade oversight is worth a read. Chuck Schumer done bad.
Just remember to accuse John McCain of being like Bush is to slander his war service or something. Anyways, he's Wolf Blitzer talking to McCain surrogate Mark Sanford:
BLITZER: Are there any significant economic differences between what the Bush administration has put forward over these many years as opposed to now what John McCain supports?
SANFORD: Um, yeah. For instance, take, you know, take, for instance, the issue of -- I'm drawing a blank, and I hate it when I do that, particularly on television. Take, for instance the contrast on NAFTA. I mean, I think that the bigger issue is credibility in where one is coming from, are they consistent where they come from.
Ooops! I'm not really sure what Sanford's trying to say here about NAFTA but there's no contrast there. There once upon a time was a substantial contrast on tax policy, but in order to win the nomination and court the GOP sociopathic donor base he's no firmly pledged himself to not only continue but intensify the Bush course on tax policy.
Washington Posttakes a look at DC's looming streetcar construction. I'm excited about this but, as they say, "Streetcars share lanes with automobiles and ride on rails built in existing streets."
We should really be aspiring to have our streetcars run at least substantial portions of their routes in dedicated lanes. A streetcar in a dedicated lane not only can hold a lot of people but will hold a lot of people -- running quickly and reasonably frequently, thus presenting itself as an attractive option that takes a lot of cars off the roads. A streetcar that spends a lot of time stuck in traffic isn't necessarily going to be a very useful option, but the routes most prone to heavy congestion tend to be the routes where it makes the most sense to consider locating a line.
From the "things that don't sound true to me" file, Ezra Klein reports some data that suggests that replacing beef consumption with pork consumption could have some dramatic environmental benefits.
Relatedly, I was in Baltimore yesterday at the Lexington Market where they had this odd kind of pan-ethnic deli, selling pastrami, "Jewish salami," etc. like a kosher deli but also featuring tons of Italian pork-based cured meats. Kosher deli is a good thing, and so is salumi but the combination is weird. Point being -- less pastrami and more ham = a healthier environment.
It's a little bit mysterious why exactly this is the case, but which party controls the White House sure does seem to have a large effect on a variety of macroeconomic variables. Might I suggest that figuring out what explains this is a pretty important area for research? Smarter people than I are going to have to get on the case.
Remember when the rule of law was a hot topic among conservatives? Obviously, 9/11 changed everything so in the name of national security we should ignore laws against torture and laws against warrantless wiretapping, but what many fail to realize is that 9/11 made environmental regulations obsolete as well:
The Supreme Court, in a decision 15 months ago that startled the government, ordered the EPA to decide whether human health and welfare are being harmed by greenhouse gas pollution from cars, power plants and other sources, or to provide a good explanation for not doing so.
The administration, naturally, decided to comply with the court order "opted to postpone action instead, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post." Ah, opted to postpone. And how does that work?
To defer compliance with the Supreme Court's demand, the White House has walked a tortured policy path, editing its officials' congressional testimony, refusing to read documents prepared by career employees and approved by top appointees, requesting changes in computer models to lower estimates of the benefits of curbing carbon dioxide, and pushing narrowly drafted legislation on fuel-economy standards that officials said was meant to sap public interest in wider regulatory action.
The decision to solicit further comment overrides the EPA's written recommendation from December. Officials said a few senior White House officials were unwilling to allow the EPA to state officially that global warming harms human welfare. Doing so would legally trigger sweeping regulatory requirements under the 45-year-old Clean Air Act, one of the pillars of U.S. environmental protection, and would cost utilities, automakers and others billions of dollars while also bringing economic benefits, EPA's analyses found.
Or maybe it wasn't 9/11 after all. Maybe they're just whoring for the coal and oil companies who fund them. Crazy notion, yes. Since we all know that John McCain (a) is a maverick (b) is in no sense running for Bush's third term and (c) has heroically broken with the GOP on climate change no doubt he'll be issuing a call for impeachment or something.
It seems that John "Straight Talk" McCain has ads up claiming that Barack Obama has voted to raise taxes on individuals earning "as little as $32,000 per year." This claim is indisputably false. Beyond that, Doug Holtz-Eakin's defense of the claim, namely that Obama voted for a budget resolution that would raise the tax rate for people currently in the 25 percent bracket, and that bracket "begins at an income level of $31,850" is positively risible. Holtz-Eakin is referring to the level of taxable income not current income at which the bracket begins, the correct figure is $32,500 for 2008, and Obama's vote was for 2009 at which point the cutoff would be higher. But that would be a taxable income level translating to something over $41,500 for an individual with no dependents or over $83,000 for a married couple.
I'm quite a bit too young to remember the last time we had major banks failing in this country and I'll admit that it's pretty unsettling. Brad DeLong gives me some confidence that the appropriate people have the tools and judgment necessary to prevent things from getting too bad. But who knows -- I'm kind of an optimist by nature, and optimism hasn't been paying off well lately.
Yesterday, John Quiggin was speculating about the potential for a nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. With today's news that bailout packages of various kinds are under consideration, it seems to me that this option should be up for discussion. As Quiggin argues, these things need to be on the table at some level when you're talking about institutions that are "too big to fail."
As he says: "The shareholders of these companies have been happy to accept the higher returns associated with an implicit government guarantee and they should pay the price when the guarantee is needed."
To echo what Ezra Klein says here obviously the low quality of the public schools in some cities makes them a not-so-hot place to raise children, but there's nothing in general about urban areas that makes them bad places for kids. I grew up in a big city and I think it was great. Among other advantages, my parents didn't need to spend my early teen years acting as my chauffeur and throughout high school they were able to rest assured that I wasn't driving drunk.
Just as for non-children, in other words, there are pluses and minuses to having a smaller home in a denser area versus a larger home in a less-dense one. I imagine that many people, both with and without children, will have a strong preference for houses with substantial yards and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's also nothing wrong with raising kids in a city if that's what you like. From a policy perspective, this is just one more reason why it's important to improve educational opportunities in troubled urban school systems but some suburbs have problematic school systems too -- it's not as if proximity to strip malls guarantees educational excellence.
Beyond all that, one important factor keeping people -- but especially families -- out of a lot of pleasant urban neighborhoods is the "no one wants to live there, it's too expensive" phenomenon. To buy a multiple bedroom apartment in the neighborhood where I grew up would, these days, cost about a zillion dollars real estate crash notwithstanding. Sky-high prices in fashionable central cities are going to push people further out who might, were the prices the same, prefer to live in the central cities. That, in my view, is a good reason to try to alleviate some of the regulatory restrictions on building more housing in desirable areas but, again, it doesn't point to some metaphysical problem with the concept of raising children in the city.
Breaking: Republicans are Racists Now So It's Okay
I'm not quite I understand what conservatives are doing when they bring this kind of thing up:
The original targets of the Ku Klux Klan were Republicans, both black and white, according to a new television program and book, which describe how the Democrats started the KKK and for decades harassed the GOP with lynchings and threats.
Which is precisely the point. Decades ago, the Democratic Party was, among other things, the political home of white supremacy in the United States. In the 1960s, the party's leadership decisively broke with that record. At around the same time, part of the rise of the conservative movement inside the Republican Party was the growing prominence of folks like Barry Goldwater who opposed the Civil Rights Act and who found in his 1964 campaign that the main electoral constituency for his brand of conservatism was . . . white supremacists. Other white supremacist politicians (some of whom, unlike Goldwater, would forever remain unrepentant) like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms moved into the GOP column. And of course while explicit advocacy of segregation has long since vanished from the top ranks of the Republican Party, major conservative leaders have been heard in recent years issuing paens to the work of Thurmond and Helms, with key legislative leaders specifically regretting that Thurmond's 1948 white supremacist presidential campaign failed, and pointing to Helms as exemplifying what conservatism is all about.
Steve Clemons rides the Shanghai maglev that speeds passengers from the airport into the city in 7 minutes and 20 seconds reaching a top speed of 270 mph and is suddenly not so happy with the state of things in the United States:
And when I left Washington ten days ago, I was reading that it was going to take 15 years to extend a subway line from the DC metro to Dulles Airport -- and that it would still take 1 hour and 20 minutes when completed to travel from downtown Washington to the Airport. Our social objectives should be higher than they are.
Indeed. There are sound reasons why we can't do infrastructure upgrades as quickly as the Chinese, but we ought to do much better than we are.
Paul Krugman says the Democrats' success in pushing a bill that would redirect funds from the Medicare Advantage program (which provides generous subsidies to insurance companies) into higher reimbursement rates for doctors shows that progressives have a winning political strategy that could turn into universal health care next year. Jonathan Cohn agrees also citing the importance of measures that aim to cleave the doctor lobby away from the insurance insurance.
But on the other hand, Cohn cautions "In the long run, no health care reform can succeed without doing something about cost and quality--which will mean changing the way we pay for medical care and, in some cases, paying doctors less." Realistically, I think this means that even if progressives in some sense "win" a big health care fight next year, it's still going to leave us with a system that leaves a lot to be desired.
Mark Schmitt argues that the center-right "Taking Back Our Fiscal Future" document discussed yesterday is the Stuart Butler's Leninist Strategy (PDF) for destroying Social Security in a new Popular Front phase.
Certainly the "centrist" elements of this team seem to be making a good run at being useful idiots. Why, if you're interested in balanced budgets, would you team up with folks like Butler who supported Bush's budget-busting tax cuts. The "balanced budgets are the most important thing in the world when Democrats are in power, but don't matter at all when there's a Republican President worldview" has a certain logic to it, but it's not one anyone who claims to be any sort of progressive ought to embrace.
Photo by Flickr user wordcat used under a Creative Commons license
McCain says today that Phil Gramm doesn't speak for him when he calls the United States a "nation of whiners" suffering from a "mental recession" but today is also the day that McCain sent Phil Gramm to speak for him to the Wall Street Journal editorial board. There whole question of whether or not the current economic downturn is real or else some kind of mass hallucination doesn't strike me as a minor economic policy issue -- if McCain doesn't agree with his top economics surrogates about it, he probably needs a new team.
Spencer Ackerman takes a look at the substantial problems facing oil companies looking to do business in Iraq. Some contracts were handed out recently, but those "aren't production contracts, but preliminary technical contracts" and really pumping oil would need to wait on Iraq writing a hydrocarbon law and the security situation improving to the point where Western companies are prepared to send their people over. The larger issue, though, is that to make big money in Iraq you'd have to make big infrastructure investments in Iraq. Investments with an uncertain payoff:
The oil conglomerates "are the toughest negotiators," said Martha Brill Olcott, a former Unocal adviser now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They'll work out a contract that insulates themselves from political risk. That's where countries get upset -- they paid too great a price to protect Western companies from political risk. That's a problem: Iraqis might agree to one set of terms now, but you can imagine in 2015, if we're lucky and it's stable [in Iraq], then they'll say, 'Why the hell did we agree to these terms?'"
Now I'll be quick to agree that this isn't the only factor at play, but it seems to me that a healthy portion of what's driving interest in a long-term US military presence in Iraq is precisely a desire to continue exercising "influence" in Iraq such that we can mitigate the political risk faced by your friendly neighborhood oil companies. Western companies don't like it when their developing world investments are lost to nationalization, and their desire to prevent this from happening has often had a powerful pull on American foreign policy.
Here's a fascinating result from Jing Feng, Ian Spence, and Jay Pratt on the subject of the well-known male edge on visiuspatial tests. One such test is known as the Field of Vision test. The researchers gave people the test before, after, and several months after "training" for it by playing two different video games. One game, Ballance (a 3-D puzzle game) didn't do much. But the action game Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault did make a big difference, improving scores for men and women but doing so in a way that drastically narrowed the performance gap. They say they got similar results on the Mental Rotation test.
This seems to suggest that a larger portion of the male/female visiospatial gap may be rooted in socialization than is generally thought. Or else that insofar as the gap is rooted in genetics it's through the mechanism of a male preference for violent video games.
Some Brookings Institution worthies teamed up with the Heritage Foundation and the Concord Coalition along with such centrist stars as Will Marshall of DLC/PPI and Maya MacGuiness of New America to produce a report called "Taking Back Our Fiscal Future" (PDF) that nicely reflects the center-right Beltway consensus that (a) budget deficits are very bad, and (b) they should be tamed primarily by cuts to federal retirement security programs.
A rival and, in my view, sounder approach is offered under the auspices of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities with the title "A Balanced Approach to Restoring Fiscal Responsibility" (PDF). Brad Delong, one of the "Balanced Approach" team, offers a blog post sized summary of the problems with the TBOFF approach and the following alternative recommendations:
We believe that rather than spending time trying to design complicated budget procedures of dubious merit and effectiveness, we should focus on concrete legislative steps: policies that raise more revenue, increase economic growth, slow the rate of health care spending systemwide and nationwide, reform Medicare, and bring Social Security expenditures into balance with Social Security resources. Specifically:
Slash farm supports.
Slash tax loopholes and tax expenditures.
Halt Medicare Advantage overpayments to private insurance companies.
Adopt the other recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
Increase Medicare premiums for the well-off.
Institute vigorous research programs to determine the comparative cost-effectiveness of different treatments and procedures.
Institute vigorous research programs to determine the causes of the extraordinary nationwide variation in health-care spending.
Use the results of research to devise policies to restrain health care cost growth without seriously compromising quality.
Index entitlement benefits by a proper cost-of-living rather than a consumer price index.
Index tax brackets by a proper cost-of-living rather than a consumer price index.
Adhere to the time-tested and effective pay-as-you-go rules.
I would add that in my view it's not reasonable to talk about fiscal policy with no mention of the Defense Department budget. All too often U.S. military posture is discussed as if the budgetary costs involved aren't real, and U.S. fiscal policy is discussed as if the Defense Department isn't there. In fact, the military is by far the biggest expenditure item on the balance sheet and needs to be on the table for discussion. That doesn't mean that draconian defense spending cuts are called for, but we need to consider the fact that given the scale of the Pentagon budget even small efforts at restraint involve large sums of money.
And of course in addition to the formal budget, there's the question of ongoing policy. If I were to propose a domestic spending initiative with a bill of over $100 billion a year it would be subjected to some pretty serious scrutiny as to whether the benefits can justify that kind of cost. The continuing operation in Iraq, however, is typically discussed as if any benefits whatsoever serve to justify a massive and costly undertaking, a standard that we (rightly) don't apply in thinking about any other portion of the pie.
I've just been watching the McCain campaign's video about their candidate's jobs plan. One thing that jumps out as amusing is during the discussion of energy policy, when the text on the screen talks about the genius of a gas tax holiday but Doug Holtz-Eakin, who's trying to provide the voiceover while maintaining his reputation, doesn't actually say anything about it, sticking instead to some good points about ethanol -- an issue where McCain is definitely right and Obama is definitely wrong.
The overarching frame of the video is the assertion that John McCain "looks at every policy, everything his administration will do, through the lens of providing Americans with the jobs they need." Running through the whole thing, however, two things become apparent. One is that this assertion is an effort to kind of distract you from the fact that John McCain does not, in fact, have a jobs policy. Instead, he's taken a miscellaneous group of other policy measures and labeled them his "Jobs for America" plan. The other is that it's clearly not the case that McCain "looks at every policy, everything his administration will do, through the lens of providing Americans with the jobs they need." After energy, the video leaps to McCain's longstanding passion for porkbusting and Holtz-Eakin reiterates McCain's vow to veto any appropriation with an earmark attached. You can say what you will about this pledge, but it's certainly not a jobs plan -- people are hard at work on those earmarked projects as we speak.
Wouldn't real straight talk be for McCain to just admit that conservatives don't really believe in labor market interventions and economic stimulus? Yes, that would be a losing election strategy, but the McCain brand is supposed to be about telling the truth no matter what the political price.
The Flint, MI police department decides to crack down on loose-fitting pants. Apparently Flint has seen a large drop in its once sky-high murder rate over the past couple of years so maybe they have nothing better to do.
AirTran got ahold of my email address somehow or other over the years and sends me occasional doses of spam. Normally, it's to promote some deal or something. But now they're giving me rants against the evils of oil speculators:
Speculators buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again. A barrel of oil may trade 20-plus times before it is delivered and used; the price goes up with each trade and consumers pick up the final tab. Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs.
Over seventy years ago, Congress established regulations to control excessive, largely unchecked market speculation and manipulation. However, over the past two decades, these regulatory limits have been weakened or removed. We believe that restoring and enforcing these limits, along with several other modest measures, will provide more disclosure, transparency and sound market oversight. Together, these reforms will help cool the over-heated oil market and permit the economy to prosper.
I've found the arguments of Paul Krugman and other skeptics of the "blame the speculators" story pretty convincing. But if I were an airline, I would badly want it to be true.
Steven Levitt writes up some new research on race, speech patterns, and earnings done by Jeffrey Grogger:
His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)
Follow at the link for an explanation of how who "sounds black" was determined. Whites with strong southern accents appear to suffer from a similar problem, though I think that since the experiment wasn't really designed to measure that the estimate is very imprecise.
Here's the video of John McCain calling Social Security an "absolute disgrace":
Another thing for his campaign to complain is being taken out of context, I suppose. McCain's just the sort of candidate who's too awesome to be quoted accurately lest the public understand his agenda, something we must be shielded from at all costs by war stories and vague stuff about patriotism and reform.
With regard to the post below it is, of course, worth saying that engineering our cities so as to support the needs of all the users of our streets, rather than the desire of suburban commuters to move very quickly, is at times literally a matter of life and death. Take the example of Alice Swanson the 22 year-old bicycle commuter killed yesterday as she attempted to bike west on R Street through the intersection with 20th Street by a garbage truck that seems to have turned right without looking to see if anyone was in the bike lane moving forward.
This particular intersection is not an especially dangerous one, in my view, which goes to show that terrible things can happen even with decent traffic engineering. But it also serves as a reminder that at other, worse-designed elements of our streets, huge risks are taken every day with the safety of pedestrians and cyclists.
The other day the Washington Post ran a preposterous article deeming a few commonsense measures taken by the Fenty administration to serve the interests of people live, work, and pay taxes in the District of Columbia a "war against workers who drive into the city." Yesterday, Megan McArdle signed on as a war supporter.
Today, I think I'd like to offer some suggestions in case the Fenty administration decides to prosecute the war more vigorously. For one thing, all the reversible-lane (lanes that run inbound during the morning rush hour and outbound during the afternoon rush hour) streets should be made into regular streets. The SE Freeway should be turned into a boulevard, as should the part of 295 that runs east from the Air Force and Naval bases (this will allow the eventual construction of a nice Anacostia riverfront). The stretch of New York Avenue running east from North Capitol Street to the border should be made into a more normal city street rather than a quasi-highway as should the stretch of North Capitol Street running north from Michigan Avenue.
Major thoroughfares like Connecticut Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, Rhode Island Avenue, H Street, 16th Street should have either parking or traffic lanes removed to make way for dedicated bus lanes that may lay the groundwork for eventual light rail. Everyplace throughout the central city that's currently painted for diagonal or perpendicular parking should be put to parallel parking with the space freed up dedicated to sidewalk, green space, bike lanes, something. Developers and landowners should be freed from any regulatory mandate to build parking lots or garages (one assumes most will still want to provide some parking that may or may not be free).
With less space dedicated to moving and parking private cars there will, of course, be a scarcity problem which should be ameliorated by congestion pricing and performance parking. Revenue thereby generated can go to enhance Metro and Metrobus service.
Photo by Flickr user Alex Massie used under a Creative Commons license
In a better world, we'd be past the debate over whether to enact legislation to curb America's carbon emissions and we could all spend our time glorying in things like Peter Orszag's recommendations on how to structure and implement a cap and trade scheme so as to maximize the room for economic growth and avoid doing anything that's unduly regressive.
He says the two most important points are (a) that we need to allow for some banking and borrowing of emissions permits, so that reductions can happen at the most economically opportune times rather than on an arbitrary schedule, and (b) that we need to auction the permits so as to generate revenue that can offset some of the problems caused by the imposition of the cap.
Photo by Flickr user futureatlas used under a Creative Commons license
It's good to hear that WMATA is set to expand MetroExtra service adding new routes for these faster buses that stop less frequently and have "signal priority" technology that lets them briefly hold green lights so the bus can make it past the intersection. Given the flexibility and relative lack of expense involved in buses, these are the kind of measures that jurisdictions all across the country should be looking at.
The next step, and the one that could really change things, would be the implementation of dedicated (and well-enforced) bus lanes. As pictured above, an equal number of people can fit into a vastly smaller space if they're riding a bus than if they're in single passenger cars so ultimately the best way to deal with the problem of a large number of people wanting to pass through a limited roadspace is to make it more appealing to take the bus.
A dedicated bus lane means that your bus can go faster (especially when combined with signal priority) which makes for a shorter commute, thus making the bus a more attractive option. But a faster bus also means it reaches the end point sooner and then goes back the other way. That means that, even holding the number of buses constant, a dedicated bus lane makes bus service more frequent which makes taking the bus a more attractive option. And, of course, if the bus becomes more attractive there'll be more demand on the route and therefore more fares, which makes it more viable to run buses more frequently which, again, will make it a more desirable option.
Oilman T. Boone Pickens is launching an ambitious energy initiative called the Pickens Plan whereby we're going to build lots of wind power for electricity, allowing us to take natural gas out of the electricity business and use it as a transportation fuel. Joseph Romm calls the plan half brilliant and and half dumb, citing the visionary leadership on winding power but expressing serious doubts about the natural gas element.
Read Romm for full details, but the crux of the matter is that burning gas in a power plant is a lot more efficient than burning it in an internal combustion engine. Natural gas, meanwhile, is so-so on the cleanliness front. Put those two things together and an electric car getting its juice from a natural gas power plant is much cleaner than a car burning natural gas. And since our current infrastructure is already geared to using gas in power plants there's no really good reason to switch things up.
Barack Obama thinks America's schools should be the best in the world, and that means doing as good a job as other countries do of teaching our children foreign languages. This, it seems, makes him a snob in the eyes of The Weekly Standard (via Julian Sanchez) where they apparently feel that a healthy respect for the common man requires a vote for John McCain and a willingness to settle for low-performing public services.
Ezra Klein, writing yesterday about Obama and ethanol, argued that rather than subsidies for corn per se the "bigger problem is that Obama supports the 45 cent tariff on Brazilian sugar cane, which is about four times more energy efficient than corn as an ethanol base."
I'm not sure which is the bigger problem. It reminds me, though, that the ridiculous tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol is just one small slice of the larger set of terrible sugar policies in the United States which are aimed at making sugar cane expensive in order to boost the fortunes of America's beet sugar producers and, indirectly, the high fructose corn syrup industry. What kind of justification one could mount for this perverse effort at sweetener autarky are couldn't quite say, but I have a longstanding dream of a politician handing out bottles of Mexican Coke (made with real sugar) at rallies, drawing vast crowds and powering a massive grassroots campaign for proper sugar.
Good article from Robert Gordon and James Kvaal which notes that John McCain has developed a marked tendency for offering contradictory proposals on a wide range of issues.
In his defense, I'd say that constantly contradicting himself is a kind of mavericky thing to do.
I hadn't realized this, but apparently the Democratic National Convention's planners are making all kinds of moves to make it the "most sustainable" convention ever, including a search for the elusive carbon neutrality. I think individuals who aim for that kind of objective in their personal lives are acting out of laudable motives, but to me it's actually counterproductive for a political organization to be doing this.
The public policy argument made by liberals is that the United States ought to reduce its carbon emissions, and that this can be accomplished either by a cap/permit scheme or a carbon tax scheme. Either would have the impact of raising the price of carbon emissions, with that added cost transmitted up and down the economic conveyor belt, leaving each consumer free to make each individual choice and tradeoff based on considerations of price and quality. In the end, carbon emissions will fall and climate change will be mitigated. Engaging in the laborious (indeed, impossible) task of calculating the aggregate carbon footprint of each and every individual activity you engage in isn't part of the agenda on any level.
The individual carbon footprint of any particular activity under the current policy regime just isn't relevant -- the point is that the current policy regime is bad and needs to be changed. When you see the Democratic Party aiming for a carbon neutral convention, it does much less to improve the environment than it does to define environmentalism in terms of an unrealistic standard of behavior that few individuals will reach, while rending huge swathes of the progressive community vulnerable to spurious charges of hypocrisy from the right.
Photo by Flickr user Clownfish used under a Creative Commons license
Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief who is now the Republican National Committee’s “Victory Chairman,” was discussing consumer-driven health insurance at a breakfast with reporters when she proposed “a real, live example which I’ve been hearing a lot about from women: There are many health insurance plans that will cover Viagra but won’t cover birth-control medication. Those women would like a choice.”
Unfortunately for her, McCain had an opportunity to vote in congress on a measure that would guarantee that health insurance plans cover birth control and he voted against it. As Dana Goldstein points out that's just one piece of a larger reactionary McCain agenda on reproductive rights and safe sex.
Interesting map showing that the highest concentration of overweight Americans is in the south and to a lesser extent the Midwest, while New England and a "backward L" from Montana to California that doesn't comport all that well with conventional regionalization are slender. Like James Poulos I want to know more -- a county level map, perhaps, or some kind of demographic controls.
David asks: "Thoughts about California Proposition 1, which focuses on a high speed rail line in the state?"
Do you really need to ask? Obviously, I'm for building high speed rail. The California coast is a potentially excellent rail corridor with a whole bunch of kinda close urban areas. I'd say that there (potentially extending upcoast to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver) is one of the most promising possible areas for rail improvement. It's an expensive undertaking, but one that will pay large dividends for a long time once it's done.
Related, a question about some rail proposal in Hawaii whose opponents are trying to force a referendum: "What is more important? Direct democracy (which I believe you mostly want more of) or 'elite' driven infrastructure projects (even if it is stipulated that they are long term benefit to a majority of the people.)?"
I don't think I do generally want more direct democracy. My understanding is that excessive direct democracy has contributed to serious governance problems in California. Among other things, I think direct democracy tends to undermine the idea of accountability of officials to the public in a way that's contrary to the nominal objectives.
Tim Lee runs down some little-known facts about the original growth of the secret, illegal surveillance state as the FBI, with administration approval, decided to ignore a series of court rulings in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s that attempted to restrain its ability to wiretap in a variety of ways. These practices, of course, were per se abusive in many ways, and led to further abuses, and then under Richard Nixon led to the revelation of massive abuses and the creations of the safeguards we're now busy unwinding.
I suppose at this point I've become fatalistic about FISA and am mostly just waiting for this whole cycle to repeat itself.
UPDATE: See also this important followup about crass politicization of surveillance and this crucial point: "Now, I have no evidence that today’s NSA or FBI is doing anything like this. But of course, someone in the 1960s wouldn’t have realized what the FBI was doing then, either."
An excellent point by Ezra Klein, namely that it's an enormous dodge for reporters to write that John McCain plans to balance the budgeting by "entitlement programs, including Social Security". Like, overhauling how. If McCain doesn't say how, he might as well be saying he plans to balance the budget by magic. If he does say how, well, some people will get upset but they ought to have their chance to get upset before the election.
This is part of the paradox of McCain's famous openness to the press -- the deal seems to be that in exchange for unusual access to the candidate, his traveling press corps agrees not to ask him any obvious questions like "when you put changing the federal government's largest program at the center of your economic strategy, what exactly do you mean?" You probably wouldn't get invited to the next BBQ session or something. But it's a kind of important aspect of the overall picture. Trying to cut Medicare spending is a more reasonable idea than Social Security cuts, but it's an even more conceptually difficult proposition and one really needs to know what kind of overhaul we're talking about before evaluating that kind of proposal.
This is just a staggering story in The Washington Post. The essence of it is that the mayor of Washington DC has made a couple of fairly minor policy shifts designed to make life better for people who live in Washington DC and pay taxes in Washington DC that have come at the expense of people who don't live in Washington DC and don't pay taxes in Washington DC but do commute to work here in cars.
To which I say: More please! Obviously, there's some point at which you've made things so terrible for suburban commuters that the downtown office market totally collapses and your city is screwed. But we're really, really far from that point. Mayors' priorities should be on creating livable neighborhoods for people, and on creating circumstances in which more people move into their cities. Putting a priority on making suburbanites' car commutes as short as possible is preposterous.
Sam Stein provides some details on the planned Health Care For America Now initiative, a $40 million campaign aimed at supporting a post-election drive for major health care reform in 2009. Intelligently, the plan calls not only for paid media but also for organizers to be deployed to a variety of spots around the country including all the districts represented by members of the Blue Dog caucus.
That sounds like the right strategy to me. A big part of the issue with a lot of these Blue Dog types is that they represent areas where there's little to nothing in the way of real progressive organization on the ground. Anyone representing a district like that is going to wind up listing to the right, especially on key votes where there are potentially large sums of money to be made by doing the wrong thing. Winning elections in marginal districts gives a political party a majority, but building infrastructure in those districts creates a working majority for substantial change.
One issue on which Barack Obama and John McCain differ is Social Security. McCain would like to replace Social Security as we currently understand it with a very different kind of retirement program that wouldn't offer security to retirees and would have no progressive impact on the income distribution. Because this plan is unpopular, he would like to confuse people about his support for privatization of Social Security and he would also like to secure bipartisan cover for privatizing it. Obama, by contrast, wants to keep Social Security very much as it is, and if deficits projected for the future emerge he's interested in altering the payroll tax cap in order to secure more revenue.
Or as the headline writers put it on the front page of The Washington Post"Candidates Diverge on How to Save Social Security". Because in headlineland, saving a program and destroying a program under pretext of saving it are just two different ways of saving it. Or as Perry Bacon, Jr. writes in the above-headlined story:
Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are both proposing dramatic changes to Social Security, taking on the financially fragile "third rail of American politics" that Congress and recent presidents have been unable to repair.
This is a great lead except for the fact that Obama is not proposing dramatic changes to Social Security. Well, there's also the fact that the projected deficits for Social Security are smaller and more manageable than those projected for the other entitlement programs (Medicare and Medicaid) and that the non-entitlement portion of the budget is running a huge deficit right now. Under the circumstances, Social Security would seem to be the least financial fragile aspect of the federal budget. And one more thing -- to say "that Congress and recent presidents have been unable to repair" Social Security implies that recent presidents and Congresses have been trying to repair it when, in fact, George W. Bush's Social Security proposals were, like John McCain's, aimed at phasing the program out.
I think I'm afraid to read past the lede of that particular story.
Robert Pear runs down the evidence that there's no way on earth John McCain is going to balance the budget by 2013 consistent with the priorities he's outlined. To put a hard number on it, according to the CBO if we extend the Bush tax cuts (as McCain has proposed) then even ignoring McCain's proposals to increase defense spending, to further cut taxes, and to continue the war in Iraq, we'll have a deficit of $443 billion.
Obviously, there's uncertainty associated with that projection, but that's the ballpark. That would mean something like an 80 percent reduction in Medicare spending.
There's not a ton of fans of the idea of tradeable water rights in my comment thread, but I'm not seeing many better options. Obviously the first-best option would be for the geological facts to just become different such that the pleasantly sunny southwest also had enough water to accommodate everyone's desires. But that's not the case. And scarce resources need to be allocated somehow. Allocating them by price has a couple of advantages. One is that it ensures that high-value uses keep going. If you have two business enterprises, and one can create VERY MUCH value out of a gallon of water and another can create JUST A BIT of value out of a gallon of water, it makes sense for the water to go to the VERY MUCH firm and for JUST A BIT enterprises to only locate themselves in areas where water is plentiful. Which is just a long way of saying that there are certain kinds of water-intensive activities that don't really belong in the arid portions of the United States, just as large solar power plants primarily do belong in those regions.
The other thing is that allocating by price lets different people make different sets of trade-offs. If water is scarce and you put a high value on having a grassy lawn but I put a low value on having one, then allocating by price will let you have a nice big lush lawn while I go without one and buy something else. Under other kind of schemes, I'll get a so-so lawn that I don't really appreciate, and you'll have a so-so lawn that leaves you wanting more.
Ultimately, we're used to the idea that a square foot of land quite properly costs dramatically more in New Jersey than in Arizona because space is more plentiful in Arizona. But why shouldn't water cost dramatically more in Arizona where water is scarce? I dunno, though. I don't have any kind of long-standing commitment to this position and am totally prepared to climb down in the face of a compelling alternative. The question, though, would have to be what policy goal is being advanced by adopting a non-market scheme -- environmental concerns, public health, what?
RoboticGhost asks: "I wondered if you heard anything about water concerns while you were out West. I don't suspect it'd be that big of a deal in lofty Aspen, but many parts of Colorado are caught in the fight for water resources. Its town against town against farmer against industry, with some armed conflicts thrown in for good measure."
I didn't hear anything about that when I was in Colorado, but I did hear a lot about water last year when I was in Southern California and New Mexico. I'm far from an expert in this, but normally when you see shortages you're looking at an effort to allocate a valuable resource by regulatory fiat (and therefore special interest political clout) rather than price. Thus, I was strongly predisposed to favor this proposal for tradeable water rights from Michael Greenstone at Brookings when I read it months ago and reading it again it still seems right.
You can imagine some very difficult water policy questions in a desperately poor country, where people being unable to acquire a subsidence level of clean drinking water is a real issue. The United States is wealthy enough that that's not a real concern -- if people are made to pay market rates to use water, we should find that there's plenty of water around for everyone to do what we really need to do.
A somewhat detailed explanation of how corn ethanol is a waste of energy. The impact on the price of food is obvious, but I keep hearing it said that as much (non-solar) energy goes into ethanol as we get out of it without any description of how this works.
I'm not sure how detailed I'm able to go here, but the basic shape of things is that if you think about a coal power plant you have to recognize that not only does the plant generate energy but it also takes a lot of energy to run the plant. The coal needs to be mined, transported, etc. But coal contains a lot of energy so the whole process is worth doing as an energy-acquisition mechanism. By contrast, planting, raising, and harvesting a field of corn is a relatively labor intensive enterprise. And when you're done, you don't have any ethanol at all -- you just have a bunch of corn. The corn then needs to be transported (and it's bulky) which uses energy, and then turned into ethanol which uses yet more energy. All told, that makes it difficult for corn ethanol to really work as a viable source of net energy.
By contrast, I believe you can just get a lot more ethanol from a ton of sugar cane than you can from a ton of corn. It's just like how sugar cane is a more efficient source of sweetener than is growing fields of corn to make high-fructose corn syrup.
You can find a technical discussion of the energy issues involving several different kinds of crops here. I would say, as a layman, that researchers seem to have obtained a range of results on the question of energy efficiency and that the "right" answer seems to depend both on how you count and and on what the specifics of any given field are. It's also worth considering that chopping down forests to clear land for agriculture can contribute to global warming.
Ultimately, though, rather than "figure this out" what we need to do is price carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme with auctioned permits. As with any other human activity, discerning the overall carbon impact is extremely difficult. For example, maybe corn ethanol by raising grain prices will, over time, make beef substantially more expensive in a way that reduces beef consumption and, in turn, lowers carbon emissions? There's just no real way to figure this stuff out, which is why we should mostly rely on the government to price carbon and let the market adjust accordingly, rather than trying to have the government pick "the best" technology.
Photo by Flickr user Kables used under a Creative Commons license
You can tell that Republicans haven't really lost their touch for the political game because the RNC's latest ad on energy ends on a talking point brilliantly designed to appeal to the lousy instincts of the brain-dead campaign press corps:
No new solutions. Barack Obama: Just the party line.
And it's true. Barack Obama's energy policies -- focused on improving efficiency and developing renewable energy sources -- are pretty much party line answers because the Democratic party line is largely correct. McCain, by contrast, is a mess. He wants a cap and trade system to combat global warming (good) but wants to organize it so that the costs are borne entirely by consumers rather than polluters (bad). He says he's against subsidies for renewable energy because subsidies are a bad idea (understandable if a little pie in the sky) but wants massive subsidies for nuclear energy (because nuclear firms give him campaign contributions). McCain wants to get us off our addiction to oil (good) but he has no record of improving mass transit or fuel efficiency (bad) and his big idea is to wreck the economy of the coastal United States through offshore drilling which he falsely claims will lower short-term fuel prices. On top of all that, he proposes to lower gas prices through a "gas tax holiday" that's been denounced by experts across the ideological spectrum.
It's true, though, that this mish-mash of ideas is far too incoherent to be anyone's party line. And that, I think, will be incredibly impressive to campaign reporters. The voters, I think, are pretty open to a more-or-less orthodox Democrat given the state of the GOP brand but that's another matter. Meanwhile, note the irony of an ad paid for by the Republican National Committee lauding John McCain for his willingness to break with the Republican line. If only the RNC had spoken up sooner on how terrible Republicans are!
It's worth saying that reducing the corporate income tax, as per John McCain, is not a terrible idea per se. As far as these things go, the corporate income tax is not a great way of raising revenue in part because it's shot-through with loopholes and such. And then the existence of the loopholes and the desire of various companies to squeeze their revenues into the loopholes has a deleterious impact of some kind on economic growth. I believe the standard center-left technocratic proposal is to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely and replace the lost revenue with a hike in the top individual income tax bracket -- that should ensure that the benefits of a corporate tax cut are captured by the middle class.
That, however, is very much not what John McCain is doing. Rather, he's proposing a cut in the corporate income tax rate and an extension of tax cuts in the top bracket and he's proposing to pay for that through some mix of borrowing and large cuts to domestic spending on retirement security and who knows what else. There's no good case for doing that. The imperfections of the corporate income tax, though real, aren't nearly so terrible as to make it worth paying any price to eliminate them. The kind of technically sound, revenue neutral corporate tax cut I outlined in the first paragraph is the sort of thing you would have expected the McCain of 2001-2003 to propose, but the new-old dogmatic rightwinger McCain is just offering flim-flam and smokescreens.
This week is economy week for John McCain, so it's worth giving some more scrutiny to McCain's economic policy proposals. For example, suppose that you, like so many Americans in these topys-turvey times, are a large and hugely profitable oil company. Your coffers are groaning under the weight of record profits driven by sky-high commodities prices. And you earn your living by poisoning the planet, all the while plowing a share of your profits back into bribes to ensure that the policy environment leaves most people with few viable alternatives to purchasing your product. You've got a tough life, and John McCain has a plan for you, a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.
The five largest oil companies in America would collectively save $3.8 billion per year under this plan, offering some change you can believe in if you're an ExxonMobil executive. But don't worry, it's not as if he only has plans for oil executives. No. Suppose you're in your late fifties or early sixties and looking to retire soon, but worried you won't be able to since so much of your wealth was tied up in your house and now the market's gone soft. Well never fear, John McCain has a plan to cut your Social Security benefits in an unknown manner and by an unknown amount in order to balance the budget in the face of his huge corporate tax cut.
After all, who needs Social Security when you can retire on a Senator's pension plus live off your heiress wife's vast fortune? In a world where the typical family owns eleven houses and lets their dependent kids spend $50,000 per month on mommy's credit card, there's no real role for the government in providing retirement security.
As a July 5 observation on patriotism, it's become increasingly common to think that there's a liberal form of patriotism and a conservative form, and that the liberal form has something to do with a self-critical spirit whereas conservatives take on a more of a "my country right or wrong" attitude. You can see Peter Beinart for some well-done thoughts along these lines.
Increasingly, though, I think this is wrong and would instead describe the liberal attitude toward patriotism as a special case of the kind of thing Richard Rorty deals with in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Up on a terrace yesterday with a bunch of somewhat buzzed people watching fireworks and shouting taunts against England and Canada and extolling the virtues of America as seen in explosions, loud noises, old TV theme songs, and grilled meats it seemed to me that the liberal experience of patriotism is really just the same as the conservative one.
And that's as it should be. American liberals and American conservatives are both Americans so our American patriotism is very similar. We just have different ideas about politics. Specifically, I would say that liberals do a better job of recognizing that much as we may love America there's something arbitrary about it -- we're just so happen to be Americans whereas other people are Canadians or Mexicans or French or Russian or what have you. The conservative view is more like those Bill Simmons columns where not only is he extolling the virtues of this or that Boston sports team or moment, but he seems to genuinely not understand why other people don't see it that way. But of course Simmons is from Boston and others of us aren't.
All of which is to say the liberal doesn't, as a political matter, confuse the emotions of patriotism with a description of objective reality or anticipate that the citizens of Iraq or Russia or China or wherever will drop their own patriotisms and come to see things our way. Patriotism is a sentiment about your particular country but it's also a sentiment that's much more widespread than any particular country, and if you can't understand the full implications of that then you're going to go badly wrong.
Apparently as energy costs rise, there's a renewal of interest in zeppelin technology. I'd say that investing in proven, workable high-speed rail where we know the technology works fine and just has high star-up costs makes more sense.
He "opposed civil rights"? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them.
Here's an ad Helms helped make for Willis Smith's 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Graham:
White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.
The "particular vision of civil rights" that Helms opposed was the vision in which African-Americans are permitted to work beside white people and in which the races are permitted to mingle.
Someone in the comment thread for the post on national service mentioned the idea of a US Public Service Academy. It would be something like the military academies, except for the civilian jobs the government needs: "The Public Service Academy will provide a rigorous undergraduate education followed by five years of civilian service to the country." I'd heard this proposal before, and it sounded like a good idea to me then and still sounds like a good idea to me now. Maintaining a high-quality civil service is absolutely vital to our country's future, and this seems like one useful way to accomplish that.
Higher-density, transit-friendly development possibly coming to a small town in California wine country. One thing we don't necessarily give enough thought to is the extent to which increased density and small town living may be compatible. After all, it's not as if classic small town America was built during the era of the automobile. A small town can be small without being super-sprawly or organized in such a way that the only way to buy anything is to drive 30 miles to a mall.
Marc Ambinder attended a Chevron-sponsored dinner last night and came away with an answer to the question of what oil companies hope to gain from trying to position themselves as green -- it's an opportunity to present efforts to gut climate change legislation as good-faith efforts to cope with the problem:
Everyone seems to agree that a carbon tax, or, more likely, the indirect carbon tax that is a cap-and-trade system, is the next step. The cap-n-trade system will include a "safety valve," a term of art that refers to a mechanism whereby government promises that, once carbon emissions prices reach a certain level, they'll cap the price but allow for more emissions credits to be purchased.
Now Marc cunningly made his "safety valve" link to a Climate Progress article explaining why it's a bad idea. But to put it briefly, a safety valve is a great provision to add if you don't care at all about mitigating climate change. Call it "John McCain environmentalism" -- you'd like to be associated with the climate change issue, but you also want to rake in huge dollars from polluters and you don't actually care accomplishing anything on the issue other than advancing your own political career.
In a different world, what you're trying to do is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. There are two ways to do this. One is that you can put a price on carbon (a "carbon tax") and then increase that price over time so as to generate the kind of emissions reductions you're looking for. Another is that you can set an economywide level of allowable carbon emissions and make it such that firms need to obtain emissions permits in order to emit CO2 ("cap and trade") thus allowing the market to raise the price of carbon emissions up to a level commensurate with your goal. Either way, the idea is that higher prices for emitting carbon will lead to less emissions -- it creates financial incentives to switch energy sources (coal and oil to natural gas, fossil fuels to nuclear and renewables) to switch to more energy-efficient end-uses (SUVs to minivans, conventional engines to gas-electric hybrids) and to simply use less energy (movie theaters air conditioned to 72 degrees instead of 60) overall.
But either way, the mechanism is higher prices for carbon emissions. If you add on a provision that prevents the price of carbon emissions from rising too high, then you're not taking action to reduce emissions.
David Sandalow argues that we ought to put a regulatory cap on allowable horsepower. He notes that 30 years go, the average car could go 0 to 60 in 14.1 seconds, now it's 9.6 seconds. Average horsepower in 1980 was 100, today it's 220. And of course we don't actually get around faster because the limiting factor in real world speeds is traffic congestion and safety rather than engine size. Regulation, he plausibly argues, could get us out of a horsepower arms race in a way that would have little negative impact on anyone's life while allowing us to capture technological gains in engine efficiency in terms of reduced fuel consumption rather than in terms of faster cars that let you get to the traffic jam more quickly.
Michael Wirth from Chevron brings to the table an interesting perspective on the biofuels issue that I hadn't heard before -- namely that from a business point of view you want to refine oil in a small number of giant facilities that reap economies of scale. The costs of transporting the biomass that you would turn into fuel, by contrast, are such that you would want to have lots and lots of much smaller facilities. That, in turn, would require changes both in business practices but also probably policy shifts about where you're allowed to build things since the opening of a new refinery is the kind of thing likely to prompt a lot of NIMBY objections.
Vinod Khosla says of the energy/climate situation, "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." I like it. Of course there's the common saying that the Chinese character for crisis combines the characters for "danger" and "opportunity" but unfortunately this turns out to not be true. Khosla, however, manages to capture the same sentiment. He says we need good biofuels. Certainly taking Richard Lugar's advice and dropping the insane tarrif on Brazil's delicious sugar ethanol would be a good idea.
At a panel on "Climate and Sustainability: Fueling the Future: Sustainable Choices for a New Transportation Landscape" neither the guy from Mercedes-Benz nor the guy from Chevron seems to think measures to reduce energy demand have any role whatsoever to play. Instead, it's exclusively about awesome new kinds of cars and new sources of fuel. As they say, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
One oddity of this panel is that there hasn't been any real mention of the main proposals put forward by actual politicians -- John McCain's plan, Barack Obama's plan, or the Wyden-Bennett bipartisan bill. Then along came a woman who I slowly realized with Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) who took advantage of the Q&A period to ask the panelists to give their views on Wyden-Bennett. It was an interesting moment, but perhaps not the optimal method for America's members of congress to be getting their information. Chris Jennings and Mark Ganz both made basically favorable noises, though both are skeptical that such a frontal assault on employer-based insurance is feasible.
Orszag said "it’s not my job to say whether something is good or bad, but Senator Wyden and Senator Bennett worked very hard to make their proposal budget neutral.” Budget neutral is, I believe, the highest praise a CBO director is allowed to give to proposed legislation.
CBO director Peter Orszag talking about the problems with the current health care financing system says that "we need much more information about what works and what doesn’t.” With that in hand, we need to “pay for the stuff that works” as opposed to the system where “right now we have financial incentives for more care rather than better care.” To a large extent, our current system doesn't deliver quality care because it's not designed to elicit quality care, “we should align [financial] incentives so that we are seeking better care, then that’s what we’ll get.” Long story short, you need to pay health care providers for helping people rather than for treating them irrespective of efficacy.
On public health more broadly, he says "we need to be doing a lot more to help people lead healthy lives" which means we ought to "dial down a little bit the excessive reliance on narrow financial incentives to influence behavior" and pay more attention to the extensive psychological and sociological research on why it is people do things that aren't in their long-term health interests and what we could do to push them in a healthier direction. Also this interesting fact -- "we are experiencing a dramatic increase in life expectancy inequality in the United States . . . at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution, life expectancy is either flat or declining . . . a lot of that has to do with health behavior."
This is a picture of Aspen's health care panel, not pictured due to sloppy photography is Rep. Dianne DeGette (D-Colorado) who made some eloquent remarks about the failure of incremental reform in the congress. Incrementalism, she said, has been a "band-aid approach" which she then described (more like whack-a-mole) as simply causing new problems to appear in new areas in a way that makes structural problems worse. Under the circumstances, comprehensive reform is needed. What kind of reform? She didn't quite say other than that "everything must be on the table."
More to the point, her remark that what we need to do is "bring all the comprehensive and myriad interests in and begin to craft a package that will be portable, affordable, and universal" sums up why I'm not super-excited about the prospects for health care reform. After all, missing from the list of desiderata is improving public health. And I think that if we make our goal putting a package together that satisfies all the "comprehensive and myriad interests" then it's unlikely that we'll really get much in the way of improvement. Portable, affordable, and universal would be an improvement over the status quo but I think that even if it gets done people will wind up ultimately disappointed.
Having people fly in to Aspen from around the country for vacation is never going to be the most ecologically sound practice, but it's worth mentioning that the city seems to have a very forward-thinking set of transportation policies. For one thing, the town is walkable with sidewalks, reasonable traffic lights, and there seems to be some effort to make parking facilities relatively unobtrusive. On top of that, the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority runs an extensive and reasonable frequent bus network and there's lots of people (myself included) getting around on bikes.
Now of course being a ridiculously wealthy community has got to be helpful in terms of putting together a high-quality bus network in a somewhat unlikely situation. But by the same token there are very few countries that are as rich as the United States of America so we ought to be able to afford to construct one of the world's best comprehensive multi-modal transportation networks.
Page Six goes where the Ideas Festival dares not tread declining attainment for America's wealthiest children: "In the past, it wasn’t unusual for as many as seven students to be accepted through early admission to the top Ivy League institution, says a guidance counselor there. But for the first time in memory, inside sources say, no Dalton students will be shipping off to Harvard come fall. And some parents—who shell out $31,200 a year for their kids’ private school education—are pissed."
I believe I was actually one of eight members of the Dalton Class of 1999 who wound up in the Harvard Class of 2003. Apparently fairness is to blame for causing the problem:
As a result, it seems private schools are feeling the heat more than their public counterparts. “The Ivies are reaching out for a diverse economic background—even home-schooled students are becoming more of a thing,” says one guidance counselor at a private school in Manhattan. “They are interested in first-generation college kids, and few privates have that. The Ivies are still good to legacies [children of alumni] if their alums have been good to them. But it’s getting harder for private school students because it’s getting fairer for the rest of the world.”
Several commenters and Scott Lemieux have convinced me that contrary to what I said here it wouldn't require a constitutional amendment to impose some kind of supermajority requirement on Supreme Court decisions.
UPDATE: Of course at the end of the day this would need to be litigated. In principle, the Court could vote 5-4 to strike the law down which would create awesome legal paradoxes.
Ben Cardin, Maryland's junior Senator, is emerging as one of our great transit advocates in the United States congress and he gives good interview to Grist's Kate Sheppard. It's great to see mid-Atlantic legislators like Cardin and Delaware's Carper repeatedly showing leadership on these topics. But what about DCCC honcho Rahm Emmannuel with his Chicago district, or his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer of New York? In a country where most legislators don't represent transit-friendly areas, transit-friendly policy is always going to be a tough sell but I'm pretty sure it could be done (the total amount of money involved in realistic policy changes isn't that huge) if legislators who do represent such areas would all start pulling.
I had realized that deforestation, particularly in the Amazon, is a contributing factor in climate change. What I hadn't realized was that climate change is also contributing to Amazonian deforestation. But according to Holdren, the rainforest hasn't just been burning lately because of people clearing forests. Rather, climate change has altered rainfall patterns and the forest is actually drier than it used to be and more susceptible to burning. In short, there's a frightening feedback loop at work.
Jessy Tolkan from the Energy Action Coalition opened a climate change session with a brief kind of pep talk, urging people (correctly in my view) that rather than try to unite the country around a sense of crisis and doom, we need to try to unite people around an appealing vision of green jobs, clean energy, etc. To me, this is completely right. Next up was Dr. John Holdren of Harvard and Woods Hole who opened by remarking that he had little in the way of optimism or good news to report -- noting that things have actually changed faster than people predicted, and that we're now at a point where substantial climate change is inevitable and the issue is how much can we adapt and can we avoid absolute disaster.
As you can perhaps tell from my dyspeptic response to some of our Ideas Festival sponsors' efforts to brand themselves as "green," (see also Boeing's hilarious hand-crank powered flashlight) I don't see the "corporate social responsibility" movement as having a ton of promise. I think large firms will more-or-less inevitably seek to maximize profits and the role of the state is to ensure that that profit maximizing behavior takes place in a larger framework such that its impacts are beneficial. But this is a practical concern, and I absolutely agree with Brad DeLong that the "strong" anti-CSR position outlined by Milton Friedman and others doesn't make much sense and actually seems blind to the non-coercive genius of capitalism.
Some scattered notes from Sean Wilentz's talk on his new book, The Age of Reagan that focus on his somewhat unusual periodization choice in which the age runs from 1974-2008: “long, prolonged era of conservative political domination of American political life” “last 35 years or so have seen conservative politics dominant in national political life” “a lot of the history that had been written of this period was locked in hagiography or demonology” “possible as a historian to lay aside one’s political views and write as a historian” “not the conventional periodization beginning in 1968” “1974, with the fall of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal” “regardless of who wins the presidency we’re at the end of a political era” “the disruption of American politics as we had known it since at least 1945” “people tend to forget how demoralized the Republican establishment was in 1974 . . . there was talk of changing the party’s name” “Republicans were increasingly divided between a beleaguered establishment and a new post-Taft conservative movement coming out of the west”
“indisputable that Ronald Reagan was the major political figure in American politics during this period” “many efforts to try to put the center back into American politics, Jimmy Carter tried and failed . . . George H.W. Bush . . . the center-right wouldn’t hold . .. Bill Clinton . . . could not recreate the center-left, the terms of politics had been transformed”
Periodization strikes me as an intrinsically problematic task for a historian. Nobody's better-positioned to recognize that these are semi-arbitrary and yet it's the historial who needs to actually write books and that positively requires you to pick beginning and end points.
What may be Obama's authentic position on gun rights was revealed in early April when he told a closed-door Silicon Valley fundraiser that "bitter" small-town residents "cling" to the Bible and Second Amendment. That ran against his public assertion as a former constitutional law professor that the Constitution guarantees rights for individual gun owners, not just group rights for state militias. But his legal opinion forced Obama into a political corner.
Journalists, like biographers, try to go out and discover information that's not already widely known. One habit of this, on full display here, is a tendency to privilege the secret and unknown as "real" and the public and known as artifice. Thus, to Novak the real key to understanding Obama's thinking on gun regulations is not to consult his record as a legislator, candidate, and academic but rather to put all that to one side in favor of a not-really-on-point remark made behind what Obama thought were closed doors.
But when you get right down to it, there's no reason to accept this epistemology. Of course it's useful to add more information to the knowledge base. But to a very substantial extent the "real" John McCain is John McCain, the politician and public figure, just as the "real" Barack Obama is Barack Obama, the politician and public figure.
So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”
I go back and forth on whether the low fertility rates in places like Italy or Japan is a real problem. Some folks predict all manner of ills stemming from the possibility of population decline, but it also seems possible that it might lead to rising standards of living and I'm not sure I've ever seen the issue given a really rigorous treatment with models and dull equations.
Photo by Flickr user Tedsblog used under a Creative Commons license
This business about the Hold Steady not having any groupies seems tragic to me -- there are many worse bands out there, and not very many better ones. Surely they deserve a groupie or two.
Carl Zimmer and Paul Ehrlich are talking about the need for alternative modes of transportation. He rightly makes the point that there's a difference between designing a city for cars, and designing a city for people. Also makes the somewhat idiosyncratic point that with transit "you could at least be having a drink on your way home":
I'm not sure a drunken commute is really the ideal we need to be aspiring toward. But it's certainly true that walking or transit is the best way to get home after doing some drinking. The main alternative, after all, is drunk driving with the attendant car crashes leading to death, disfigurement, and disability. We take a certain level of that for granted right now but driving -- and especially driving after consuming even only a drink or two -- is a pretty high-risk behavior in the scheme of things and reducing its incidence would be a major boon.
I'm a very "bad" tourist in terms of looking things up in advance and planning. But I always enjoy doing things this way -- seeing something cool is twice as cool when unexpected. George Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one of my favorite paintings, well-liked enough that I swiftly made it the wallpaper on my iPhone when I get it. And then yesterday I was ambling around the Art Institute of Chicago and, unexpectedly, there it was! Naturally I then took a photo with the iPhone and set that to be my wallpaper. But wallpaper aside, the point is that not knowing what the collection's highlights are until you get a chance to look around preserves a certain element of the thrill of discovery even though obviously it's already a super-famous painting.
The LA Timesasks what such a world would look like. I think it's a difficult question to answer -- it will depend a lot on our policy response. Clearly, if we keep spending priorities and regulations in place that were formed when oil was cheap, but then oil becomes massively more expensive, then the results will be terrible. But not only would that be a bad idea, I'm fairly confident it won't happen -- it just wouldn't make sense. The question in play is when will politicians stop offering McCain-style gimmicks and start recognizing that relatively expensive oil (I won't make specific predictions about $200 / per barrel or anything else) is likely to be the long term trend so we should respond accordingly.
Things like BP's ongoing "greenwashing" campaign where they run ads trying to convince us that they're the good kind of polluting oil company seem to have been a boon for people working in media oriented around public affairs. It's not a business that's been doing very well lately, but it's a natural target for this sort of advertising. But does it work? I'm not even sure I understand what it working would look like. Is BP going to be exempted from cap and trade regulations? Get a special "we like you better than ExxonMobil" ribbon? We're going to drive an extra mile to fill up with BP oil instead of Shell oil?
School buses are the practical way for most school districts to ensure that kids can get to school. But in some cities, it's cheaper and simpler to contract with the local transit authority to provide extra service on routes needed to take people to school. That's what DC does for most kids, but now the rapaciously anti-transit Bush FTA says cities can't do it -- good bye economies of scale, hello inefficiency.
Good news! Larry Craig and David Vitter are on the case. Some liberals see irony here, but I see two men well-positioned to know what a tenuous strand it is holding the institution together and how easily a handful of gay weddings could plunge us all into an endless wide-stance, hooker-filled dystopia.
One objection you often hear to pro-transit, pro-walking, anti-driving measures is a social justice argument that these measures will hit the poor hardest. In fact, as this Kevin Drum post makes clear poor people do relatively little driving. They differ from middle class and wealthy people in that utility bills take up a very large proportion of their income.
Not only should this specific point be remembered, but one should also recall as a general rule of thumb that if you see a large, powerful, well-organized lobby citing the needs of the poor as the rationale for something or other they're almost certainly full of it. In the real world, poor people have extremely little political clout and anything that's attracting a lot of political attention is almost certainly doing so because it's of concern to the non-poor.
Ian Dew-Becker and Robert J. Gordon take an interesting look at the growth in inequality in the United States:
Within the top 10 percent, SBTC has certainly still been an issue, and there is a role of SBTC in contributing to pay premia of entertainment and sports superstars. In a variety of settings, technology has allowed superstars to distribute their talent to a wider variety of consumers. This has driven their incomes up exponentially. Their earnings are an outcome of market forces, and the only policy measure available to achieve greater after-tax equality is an increase in tax rates at the top balanced by a decrease at the bottom. However, for top corporate executives, there is strong evidence that incomes have been driven by non-market forces. This is where policy can have the most positive impact on inequality; increased disclosure and improved corporate governance laws can not only raise firm value but help distribute economic gains more evenly across society.
This treatment of the "superstar" issue seems wrongheaded to me. The point of understanding the causes of the growth in inequality isn't to assemble a prosecutor's brief against very rich people and then dole out appropriate punishment. If that was the point then, yes, we'd have to deem superstar athletes and entertainers (and presumably the agents, managers, and lawyers who take home a percentage of their gross) who've taken advantage of the globalization of the entertainment space to become richer than ever "innocent." But the point of understanding the situation is to enable us to think clearly about forward-looking policy options.
It seems to be the case at first blush, for example, that policies which tax the incomes of the very rich in order to pay for widely used public services are very appealing policies. But, an opponent may counter, such policies will actually crush economic growth and make us all worse off! To the extent that the super-rich class is composed of superstar entertainers and their hangers-on this counterargument seems to me to be weaker -- ever-growing after-tax income for movie stars is not integral to the long-term future of the American economy in the way that potential uses of the money to provide for adequate infrastructure and a healthy, well-educated population are.
We're likely to see a lot more nuclear energy globally because of global warming and energy prices. What is the right way to reduce the proliferation risk?
You can also see "Multilateralism as a Dual-Use Technique: Encouraging Nuclear Energy and Avoiding Proliferation" by John Thomson and Geoffrey Forden for the Stanley Foundation which I've recommended in the past. I note that proliferation risk is one of several good reasons to hope that we don't respond to global warming with huge new investments in civilian nuclear power, but as at least some expansion of nuclear power seems inevitable it's important that we get this right from a security standpoint.
I'm a Jewish liberal from New York City so naturally I grew up to believe in gun control. Crime is bad, gun crimes are deadly, gun enthusiasts are weird, the NRA should get off our backs. I changed my mind on the subject because I started reading Mark Kleiman, who's also very much the sort of person who'd be for gun control -- a liberal Jewish professor living in Los Angeles. But he's a professor of public policy and specializes in crime control issues and well it turns out:
There's simply no evidence that keeping guns out of the hands of those currently eligible to own them under Federal law (adults with no felony convictions, no domestic-violence misdemeanors or restraining orders, and no history of involuntary commitment for mental illness) reduces the level of criminal violence. Nor is there evidence that allowing anyone who can pass a background check and a gun-safety course to carry a concealed weapon increases the level of criminal violence. All that matters is keeping guns away from people who demonstrably shouldn't have them. Present law does that, but the gun lobby has done many things to make that law impossible to enforce.
With any luck, taking the "gun confiscation" card out of the political pack might actually reduce the fervor of the opposition the NRA can whip up to sensible measures such as requiring background checks for gun sales by private individuals (the current rule that requires them only for purchases from gun dealers), computerizing data on which dealers are selling the guns that get used in crimes, and developing and deploying technology that would allow police to identify, from a bullet or a shell casing found at a crime scene, when, to whom, and by whom the gun that produced that metal was lawfully transferred.
Maybe that optimistic take is right, or maybe that optimistic take is wrong, but either way there's no reason to be afraid of the Heller decision and Kleiman here points the way toward the compromise we should be seeking. Gun confiscation formally and credibly off the table, with a firm understanding that law-abiding competent adults have a right to buy and own guns if they so choose combined with an understanding that law enforcement agencies need serious tools with which to track and identify guns used to commit crimes.
Photo by Flickr user Robert Nelson used under a Creative Commons license
Ezra Klein's getting into cocktail-blogging. I had a classic cocktails phase back in 2001-2002 when I first discovered Angel's Share and Milk & Honey (the establishments and I were all cooler back then) in New York. My favorite was the sidecar:
These days I'm radically more lowbrow and you can find me with a Miller High Life or some Jim Bean.
Buses have some substantial advantages over rail as a transit modality, notably being cheaper, quicker, and more flexible. But some of these advantages can also serve as flaws -- bus systems tempt administrators into creating shoddy service and tend not to spur development. So one important issue moving forward is going to be thinking more rigorously and more creatively about buses and bus networks and what can we really do with them. The new Shirlington Bus Transfer Station in a part of Arlington County that's far from Metro seems promising in several respects. Chris Zimmerman, who's on the County board and the WMATA board, is quoted as calling it "a great example of where you can do transit-oriented development even where you don't have a rail station."
If that really works, it could be a promising model for other parts of the country where new rail construction would be infeasible but where density is sufficient to support multiple bus routes that have some frequency.
The conservative movement seems to be running out of steam, but Rep. Eric Cantor has the solution -- a virtual "solutions factory." Hm. Alternatively, the right could take David Brooks' advice and read more blogs written by my right-of-center friends (and even a few people who I've never met) and buy Grand New Party. Brooks has, I think, the sounder view. Ultimately, though, the trouble even with his solution is that some of these folks' ideas are bad, whereas the ones that are good will never be implemented by conservatives. Why? Because, as I've said before, "the problem is actually much worse -- the problem with the conservative movement is that it's fundamentally malign." If we're lucky, liberals will steal the right's better ideas only to see the conservative movement eventually turn on them (see, e.g., EITC, Section 8 vouchers, cap-and-trade) in the interests of greater evil.
I forgot to say anything about the Court's ruling on the child rape case. My evolving view of the death penalty is that there are situations one could envision wherein punishment by execution would be a just outcome but given the realities of the world a "no executions" policy would be the best way to go. At the end of the day, to be haunted by a nagging fear that somewhere there lurks a criminal who deserves death but who is, instead, suffering a lifetime of imprisonment doesn't strike me as especially reasonable. So from that perspective, I both sympathize with any effort to limit the constitutional scope of the death penalty while also thinking that these efforts to draw distinctions -- to tinker with the machinery of death -- are fundamentally misguided.
In the specific case of people who rape children, it's worth saying that the death penalty is bad crime control policy. You want to make it the case that no matter what terrible things a criminal has done, he would get an even worse penalty if he killed the victim/witness. Getting bogged down into a debate over the relative heinousness of various crimes is a bit of a red herring -- there's an internal logic to the deterrent system that requires murder to carry a unique and maximally severe penalty.
A Prince George's Country merit pay plan for teachers seems to have gained support among the local union, which will certainly make the experiment noteworthy. I'll be interested to see how it turns out. You can mark me down as a skeptic, though, since it seems very likely to me that linking teacher compensation to test scores this directly mostly creates incentives for teachers to help their students cheat on tests.
However, given that this is a pretty obvious idea and we have a whole lot of school districts in this country, I think it's essentially inevitable that this will be tried out in some places and we'll see what the results are. I think, however, that there are probably more promising ways of caching out the idea of "merit pay" that would focus more on the idea of giving administrators flexibility with teacher salaries and then holding them accountable for getting results.
In a post the other day, Elizabeth Edwards made the point that individual markets in health insurance, à la John McCain's proposals, would be disadvantageous to women. For whatever reason this doesn't seem to get talked about much, but there's a significant gender disparity in health care costs and that plays a role in thinking about insurance in a variety of ways.
For example, in a world where everyone must buy insurance, and insurers must sell insurance to all customers at a flat rate, you have a strong incentive to try to attract a disproportionately male client base -- lots of ads on Spike TV and sports programming, no ads on Lifetime or Gray's Anatomy. How big a deal that would prove to be in the end is hard to predict in advance, but in general any system that involves consumer choice and for profit insurance firms is going to encourage people to design plans that better-fit the desires of men than of women.
Talk about the hybrid car scam! With the exception of the Prius, it seems like most hybrids have highway mileage somewhere in the 30--35 mpg range. This is a little better than those same car models with a gas engine. But I own a 1984 Honda hatchback, obviously not a hybrid, which gets 40-odd mpg on the highway, and I remember it being pretty routine in the 1980s and 1990s for economy cars or even 4 door models to have comparable mileage. I imagine it mostly has to do with the massive increase in horsepower in recent years, or maybe heavier cars as a result of safety features. But how are hybrids supposed to help us out of the global warming/foreign oil dependence trap when they are less efficient than a 24 year old non-hybrid beater? And why not just make cars like the aforesaid beater, with a hybrid engine in them?
Over time, technology improves, and we develop more efficient ways of burning gasoline as a way of making a car move forward. Those kind of advances can be used to reduce the overall quantity of gasoline burned, but they can also be used to increase the overall power of engines. That's the basic problem being pointed to here, and it's why if you want to reduce carbon emissions there's ultimately no substitute for an emissions cap or a carbon tax. If you create a financial incentive to reduce emissions, then our vast ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit will produce vehicles that accomplish that goal. If we don't, it won't, as even the very same technologies that could reduce gasoline consumption are instead turned to other purposes.
Meanwhile, it's important to remember that for the short-tun the most important thing isn't to develop futuristic new low-emissions vehicles. The low hanging fruit is to replace the very least efficient vehicles with more efficient ones. Replacing an SUV with a standard sedan does more to cut consumption than does replacing a sedan with a hybrid. Even replacing an SUV with a minivan brings about substantial reductions.
I went to an event at New America yesterday where Tom Gallagher, Senior Managing Director at the International Strategy and Investment Group, put forward an idea I hadn't heard before regarding the current debate over whether or not the Fed is making a mistake by setting interest rates too low and setting off inflation. Gallagher's take on this is that loose monetary policy is appropriate given the current state of the U.S. economy, but that the problem is that developing countries, especially China, are loathe to let their currencies appreciate too much against the dollar. Consequently, they wind up "importing" a good deal of American monetary policy even though they're not in slowdown conditions. And the upshot is inflation over there which then, via the global commodities markets, becomes exported to the United States.
The ideal response to this, he said, would be for Bernanke to keep our monetary policy loose but for other countries to tighten. But if that doesn't happen, we may be forced into a situation where we need to tighten our monetary policy in order to halt inflation even though really it would be better to keep things loose. Long story short, some financial diplomacy is badly needed in order to help us avoid an unfortunate macroeconomic policy conundrum.
I also doubt that conservatives will be too upset by the "judicial activism" involved in the Supreme Court overturning the DC handgun ban. I don't really understand the details of the ruling at this point, but I'm not complaining about it either. From a policy perspective, what DC is trying to accomplish is just futile -- as long as the District is a very small patch of land adjacent to Virginia, there's no way gun regulations of this sort will prevent criminals from acquiring weapons.
Doubtless conservative pundits all across the land will howl with outrage at the gross judicial activism of the Supreme Court in slashing punitive damages in the Exxon Valdez case from $5 billion to $500 million, thus saving ExxonMobil, $4,500 million dollars.
As everyone knows, the country is going to undergo some significant "graying" over the next few decades with the proportion of senior citizens going up substantial. That's going to pose a challenge on many levels, but one level is that building more and better transit will help us cope with the problem that seniors often aren't comfortable driving, especially in sub-optimal conditions, and it often isn't safe to have them on the road. If we don't want to see a huge proportion of the population immobilized, we're going to need more ways for people to get around.
Boy, but America's infrastructure looks baaad, people. And everything is dirty! The girls were like, what's wrong with this bridge? (a metal bridge in Jersey leading from the Newark airport to the Holland Tunnel, I don't know what it's called). Old metal that's just black with soot! And graffiti! Man, if I fully acclimatize to the level of cleanliness, safety, and well-built massive public investment projects of Singapore I'll never be able to move home.
I believe it's the Pulaski Skyway (pictured above). In part, a country like the United States just isn't going to be able to compete infrastructure-wise with a newly-prosperous country like Singapore -- we have a lot of stuff that's oldish, but still usable, and shutting it down to fix or replace it would be extremely inconvenient. But it's also the case that Singapore's not spending 1 percent of GDP a year on a misguided effort to control Iraq. So, yes, we badly need a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank.
Photo by Flickr user Doc Searls used under a Creative Commons license
The LA Timeswrites about the Think City a small but functional electric car coming from a Norwegian company. This isn't going to suit most Americans' automotive desires, but I think it would be very promising in the European market where a lot of people like little cars that are well-suited to occasional trips through narrow urban streets and small parking spaces. Meanwhile, at least some Americans seem to be buying Smart Cars these days, which are comparable in size to the City, so you could see a niche market for this in the USA which would certainly count as a step in the right direction toward a better transportation future.
As Tom Lee points out any discussion of a project like My Bike Lane aimed at getting motorists to stop practices that endanger the lives of motorists inevitably cycles back to someone pointing out that cyclists sometimes misbehave as well. And that's true enough. However, from a policy perspective you need to consider the costs and benefits to different weightings of priorities. A measure like stricter bike lane enforcement that makes life easier for bike riders and harder for car drivers has some clear environmental and public health benefits in terms of at the margin encouraging drivers to shift to walking, transit, or biking.
By contrast, a measure that would be convenient for drivers of private cars but inconvenient for cyclists doesn't seem to have much to recommend it. By contrast, in a conflict between a bike and a bus the policy merits seem to lie with the bus. Buses loading and unloading passengers are constantly interfering with the bike lanes on 7th Street and 14th Street which is annoying if you're on a bike but probably not A Bad Thing in a broader sense since clearly many more people fit on a bus than fit on my bike. The problem here is that the city has seen fit to put its two biggest north-south bike lanes on two of the top three north-south routes for bus frequency. A smarter idea would be to reduce the volume of space on those roads given to private cars and make wider bus/bike lanes (but unlike the alleged bus/bike only lane on 9th street and a part of 7th street north of the mall you'd actually need to enforce it) which would remove the problem of buses needing to cross back-and-forth past the bike lane.
Bike/pedestrian conflicts are, similarly, to be lamented. But the problem here is less evil cyclists encroaching on the sidewalk than the simple fact that such a huge proportion of public space in dense, walkable areas is nonetheless given over to cars. If bikes had more space specifically dedicated to them, then they wouldn't be in the way of people trying to walk around. Go to Amsterdam and you'll almost certainly have a near-collision experience if you stand around in a bike lane, but not otherwise because the bikes are in the bike lanes which are plentiful and well-marked.
I've written before about how most developing countries have even more screwed-up energy policies than we do -- with the government expending large sums of money on environmentally destructive gasoline subsidies that are almost always regressive in the context of a poor country. One consequence of this that I hadn't considered, but which makes sense as soon as you think about it, is that if you live in the American Southwest you can head south of the border and fill up on cheap gas:
And while here he would pick up six-packs of Tecate beer and produce like passion fruit, and even visit an orthodontist. In all, he expected to save $200. The border, he said, flashing a mouthful of braces, is “our advantage.”
Things like buying passion fruit and an affordable orthodontist are conventional gains from trade, and ought to be encouraged but the kind of subsidy arbitrage represented by the gas issue isn't all that awesome. The good news, I suppose, is that this may put pressure on Mexico to start phasing these subsidies out.
Via John Aravosis, the UK is sensibly reacting to energy trends by expanding rail capacity substantially. We, of course, can't afford to do any such thing even though we're substantially richer than Britain and even though we absolutely can afford to spend over $100 billion per year in Iraq indefinitely -- after all, our troops are dying there at a lower rate than they were before, so what's the harm?
A new study from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies says the U.S. housing market is likely to keep slumping for a long time. Here's coverage from the Washington Post. That makes sense to me -- to have a speedy turnaround, you'd really need to have a speedy crash and that goes against the psychology of the whole enterprise. I believe the way these things usually work is that nominal prices stagnated for a while, allowing real prices to fall (and especially allowing real prices to fall as a share of household income) over time without people engaging in steep price cutting.
Are American metropolitan areas outside of the Northeast Corridor dense enough or well layed out enough to support inter-city rail? Beyond putting light- or medium-rail in those cities, how much would have to change before inter-city rail made sense as a way to travel from, say, Milwaukee to Indianapolis?
As a general matter, rail works better as an alternative to driving when the destination is someplace with a good walking/transit network. That said, for a lot of trips it's not really necessary to have a car at your destination even if your destination is a very car-dependent area. I went to Forth Worth for a conference once and both the hotel and the convention center are in Fort Worth's smallish walkable downtown. Combined with a cab ride to the Fort Worth Cultural District to see the Kimbell Museum and the Fort Worth Modern that contained plenty of things to do for a few days without the expense of renting a car and that kind of thing is reasonably common for business travel.
Second rail is not only an alternative to driving, but also an alternative to flying. There are a lot of flights between Portland and Seattle, for example or between Chicago and Detroit. Any time you have two cities that are pretty close by and serviced by a lot of flights, you have a situation where a good inter-city rail option would attract customers notwithstanding any issues related to the density of the destination city. Replacing air trips with train trips is good for the environment, and any time you have a viable rail option that'll displace some of the intercity car travel which is also good. Meanwhile, a passenger rail hub can become a focal point for neighborhood development and a node on a growing urban transit network.
I think the idea of using prizes to try to spur innovation is a promising idea, but I'm not quite sure why John McCain's decided that a better battery for an electric car is the thing to offer the prize for. Electric vehicles would be good from an environmental perspective, but insofar as so much of our electricity comes from fossil fuels car electrification also has a large element of just pushing the problem around. The thing to offer the prize for is either some kind of clean electricity breakthrough, some kind of carbon scrubbing or sequestration technology, or maybe something to make nuclear waste disappear.
Also, if McCain's cap-and-trade plan involved auctioning the permits (the way Barack Obama's does) then it could raise money for these prize schemes. Something he might want to think about.
On top of all that, $300 million seems preposterously low. A good electric car battery would earn you way more money than that in the course of things. For a prize to make sense, the scale of the prize needs to be large relative to the potential profitability of the invention.
It seems John McCain is prepared to admit that his drilling schemes won't actually bring down gas prices but still defends the plan by saying: "Even though it may take some years, the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial."
Um, okay. But if even conservatives agree that "aesthetics" are a valid reason against drilling, why doesn't that override the psychic benefits of drilling? More to the point, couldn't people use some policies that are beneficial in non-psychological ways. Maybe the federal government should provide a cash infusion to mass transit systems so that instead of buckling under increased demand we can improve the quality of people's experience and start running trains and buses more quickly? That wouldn't solve everyone's problems by any means, but it would deliver genuine help to many people in the short run.
How much does the picture of urban school systems I was painting yesterday change if you look at race as an indicator of socioeconomic disadvantage rather than family income? The answer is that even though studies show that race exhibits a substantial, income-independent influence on school achievement, the qualitative picture is similar if instead of looking at how cities do with educating poor kids we look at how they do with black kids:
As you can see here, nationwide performance by black children is pretty deplorable with 59 percent rating as "below basic." But given that unfortunate baseline, you can see that several urban school systems -- Charlotte, Austin, Houston, New York, and Boston -- are doing somewhat better than average, while others are doing quite a bit worse than average.
Now it's worth saying that this way of slicing up the demographics is no substitute for a proper regression analysis. You can really see this if you look, for example, at white test scores where suddenly the otherwise poor-performing DC public schools start looking good because the DC white population is unusually affluent and well-educated compared to whites nationwide. Unfortunately, the data available to talk about in order to get city versus city detail is a little sparse. The NAEP TUDA is the best way of getting apples-to-apples comparisons of different urban districts, but it doesn't cover very many cities and doesn't let you get nearly as rigorous as would be desirable.
Still, I believe the overall basic point holds. Demographic factors have a large impact on educational outcomes. When you try to control for demographic differences, suddenly big city school systems don't look uniformly dysfunction -- some are above average. But demographics aren't destiny -- some cities are doing much worse than others. Beyond that, on a nationwide basis poor children and non-white children are doing unacceptably badly even in "good" school districts.
John requests comment on "Barack Obama's support for corn ethanol subsidies and tariffs on the more energy-efficient Brazilian sugarcane stuff, please." There was a good New York Timesarticle on this yesteday and Obama turns out to be sort of worse than I'd thought -- not just shuffling along the Midwestern party line but really in tight with a bunch of corn ethanol people.
The problems with corn ethanol are pretty well-rehearsed at this point, and obviously anyone trying to block the importation of foreign ethanol isn't actually serious about this topic as an alternative fuel and is just trying to hand out yet more money to Big Corn. I'm not sure how much the president's attitude toward this issue really matters, but if Obama wins let's hope it doesn't matter too much.
Via Ryan Avent, it seems that train ridership is way up: "Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month." Nevertheless, "the railroad, and its suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet the demand."
We could, however, expand train service at a medium pace to meet the demand were we so inclined. It's also worth noting a few things about the state of passenger rail in the United States. One is that outside the northeast corridor the general quality of service is pretty poor. The other is that outside the northeast corridor most of the focus is perversely on long-distance routes rather than on the short routes where the demand is. And last, on the northeast corridor where a decent train runs on a reasonable route the supply is so limited that the fares are absurdly high.
Nevertheless, ridership is growing. If we were to invest money in expanding capacity on the Acela corridor, and servicing the shorter inter-city trips (Miami-Tampa, Chicago-Milwaukee rather than NY-New Orleans) for which rail is well-suited, then we'd really be getting somewhere. This is to say nothing of adopting Barack Obama's goal of actually having the fastest trains in the world.
Photo by Flickr user red arrow used under a Creative Commons license
"The Border Patrol is one of the few large law enforcement agencies that does not require a college degree or even a high school diploma and can offer pay of $70,000 after just a few years, factoring in overtime." That's from a New York Times article about the Border Patrol's efforts to increase recruiting in African-American communities since the agency is currently hard-up for recruits and only one percent black. The larger issue here is that when you decide that it would be good politics to double the size of an agency during a very brief span of time, you're then left with the difficult task of actually recruiting the manpower.
The Finnish Border Guard has a comparable mission of securing a long land border with a much poorer country but I think it's a relatively elite force. The United States is trying to maintain global military commitments, needs good people to police our large cities (indeed, we need more and better of them), run FBI counter-terrorism and organized crime operations, etc. Unless we're prepared to seriously bump the border patrol in the list of public sector priorities, which sounds like a bad idea to me, it seems to me that we'd be better off with a relatively small but high-quality force than with a large one riddled with problems like the recruit who "was recently ejected from the training academy after being arrested in a gun smuggling case."
Photo by Flickr user StormyRed 28 used under a Creative Commons license
The Case Against (Government Subsidization of) Homeownership
I briefly argued on Saturday that public policy bias in favor of homeownership was perhaps a not very good idea. Paul Krugman lays out the argument at greater length today. Clive Crook did an even longer column on this for The Atlantic several months ago. Crook and Krugman are not particularly close to each other ideologically, an indication that this aspect of our policy environment is not motivated by any particularly principled considerations.
Let me just add to this that if you look at homeownership rate by state it's clear that a super-high rate of homeownership is neither a sign of economic vitality nor something that creates economic vitality.
Why don't you talk about the consequences of permanently high oil for the food production business? Does the high cost of fertilizer mean a drop in productivity and some kind of malthusian nightmare? Or can we sustain a large world population of food production with permanently expensive petroleum?
Conversations about urbanism always eventually end up going in the direction of education policy. After all, absent better schools, the city will always be a place for poor people, very rich people, and young people rather than for the mainstream of American life. To that end, it's worth noting that a lot of people's ideas about the quality of urban schools are mistaken, as you can see from a look inside the results of the NAEP mathematics test as revealed in the Trial Urban District Assessment from 2005. First off, consider the number of eighth grader who rate as "below basic" (this is bad):
That's your classic "big city, bad schools" chart with DC, New York, and Boston all doing far worse than the national average. Except it turns out that demographic factors have a huge influence on school achievement. Big city school systems tend to contain a higher-than-average number of poor kids, and poor kids tend to do worse than middle class kids, so cities wind up with bad test results. What if we restrict our sample and just look at how kids from economically struggling families, the ones eligible for federally subsidized school lunches, are doing?
Here things look very different. Once we control for demographics, it turns out that New York and Boston don't have "failing inner city schools" at all -- on eighth grade math scores, their schools are actually doing a slightly better than average job of educating poor children. Their overall numbers are pulled down by their larger-than-average number of poor kids, but when you add appropriate controls their school system is doing fine. DC, by contrast, does have a challenging population, but also is doing a crappy job relative to the challenge.
Now of course things change a little bit if you look at 4th grade instead of 8th grade or reading instead of math, or middle class kids only instead of poor kids only, or the high end or the low end, but the basic pattern is pretty robust -- New York and especially Boston have average public school systems masked by difficult demographics, whereas DC has a shitty public school system whose badness is masked by clichés about bad big city schools. Here's 4th grade scores among lunch-eligible kids:
And here on the flipside are the number of non-poor kids who did well on the test:
So to make a long story short, when talking about this issue it helps to be precise. All across the United States we have a problem with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds doing poorly in school. We also see kids from disadvantaged backgrounds overrepresented in urban school systems. Consequently, average results from city school systems tend to be below average. But when you use appropriate demographic controls you see that there's huge city-to-city variation and also a huge amount being determined by the demographics.
Some cities -- i.e., Washington DC -- really do have sub-standard school systems and would do well to implement reforms that made DCPS get results more like what you see in Boston or New York. But even if all cities did get the level of performance that you see from the best cities, there would still be a problem insofar as poor kids tend to do badly even in "good" schools in the United States.
The LA Times has a well-argued editorial about the Bush/McCain proposal to destroy America's coastline:
Enter Bush, who on Wednesday said he would end his father's 1990 presidential moratorium on most coastal drilling if Congress would lift its own, separate ban. His reasoning was so contradictory that it's a wonder he could finish his news conference without cracking up. While conceding that the long-term solution to high oil prices is to pursue alternative energy sources, he argued that "in the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil, and that means we need to increase supply." The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that even if oil companies are allowed to tap the 18 billion barrels under coastal waters that are currently off-limits, oil prices wouldn't be expected to fall until 2030. How is that a short-term solution?
Coastal drilling isn't just opposed by a bunch of Prius-driving greenies from Santa Barbara. Existing moratoriums were put in place at the behest of tourism interests, fishermen, small businesses and coastal dwellers. That's because drilling in these waters benefits oil companies but causes direct economic harm to everyone else by trashing beaches, poisoning marine life and ruining views.
One flaw in the editorial, however, is that it refers to Bush and McCain as "oil opportunists." This misses the fact that since David Broder likes his aura it's not possible for McCain to be an opportunist. Maybe if the LAT editorialists moved closer to DC they could see these issues more clearly. Maybe they don't realize in Southern California that McCain is a straight-talker and Broder's the Dean. I mean, this is a paper that doesn't even know that Tim Russert was 21st century America's greatest hero so clearly they can't be trusted.
Photo of oil-smeared grebe by Flickr user Wolfraven used under a Creative Commons license
There Netherlands is poised to ban smoking tobacco in public places, but smoking marijuana will still be allowed in licensed "coffee shops" as long as it's not mixed with tobacco.
I also note that I learned went I went to the Netherlands this past fall that there are fewer coffee shops around than there used to be, and that there have been a variety of measures put into place to make it more difficult to get a license. This is in part a consequence of the socially conservative smallish Christian Union Party joining the governing coalition.
Photo by me, available under a Creative Commons license
Buyers' remorse strikes Prince William County in Virginia, home to the DC area's highest foreclosure rates and a situation that's left not-foreclosed-on homeowners with sinking property values and rising taxes.
The weird thing is that in the midst of these problems, county officials (and I suppose citizens) have decided that it would be smart for their local government to devote more time and resources to hounding illegal immigrants out of the county in a manner that's made it generally unpleasant for Hispanics of all stripes and immigrants both legal and illegal. One might think that under the circumstances you'd want as many residents as possible keeping homes occupied and patronizing local businesses, but there's no accounting for some folks' manias.
Rich Lowry, diavlogging with Mike Tomasky, says there's basically no reason we shouldn't just drill for oil everywhere because the only downside is "aesthetics":
I assume that people who work in the tourism business, or who live in communities where many other people do, will appreciate that aesthetics can have actual economic value. If we made it so that every spot of the coastal United States became horribly ugly the total economic damage would be pretty large. But even aesthetics for its own sake aren't nothing -- I assume Lowry wouldn't burn Starry Night for $5. And of course the ecological damage done by oil drilling can go far beyond merely ruining the view (oil and ocean life don't mix) which is to say nothing of the environmental problems associated with burning the oil.
Ultimately, though, this kind of thinking is why the "oil addiction" language has gained such popularity. There are things we could do that would set us on a path toward reducing our oil consumption. Alternatively, we can decide that it's somehow just not possible and we need to reconciling ourselves to pumping more and more oil with that quest for oil overriding all other possible considerations.
There's some kind of persistent confusion, both in the punditocracy and among the public at large, as to where John McCain stands on this issue, but he's been fairly clear that he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade:
In an ideal world, we'll get an honest debate on this and related subjects during the campaign season, rather than the usual thing where candidates just kind of mutter about "strict constructionists" without saying anything substantive.
I think it's clear enough that this rise in the number of people renting their homes has, in practice, been driven by economic hardship. And hardship, obviously, is a bad thing. But at the same time, I think the habit of using the homeownership rate as a general indicator of economic progress is a bad one. There are pros and cons to owning versus renting, plus at any given time in any given market the financial imperatives may point in one way or another.
Given all that, it seems that there's no reason for our policy and rhetoric to include a strong bias in favor of homeownership. Renting gives people more flexibility about where they live, which is probably a good thing in a continent-sized economy where there can be a lot of localized booms and busts. What's more, a house you own combines two elements -- a consumption good element and a savings element. Renting separates that out -- you rent as much house as you feel like consuming, and then you save money by buying mutual funds or whatever. When people own they tend to wind up living inside they mutual fund, which means buying a bigger house than they might have rented, which distorts energy consumption patterns and all kinds of other things.
Consequently, I think that over the long term we should try to shift toward policies -- especially tax policies -- that are more neutral between buying and renting. This can probably be accomplished by capping the home mortgage interest tax deduction at some inoffensively high number, and then not raising the cap as inflation eats it away. Lots of people would still own homes if we did that, but it would be somewhat fewer people, and they'd probably own somewhat smaller homes, and national savings could then be more focused on potentially production investments.
s the conventional wisdom has it, neither senator has been serious about the long-term budget deficit; both have made rosy assumptions about the revenue that will come from cracking down on waste, fraud, abuse, overseas tax loopholes and other vague fiscal bogeymen.
All this is true enough. Mr. Obama, for instance, relies on hypothetical savings from electronic medical records to claim that he can reduce the deficit, and he hasn’t been totally clear about his tax plans. But the unknowns about the McCain agenda are simply on a different scale.
So far, Mr. McCain is having it both ways. On the campaign trail, he has sounded like a bold tax cutter. To budget wonks, though, his campaign has gingerly inched away from those plans, saying details will be forthcoming. In the meantime, the most-cited analysis of his proposed budget doesn’t square with what he is saying on the stump.
What he doesn't understand here is that McCain is a well-known straight-talker whom everyone respects and knows is honest. Therefore, this analysis can't be right.
It seems that not only did John McCain hold a private meeting with Latino leaders in Chicago at which he tacked left on immigration (after having tacked right after having tacked left earlier) but that his staff let an Illinois Minutemen leader (who happens to be Hispanic) into the meeting so he could hear everything and get pissed off:
So she went to the meeting, a room full of 150-200 people. "Sure enough," Pulido says, "his mantra at the meeting was comprehensive immigration reform.' And there were cheers and applause whenever he mentioned comprehensive immigration reform."
"Then he said, 'I bet some of you don't know this -- did you know Spanish was spoken in Arizona before English?' And the crowd roared. I was appalled," Pulido said. "He was pandering to these people -- that's what they wanted to hear."
I guess I basically agree with what appears to be McCain's real position on immigration, and I look forward to David Brooks' column on McCain's unprincipled flip-flopping on this subject.
Under what circumstances would you support offshore oil drilling or drilling in ANWR? Is there a compromise position -- oil companies promise to follow certain environmental restrictions/expanded funding for public transportation/windfall taxes -- where you feel that giving oil companies access to explore and drill in these areas would be worth it?
I don't think there's a "compromise" on these topics that I'd support. What would be worth supporting, by contrast, is a logroll. If something resembling Barack Obama's climate change plan were poised to pass the congress but needed the votes of two additional Senators to clear a filibuster, and giving way on ANWR would get the Alaska Senators on board, then, sure, you strike the deal. In practice, I think offshore drilling would be a net loser of legislative votes in this context, since it's an issue whose opponents (representatives from coastal areas) care more about than do its proponents. Plenty of Republicans with middling-to-terrible environmental records are against offshore drilling. ANWR is probably the reverse -- a big deal in Alaska, where people tend to favor it, and not a big deal elsewhere -- so in theory one could imagine a deal.
Barack Obama says he's a reformer, but apparently he's in hoc to Big Bike: "In a private 20-minute meeting with members of the Bikes Belong board of directors, told them if he were elected president he would increase funding for cycling and pedestrian projects." I think it'll be fun to have a president from a big city.
A lot of people seem to have gotten it into their heads that nuclear power is a cost-effective, carbon-free method of generating electricity being foiled by nefarious environmentalists. But as Cato's Jerry Taylor explains, it's just not true:
The reason we hear politicians like John McCain talk so much about the need for the federal government to promote nuclear power is because investors in the private sector take one look at the economics and run screaming for the hills. Investment banks tell utilities who want to borrow money to build these things that not one red cent will be coming their way unless and until the federal taxpayer guarrantees that the entire loan will be repaid in case of default. If nuclear power were such a good economic bet, those taxpayer guarantees would not be necessary.
McCain and other big nuke-heads are talking about large subsidies for nuclear power, not about getting green tape out of the way. Personally, I don't really think we should be subsidizing any form of power generation -- a cap on carbon emissions (or a tax) would be a large de facto subsidy to everything that's not fossil fuels. But insofar as we are going to subsidize electricity it makes more sense to subsidize genuinely clean power.
Foreign Policy lists five reasons to love $4 gasoline. And it's true, expensive gas has a lot of public benefits. And if we made gasoline more expensive through, say, higher gas taxes or a carbon tax then not only would we secure the public health, congestion, and environmental benefits of expensive gas but the government would have a good source of revenue with which to mitigate some of the consumer pain. As things stand, gas is expensive (and getting pricier) anyway, but oil companies and oil-exporting nations are reaping a huge share of the benefits.
A DC edition of a website where bike riders photograph the license plates of cars blocking bike lanes has launched. I intend to make a pain of myself submitting photos.
I'm a bit surprised their isn't more enforcement of this. Given the currently large number of violations, it seems to me that hiring an additional traffic enforcement officer, giving him or her a bike, and having him or her ride around handing out tickets (especially on the busy, frequently violated lanes on E Street, 14th Street, and New Hampshire Aveneue) would be an easy net source of revenue for the city.
As the endless ANWR debate continues, George W. Bush said yesterday that allowing drilling would "bring enormous benefits to the American people." Given how well-rehearsed this issue is, I know that to be false, but I didn't realize what Ben at ThinkProgress pointed out, namely that the Department of Energy did a report just last month showing that drilling in ANWR would reduce the price of oil by 75 cents a barrel. That's not 75 cents per gallon for your gasoline, it's 75 cents per barrel of oil -- meaning a reduction in price of substantially less than one percent wholesale and doubtless less than that in terms of retail gasoline.
The striking thing about this is that I doubt anyone is really all that shocked to learn that the president might make statements that contradict the findings of official government reports about the merits of his preferred policy vis-a-vis ANWR. He favors drilling, so he's overstating the benefits. Whether he's lying or not depends on the subjective status of his brain in a way that we can't ever literally know, but he's saying stuff that government reports say is false.
And of course it's well-known that Bush has made claims that contradict official government reports about all kinds of topics, ranging from climate change to tax policy to oil drilling and beyond. And yet if you say he did this exact same thing with regard to making the case for invading Iraq, you're treated as a member of the lunatic fringe. But it's hardly unusual for politicians in general, or Bush in particular, to understate the costs and overstate the benefits of their preferred policies.
Botswana Meat Commission FC says: "I dig all the talk about transportation/transit around here. How about some analysis of light rail and 'express bus' options that are sort of a halfway point between city buses and heavy rail." A few points on this.
As a mainline transit option, the great virtue of bus routes is that they're easy to set up. In ideal circumstances, I think the service on Georgia Avenue currently provided by the 79 Express Bus line in DC should be a full-fledged Metro line. There could be a separated Yellow Line extending north from the Shaw/Howard station along Georgia Avenue with transfers to the Green Line at Petworth and to the Red Line at Silver Spring. But that would be very expensive, wouldn't really be my first priority for expensive projects, and would take a long time to finish. So the 79 is a solid, practical solution. But by the same token that bus lines are easy to set up, they're easy to shut down and it's very easy to shift the stations around and consequently they aren't going to do a good job of becoming a locus of private sector investment and altered development patterns. A light rail line can do more to create dense hubs around stations with a vibrant commercial corridor running between them.
The choice between a light rail and heavy rail line, ideally, ought to be made not on the basis of the fact that the light rail line is cheaper but by thinking about what it is you're trying to accomplish. Light rail doesn't move as many people and, consequently, can't serve as the transportation backbone for as dense an area. But maybe you don't want to build a super-dense area, but you do want to have a workable transit link. Light rail's a good solution.
Across an entire metro area, you should expect the transportation network to genuinely be a network that involves heavy rail on some routes, light rail or BRT on some others, and then probably various kinds of local bus routes that work for shorter trips or bring people to hubs for other transportation modes. If you look at the best transit cities in Europe, you'll see that they have all kinds of stuff going on in terms of light rail and subways and commuter rail and intercity rail and buses all on top of each other.
Photo by Flickr user Intangible Arts used under a Creative Commons license
Excellent satire of the view that gay marriage is going to imperil heterosexual couples:
In addition to the issue of justice for gay and lesbian couples, and to the vital need to mock conservatives, there's really a larger problem here. It's genuinely the case that we have a lot of social problems that are complicated by family instability -- children are expensive and time-consuming and tend to be much better off if both parents are involved in bringing them up. So the idea that marriage and family life could, in some sense, use some shoring-up isn't a crazy one. But conservatives don't seem to have many actual ideas about doing this apart from blaming the gays. But I think serious social conservative ideas on this front would be welcome.
One thing I'd forgotten during the long debate about Clinton versus Obama on health care, and in speculation about the Senate filibuster, is that the key legislative player, the chokepoint through which health care reform must pass, is Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. But he's not just Finance Committee Chairman, he's also a terrible Senator! Indeed, on core economic policy issues he's probably the worst Senator -- a little bit right-wing, a lot corrupt and unprincipled. Ezra Klein has a piece on Baucus and health reform that nods in the direction of Baucus' critics but then waxes optimistic:
This time around, however, Baucus has given health reformers reason for optimism. He has staffed up, hiring Liz Fowler, a well-regarded health-policy staffer with immense Hill experience. He's held a series of hearings on the need to reform the system, inviting experts to testify on everything from the explosion in costs to the failures of the insurance market. More importantly, his statements at these hearings have been invariably action-oriented. He opened a recent session by saying, "Today let us talk again about health-care reform. Let us hear from the experts about how to do it right. And let us plan, next year, to actually do something about it."
I'm not actually sure what the reason for optimism is. At a minimum, while Baucus' evident interest in the subject does seem to boost the chances that something called "health care reform" will pass, I don't see any reason to be confident that good health care reform will pass. Baucus was an architect of the 2003 Medicare Reform bill so we might get something like that -- a bill that does, just as liberals wanted, provide seniors with a prescription drug benefit under Medicare but does so at enormous fiscal cost in terms of bribes to drug companies and pharmaceutical companies and bad structural changes to Medicare.
But I dunno. Maybe Baucus has changed his ways. His campaign website does include this stirring section on economic justice:
As Chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, Max was a chief architect of the 2008 Stimulus Bill designed to limit the economic downturn in the U.S. by boosting Main Street economies through tax relief for individuals and businesses. Using his seniority on the Senate Finance Committee, Max co-wrote the largest tax cut in a generation, providing $1.35 trillion in relief, including more than $115 million for Montanans to pump into local economies.
Max improved the 2001 tax relief package to make sure that more than 34,000 moderate and low-income Montanans got the tax relief they deserve by expanding the child tax credit. That money is best spent in neighborhood stores.
Coming from a seven-generation ranching family, Max know how important passing family farms and businesses on to the next generation is, which is why he fought to repeal the estate tax in the 2001 tax package.
That's right -- thanks to Max Baucus, Bush's hugely unaffordable and massively regressive tax cut package cut ever-so-slightly less regressive at the cost of a bipartisan imprimateur that scuttled any hopes of defeating in the Senate. And he fought for estate tax repeal, because if you're a rancher who also happens to be a multi-millionaire -- or, indeed, if you're an extraordinarily wealthy person of any sort -- then Max Baucus is on your side.
Needless to say, his number one, three, four, and five contributors this cycle are firms in the health care or insurance industries. Of course it's natural for anyone who has his job to rake in a lot of bucks from those kind of companies as they seek to influence legislation, but Baucus isn't exactly the kind of guy with a long record of standing up to special interests.
Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat. [...]
The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.
There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.
I think the evidence is clear that the Bush administration went to war in Iraq because it's run by crazy people. The oil money more plausibly comes into play in explaining the desire to stay at war forever. After all, these companies (or their corporate ancestors) had oil contracts in Iraq in the past and now they're getting them back "36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power." Nationalization, you see, is a substantial risk of doing business -- especially natural resource business -- in unstable countries. But a given government is much, much, much less likely to nationalize western countries' assets if it's dependent on external U.S. military support and especially if its security services are nicely enmeshed with the U.S. military.
Our troops can "curb Iranian influence" and provide "stability" all of which is good for business. But don't call it imperialism, we're there to help!
Police officer is called into HQ with the rest of his unit and told everyone's supposed to fill out mail in ballots right in front of three superior officers. He fills it out, puts it in the envelope and then:
They opened his ballot and saw that he had voted for Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC. He was followed by the Police Internal Security Intelligence (PISI) who attempted to kidnap him that night at his home. He has been on the run ever since. This officer told me another story of another officer in his unit who actually voted his ballot out in the open, on the table, in front of the three senior Police officers, and was immediately arrested and taken to one of the detention centers that are now being called “Reeducation Camps”.
I asked him what “reeducation” means? He told me “People are only taken there to be beaten”.
That's on Joe Trippi's blog via which I see the Friends of Zim site which has much more.
I see my colleague Andrew is getting on board the neo-contrarian argument about climate change -- it's real, it's caused by human activity, but it's just not worth doing anything about:
The key will be private and public innovation of non-carbon energy, and possibly carbon capture technology.
You can find a more elaborated version of the argument from Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in Democracy. I thought their book, Break Through, made a number of interesting points but this article focuses in on their core bad idea -- "Kyoto is dead—and that’s a good thing. In its place, we need massive global investment in new clean energy technology."
There's just no reason to think of "massive global investment in new clean energy technology" as an alternative to the mainstream environmentalist interest in putting a price on carbon. Massive investment requires a lot of money. And if the point of raising the money is to produce clean energy technology, what better place to get the money from than auctioning permits to generate unclean energy? If you raise the funds through a carbon charge, then you're able to subsidize technology both coming and going. Any alternative way of funding "massive global investment" is ultimately going to involve less efficiency and more economic pain.
The American Medical Association decides to come out against midwives delivering babies at home. Like dentists who won't let hygenists clean your teeth unless they get a piece of the action, obstetricians want to make sure no childbirth revenue slips through the cracks. This business of senseless supply restrictions isn't the health care problem in America, but it does make the other problems all much harder and more expensive to solve than they otherwise might be.
Will they hook up with robot groupies after the show, you ask? They just might if this Japanese robot girlfriend initiative picks up steam. Be afraid.
Incidentally, wouldn't countering the robot menace be a good issue for John McCain? It seems to play to his combination of cranky old man-ness and national security paranoia. They all laughed at Admiral Adama when he didn't want networked computer on the Galactica but look how that turned out.
Criticizing the policy is an appropriate way to approach it if you're an Obama supporter, but why begrudge the man for changing his mind as conditions (our general awareness of climate change, the Iraq war, gas prices, etc) have changed? Perhaps he changed his mind for the wrong reason... but that's an argument that one has to make, not just assume.
The point I would make is that McCain's new view undermines an important larger argument he's trying to make. His latest ad features the idea that he broke with the president over climate change -- i.e., he wants to do something about it. Specifically, McCain says he wants to reduce carbon emissions. But you just can't reduce carbon emissions without burning less oil by, in effect, making it more expensive. Offshore drilling is a way to get more oil in order to make oil cheaper. If McCain wants to say that high gas prices have made him abandon his previous views on climate change, fine. But what he wants to do right now is simultaneously get credit for standing up to Bush on climate, while also agreeing with Bush about the particulars.
Su Bang says: "As I sit here in my cubicle at Ford WHQ after having driven 20 miles to get here from Ann Arbor, I wonder if cheaper and improved broadband access would make the average white-collar worker as productive at home as in the office thus removing the need for big old office buildings sucking up energy removing the need to commute? If so would this be cheaper to implement than improving/providing mass commuter transportation?"
I don't think the quality of broadband is really the issue here. At the moment, I'm sitting at the Big Bear Cafe (pictured above) at a table with my non-journalist housemate. She's working from home (or, rather, the coffee shop) today for special reasons and normally has to go into the office. But whatever the reason is that her employers want her to come in most days, it's not the quality of internet access.
I do think that this is a pattern we may see changing soon. Some employers clearly put a high value on office location and pay top dollar for centrally located offices in the middle of major cities -- think of Condé Nast and Skadden Arps in 4 Times Square. But many companies have decided that specific location isn't all that important to them, so they should save money by getting space in suburban office parks. Arguably, though, given modern telecommunications technology firms like that ought to save even more money by getting substantially less space -- maybe a conference room and a few swing offices -- and having most people do most of their work from home or some friendly venue in the neighborhood.
If transportation costs continue to rise, we'll probably see some change on the margin here. And there are, of course, good reasons to think we should adopt policies that will improve the quality of broadband in the United States. Would that be "cheaper" than new transit construction? Presumably, but it would also be cheaper than new highway construction. I don't think -- and I don't think anyone thinks -- that there's a compelling case for reducing our overall level of infrastructure spending. The question is primarily one of how much of that should be road spending and how much should be transit spending. The telecommuting issue, though interesting in its own right, is basically an independent issue.
UPDATE: Alyssa Rosenberg had a piece about the federal government's teleworking initiatives, which are ahead of most of the private sector and starting to serve as a model.
Photo by Flickr user tvol used under a Creative Commons license
Via Chris Hayes, it's LILYPAD A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees. Neat if it works, I suppose, though these days anyone can make a cool-looking computer-generated image and assert that it's self-sufficient, energy-positive, etc.
It seems to me that, as a professional blogger, it's pretty likely that were I to have children I would have a more flexible work schedule than my wife and wind up shouldering more responsibility than is customary for most men. As such, I read Lisa Belkin's article on couples who try to share parenting duty equally (the piece also presents the staggering inequities in current household burdens) with a great deal of interest.
Reading it, one thing that comes through is that equality isn't necessarily a very practical arrangement. A lot of things in life reward the division of labor, and the neotraditional arrangement in which one partner works to maximize career success and does domestic obligations on the side while the other partner treats domestic obligations as the fixed point and earns money around that commitment is in many ways a more efficient way of organizing a household than is strict equality. But of course thanks to entrenched tradition and social expectations, we all know that the "one partner" is a man and the "other partner" is a woman.
One could, however, easily imagine an alternate reality in which the society as a whole featured more-or-less equal sharing of domestic tasks between men and women without it being the case that most individual couples share things precisely equally. And, indeed, according to Belkin "who does what, lesbian couples say, is instead determined by personality and logistics" rather than either pre-existing gender stereotypes (obviously a non-starter) or by a 50-50 rule. Still, the evidence from gay and lesbian couples does suggest that despite some specialization, you tend to get closer to 50-50 than heterosexuals do:
Lesbian couples also have a more equal division of housework. Rothblum found that it is only heterosexual mothers who do the lion’s share of housework for the family each week — between 11 and 20 hours for her survey respondents. Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.
Among other things, that result suggests a certain amount of "leveling down" in terms of housecleaning in gay couples with both partners acting more like a heterosexual man than like a straight woman. Meanwhile, as you see throughout the piece it's difficult for any one couple to decide it's going to unilaterally change how the world works -- part-time work is hard to come by in a lot of fields. This is, presumably, something that will have to change if more couples try to share their responsibilities more equitably. In general, it seems that everyone who has kids would have an easier time dealing with their family responsibilities if we took Ezra Klein's advice and mandated more vacation days.
Alternatively, the fewer children people have, the less domestic work there is to do. For a while now, the trend has been for the number of kids born to adjust to the economic demands for full-time work. We could, conceivably, adopt policies that aim in the other direction, but I haven't seen much indication that anyone in politics really wants to go that way.
Some would say this counts as a genuine advance in the Bush Administration understanding of human relations. I think, rather, that they’ve always known this truth, which is why they tried to avoid compromise unless desperate.
The manager of the building where my office is writes:
It has been brought to our attention that there is a lack of space on the bike racks near the B2 ramp in the garage. This problem may be caused by people who have abandoned their bikes, and by Clients who are using the bike racks for long term bike storage. To be fair to the daily bike commuters, Clients should not use the bike rack for long term storage.
Of course, an alternative possibility is that the racks are crowded because bike commuting has grown in popularity. But they're going to test their theory out by "removing all bikes that are left on the bike racks in the garage after 9:00 PM on Wednesday, June 18" and then they will "place the bikes in storage for a period of two weeks, after which time, they will be donated to charity." I'll be interested to see what they come up with, but personally I doubt that mass bike-abandonment is really the culprit here.
Either way, eliminating two car parking spots would make room for many bikes, so objective shortage of space should never really be a problem for a garage-equipped building looking to accommodate bike commuters.
Photo by Flickr user Mobikefed used under a Creative Commons license
Via Chris Bertram, a nice demonstration of the growing size of food portions in the United States. Naturally, this trend toward increased consumption of calories has not been a good thing for public health.
It's also part of the reason I think rich countries like the United States are going to weather the long-run consequences of higher food and energy prices just fine -- at the low prices that have been prevailing recently, we're consuming substantially more than is good for us. Switching to an equilibrium where less food is eaten and more attention is paid to quality (in terms of both taste and nutrition) will be beneficial once the switching is done. Of course there's always what Keynes said about the long-run, but it still is worth distinguishing between long-run trends that point toward doom, and those that do not.
What's this . . . John McCain flip-flops on energy policy and CNN tells the tale! Crazy stuff, don't they know he's a straight-talker who can do no wrong? At any rate, kudos to Dana Bash.
Someone in the requests thread wanted me to cite real sources such as books in my posts on transportation and urban policy, and there have been several request for book recommendations generally. The trouble with making citations to books when you're writing a blog is, of course, that I mostly write the blogs in quick snatches all around town and can't lug the whole library with me. My ideas, however, are all derivative and you, too, can read the works from which I've stolen them.
Describing the health care vouchers plan from Ezekiel Emanuel and Victor Fuchs, Ezra Klein describes a part of the system that's relevant to a lot of other reform proposals:
Big decisions within the system are made not by Congress or by insurers, but buy a Federal Reserve-style National Health Board that has, in turn, twelve Regional Health Boards. These commissions, staffed by a variety of experts who're appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, will define benefits, carry out research on effectiveness, figure out risk adjustment, and so on (in this, the plan has shades of Tom Daschle's plan).
The con of this proposal is that if you describe it as "decisions made not by elected officials, but by largely unaccountable political appointees" it doesn't sound so good. But if you describe it as "decisions made by appointees insulated from political pressure like the Federal Reserve system" it does sound good. Which is another way of saying that the Federal Reserve system works well, even though it doesn't sound (to me, at least) like something that would work very well.
Unfortunately, I'm not really sure that we as a society have a great grasp on why the Fed does work well. In principle, it's an appealing model that could be applied to various other questions where it seems better to keep congress in more of a supervisory role rather than a direct policymaking one (issues that have a technical dimension or where the geographic nature of congressional constituencies is inappropriate, etc.) but it also holds the potential for disaster. You wouldn't want the Bush FEMA team making these kind of decisions, and you also wouldn't want it to become the locus for constant congressional battles. What you want is something like, well, the Federal Reserve appointments where even Bush has felt obligated to pick people like Ben Bernanke who are genuinely well-qualified and well-respected. What you fear, though, is that this would become a "revolving door" scenario where industry lobbyists go to work as regulators, do favors for industry, and then cash in with cushy jobs once they leave government.
We can invest in rail, so that cities like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis are connected by high-speed trains, and folks have alternatives to air travel.
More in-depth analysis of the speech and the policy agenda contained therein later, but I do love me some high-speed rail.
In contrast to Barack Obama's efforts to provide viable alternatives to hefty gasoline consumption, John McCain's idea is that we should make regulatory changes to allow more drilling, and then slather on some additional subsidies (or as he puts it "incentives" since he's against subsidies) to allow for more drilling:
Now there's a coherent case for more drilling. It would say something like "the economic benefits of cheap gasoline exceed the environmental and other harms of massive gasoline consumption." But McCain, whether he realizes it or not, has endorsed a carbon cap-and-trade program that will necessarily reduce consumption of fossil fuels and raise the price of gasoline. If you want cheaper gas, you don't cap carbon emissions. And if you want to reduce carbon emissions, you don't try to reduce the price of gasoline.
But McCain wants political credit for breaking with GOP orthodoxy on climate change, and he doesn't want to bite any of the bullets involved in breaking with GOP orthodoxy on climate change, so instead he's come up with an incoherent mess.
A lot of separate questions about how to improve transit in this country come down to the same solution -- decide we want to improve mass transit services. Until then, you get things like the state of Maryland's transportation planning over the next five years:
$2.17 billion for the Intercounty Connector
$74 million for the Purple Line
$57 million for the Silver Spring Transit Center
$55 million to build the Montrose Parkway
$50 million for the Corridor Cities Transitway
$18 million to improve MARC tracks
$2 million to study extending the Green Line north to BWI Airpoirt
The Intercountry Connector, a large highway, accounts for an order of magnitude more spending than do all the mass transit projects (i.e., everything else except the Montrose Parkway) on that list. Meanwhile, the Purple Line has to be light rail rather than a faster, higher-capacity system because heavy rail is "too expensive." But if Maryland politicians are really concerned about the current gas price situation, they'd drop the ICC and use the savings to fund the Purple Line for the medium term and to improve their bus service for the short term. Good transit projects are expensive, but highways are expensive, too -- we live in a rich country and can afford to build the things we decide it's important to build.
Watch in amazement as John McCain fails to realize that a cap-and-trade system necessarily involves a "mandatory cap" on carbon emissions. Obviously the root of the issue here is that McCain doesn't understand anything about carbon policy and doesn't care about it either. But he wanted to sign up for a "centrist" solution on the sexy issue of climate change, so his staff came up with a plan. But "mandatory cap" sounds like the lefty position, so McCain thinks he must not have it.
Maybe he should explain to people the real difference between his plan and Barack Obama's, namely that under Obama's plan you need to pay the government for carbon permits whereas under McCain's plan polluters get free permits that they can then sell. Either way, energy's going to get more expensive and some hardship will exist, but under Obama's plan revenue will be generated that can be used to ease the pain. But of course to explain his plan to people McCain would need to get someone to explain it to him first.
I used to have an occasional joke at The American Prospect about how we should stop wasting time with article about wage stagnation and start devoting more energy to real problems -- like the risk of mass extinction caused by an asteroid. But Greg Easterbook actually did the work and wrote a great article about the problem. And the Atlantic web team made a great video to go along with it. Here's a preview:
Full film (it's about ten minutes) available here. Check it out.
Scientific American: "Microsoft, Google and several more of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies have found a way to provide wireless Internet access that is so fast it makes today’s Wi-Fi networks seem as sluggish as dial-up service. The prospect, however, has big media broadcasters up in arms, because this blazing-fast network access may hamper television signals when they go digital next year."
The trouble, basically, is that this wireless internet service uses the same portion of the spectrum on which TV stations will be broadcasting digital signals. We could resolve the problem if only there were some set of human institutions that allow scarce resources to come into the possession of those capable of deploying them in the most high-value way. Like, say, an auction rather than just giving the space away to TV broadcasters. But that's crazy talk.
Jon Chait wants to rebuild Klingle Road and sees opposition to the project as driven solely by a desire of nearby property owners to keep their backyards quiet. In response to my post on the subject he queries:
If we're going to try to encourage public transit by making life hard for drivers, why do it by randomly closing roads that happen to run through wealthy areas whose residents have the clout to keep them closed? Why not jack up the tax on cars, or have the city periodically scatter shards of broken glass in the streets?
I think the case against periodically scattering shards of broken glass in the streets is pretty clear, but in case it's not -- doing so would be hazardous to pedestrians, cyclists, commercial vehicles, etc., and as such it doesn't suggest itself as a reasonable method of discouraging automobile use. Jacking up the tax on cars sounds like a good idea to me. I'd also favor congestion pricing, reduction in the amount of free parking made available, etc.
But to be clear on the question at hand, I don't own any property that abuts Klingle Road or even live in the area, and I'm not some kind of hypocrite who refuses to apply the same principle generally. Closing down entire roads probably isn't the best way to go, but I would strongly favor eliminating car traffic lanes throughout the city in order to make dedicated bus lanes, bike lanes, or streetcar tracks. And built-up areas should not, in general, be investing money in building new roads or (what amounts to the same thing) rebuilding old ones that have been closed. New road capacity in a place like DC is going to do very little to relieve traffic congestion over the long run (to reduce congestion you need congestion pricing -- otherwise the uncongested, unpriced road is a valuable resource that will swiftly be "overconsumed" by drivers) and therefore makes little sense as a target for public expenditures.
Peter Bautista asks: "How to make public authorities, like New York's MTA, more publicly accountable?"
This is a very good question and I don't have a great answer to it. By way of punting, I'll note that I doubt you could solve the problems in this regard in isolation from the more general problem of lack of accountability in local government. There's very little competition in local elections, which naturally leads to a lack of accountability. And key transit states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Pennsylvania find themselves in the top ten most corrupt list which doesn't help.
These are important issues. I've increasingly come to believe that questions about the quality of government -- not just in a pure goo-goo sense of avoiding corruption, but in the real-world sense that some public agencies are well-run and others are poorly-run -- are more important that people realize. Effective agencies (the public schools in Massachusetts, the American military, and the bulk of the public sector in Scandinavia) attract public support, public funds, public enthusiasm and wind up in a virtuous circle. Dysfunctional agencies breed cynicism, corruption, low pay, and despair. Merely changing policies in the absence of the ability to actually get the job done (Brazil has very admirable laws against doing this but it doesn't stop anyone, and in theory there are people in charge of preventing stuff like this in DC) doesn't accomplish anything.
17 years ago, a storm rendered the former Klingle Road through Rock Creek Park unusable. Ever since then, there's been an on-again, off-again controversy about whether to rebuild it. Those in favor say:</
