Boring Political Diatribes

A new post?...YUP

2008-06-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

I know I know...it's been a long time. But I recently saw a discussion over the Supreme Court's recent decision to guarantee the right of every individual to own firearms and my head almost exploded. It was time for a Boring Political Diatribe.

In case you haven't heard, the Supreme Court, for the first time ever, made a major decision about the 2nd Amendment. Since its passage in 1791, there had never been a clarification by the supreme court of its meaning...until now. In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Scalia, the court argued that the amendment's phrasing protected all law-abiding citizens to own weapons for both hunting and self-defense.

So...where to start? For me, the entire situation could not be more ridiculous. And it's part of a bigger problem with our national dialogue. See, since the 1980s (and slightly earlier going back to the 1960s), conservatives have been obsessed with the idea of strict constructionism: the idea that the law of the land should be derived strictly from the constitution. This was a way of trying to undermine the liberal decisions of the Warren Court (which gave us such horrible things as Brown v. Board, the ending of miscegenation laws, and the right to use birth control) because many of those decisions had taken some liberties with strict interpretations of the constitution. So, the movement towards strict constructivism was an attempt to persuade voters that conservative principles were more in line with the ideas of our honored founding fathers, and thus more righteous.

At this point I should mention two things:

One, why we should care about what our founding fathers meant or even if we can is completely mysterious to me. No other country in the world is obsessed with this sort of thing, it is quite strange. Our founding fathers were not geniuses, they made plenty of mistakes, many within our Constitution. Some have been rectified (slavery anyone?) and some haven't (our ridiculous electoral system for one). Additionally, the constitutional convention was attended by 55 delegates. How could we possibly read into the thoughts and minds of 55 people? And of course, everything in the constitution was a compromise, so it is possible that no one fully agreed with any of the wording of the constitution. For me, trying to strictly interpret the constitution based on what we think people in the late 18th century were thinking is just beyond crazy.
And two, many of the conservative attempts to strictly interpret the constitution, just fail on the most basic accounts of common sense. In other words, to say that the interpretation is a strict understanding of the Constitution is either lying or just plain crazy. Coming to these conclusions takes quite a lot of intellectual acrobatics. For example, the 2nd amendment reads:"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." As some quick background, the reason this amendment was approved was because it addressed a major issue from the Revolution. Leading up to the revolution, the British had forbid the colonial militias from carrying arms because they feared insurrection. Not surprisingly, the recent revolutionaries were so outraged by this infringement that they put a law in their new constitution protecting militia's rights to carry arms. Of course, they didn't really think this through: the British outlawed these guns because they rightly feared a rebellion against the government. It was not as if outlawing guns precipitated the revolution, it was just a normal reaction by the British to the coming of a rebellion. To include this amendment in the bill of rights was just to stick it to the British: to show them that Americans were better because they were going to preserve those rights. But no government believes itself to be illegitimate; to allow citizens to arm themselves against the government in a democracy is a recipe for disaster and probably some sort of dictatorial takeover. Honestly, the founding fathers never really thought this one through.
So that is the real background to the 2nd amendment. Notice that it only applies to militias (by the way, soon after, the militias were incorporated into what we now call the national guard). Now, I guess one could argue that the writers of this amendment would not even have imagined a scenario where guns would be outlawed amongst the general populace. For many people of the time guns were used to secure food, so it would have been inconceivable that the government would actually outlaw them. But still, a strict interpretation would affirm only that militias have a right to bear arms. That the founders didn't think about it only affirms my point that we shouldn't look back on them for guidance. Still, conservatives argue that the 2nd amendment is a promise to the American people that they have the right to have guns. How they derive this is a mystery to me: there is no such promise, the amendment specifically protects a militias rights to own guns and the reason it does so is because militias challenge the government. As with all the amendments in the bill of rights, central government's power is challenged and state's rights are preserved. A more open interpretation would only grant that the 2nd amendment gives people the right to have guns only in terms of resistance to the government (ironically, a position that even the NRA finds hard to defend). It makes no mention in any way to the right to own guns for self-protection.

But what really set me off was a comment by a conservative pundit who claimed that finally the Supreme Court had stepped in to preserve the rights granted to us in our constitution and had showed those winy gun-restricting liberals a thing or two, as if this was some sort of major constitutional crisis between the powers of government and the powers of the people. In reality, the entire gun control debate is about mobilizing blue-collar voters against the "elitist" Democratic Party. It has no other purpose. As some brief history: "liberals" and the government had no interest in restricting guns until 1920s (with the exception of 1790s when George Washington confiscated the guns of those involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, thus showing that to allow rebellious groups to have guns in the name of overthrowing the government is just plain crazy anyhow) when gangsters started going on killing sprees in urban environments with automatic Tommy Guns. Thus, in 1934, the National Firearms Act outlawed automatic weapons. There was no major protest. In 1938, the U.S. government began regulation of domestic arms sales under the interstate commerce clause, which would eventually lead to the setting up of the ATF. Still no protest. In 1968, in response to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the government began to register gun owners and disallow certain felons and those with a history of mental illness from owning guns. Still, no major protest, although the NRA shifted its emphasis from a gun-club, to a political organization trying to influence legislation to ensure that gun owners were respected and did not have to pay for expensive permits, etc. In 1986, the Law Enforcement Protection Act was passed that outlawed armor piercing "cop-killing" bullets. Still, no protest, but also in that year the NRA pushed for a Firearms Owner's Protection Act that streamlined the process to gun ownership, but also created heavier restrictions for those involved in armed crimes.

But then came 1994. In 1994, Bill Clinton pushed for two laws: The Brady Bill which forced anyone buying a gun to go through a 5-day waiting period in order to administer a background check and what would be called the "Assault Weapons Ban," which banned semi-automatic weapons. Now the protests started. The NRA was not happy with this bill, they had become accustomed to 12 years of working with Republican administrations and they were being shut out of the process. But more importantly, Republican strategists believed they could use this issue to split blue-collar Democrats and push swing voters into the Republican camp. They painted Clinton, Democrats, and liberals as elitists who didn't understand the importance of guns to many rural families. They claimed that these liberals looked down upon those that owned guns. They claimed that liberals were the ones trying to take away their tradition of gun ownership and hunting. Of course this was psychological warfare. The Republicans were playing on the minds of many Americans who owned guns who were feeling ostracized not by liberals, but by society for owning guns. Many of these swing voters were traditionalists and in an era of rapid change, such traditionalists are logically going to feel uneasy and insecure. Republicans were able to channel these insecurities and direct it against Democrats. Nevermind that the laws did almost nothing to most gun-owners or that repeal of those laws would lead to much higher crime rates in urban areas. Clinton and the Democrats were the bad guys. Not surprisingly, the elections in 1994 were a complete disaster for the Democrats on a surprising scale. The gun issue was cited by many voters in swing states and areas as why they came and voted Republican. The Republicans gained 62 seats in Congress, gained the Senate and the Congress back (the Republican Party had not held the Congress since 1954).

Since then, the Democrats have basically given up on Gun Control. They have bigger fights to fight, I suppose. But Republicans have continued to use this issue to wedge normally Democratic voters from the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court ruling was the culmination of this mobilized outrage and is not based on any reasonable interpretation of the constitution or any interest in reasonable government administration.

Unstoppable?

2008-02-12T22:45:00.000-08:00

His only weakness: SuperDelegatium

Oh...that's what a bubble looks like...

2008-01-31T16:41:00.000-08:00

Well done, TMQ

2008-01-29T14:55:00.000-08:00

My sentiments, exactly:

U.S. Congress to the Next Generation --Drop Dead: Announcing the economic stimulus package agreed to last week by both parties in the House of Representatives, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declared that typical Americans can expect to receive a "stipend" of $300 to $1,200. Stipend -- will we get a federally funded sherry hour, too? Calling a government check a "stipend," to make it seem lofty and grand, reflects the modern affection CEOs have for calling the cash they receive "compensation" rather than pay, and consultants and speakers insist on saying they are receiving "honoraria" rather than pay. There is nothing wrong with receiving pay! And no reason to employ euphemisms.

The stimulus bill will cost about $150 billion and consists entirely of deficit spending. The secondary euphemism being employed in Washington is to call the checks "tax rebates." But they are not rebates, meaning partial returns of monies paid -- they are pure borrowing. Which is to say, Congress will award most current American adults $300 to $1,200 each, then send the bill to future American adults. Suppose that instead, each American adult today set aside $300 at 5 percent interest. In 20 years, that money would grow to $800, and likely much more if invested in stocks. Such savings would be good for the U.S. economy, which, since 2001, has seen a negative national savings rate. China's national savings rate is currently almost 50 percent. Savings is one reason the Chinese economy is growing far faster than the U.S. economy; the U.S. savings rate is close to negative-4 percent, and our economic growth is sputtering.

But rather than help the U.S. economy grow in a generous way that forgoes a little today to gain a lot tomorrow, the American people -- through their representatives in Congress -- just reached into the pockets of future citizens in order to spend more on themselves right now. Explain to me why this is considered a populist action by Congress?

Bear in mind, the stimulus package announced last week is only an agreement between the two parties in the House. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in the Senate currently are scrambling to add their own pet projects to the legislation -- whenever a big spending bill moves, there's always a bidding war in which Republicans and Democrats vie to see who can stage the biggest giveaway. The damage to the national debt might get worse because what's happening now is the environment Congress likes best -- an environment of zero fiscal discipline. Lobbyists for retirees, who already are subsidized by the young, are complaining that their special interest isn't being showered with free money by the stimulus bill; lobbyists for pork-barrel projects that could never withstand logical scrutiny are maneuvering to wrap them in the flag and add them to the stimulus bill. By the time the stimulus bill leaves Capitol Hill, the young might be saddled with yet more debt so that members of Congress can congratulate themselves as they hand checks to politically connected fat-cat donors or to retirees already drawing out of Social Security far more than they put in, plus interest.

Next, recall that on Jan. 4, 2007, both houses of Congress agreed with considerable fanfare on the Paygo measure, which stated that under no circumstances -- under no circumstances, never, regardless of conditions! -- would Congress enact any bill that increases the federal debt. According to the Paygo legislation, the House and Senate are forbidden even to debate legislation that would increase the debt. ("It shall not be in order to consider any bill, joint resolution, amendment or conference report if the provisions of such measure affecting direct spending and revenues have the net effect of increasing the deficit …") Paygo rules specify that all bills causing appropriations increases or tax favors must be offset be spending reductions or tax increases. When Paygo was enacted, many members of Congress from both parties, prominently Speaker Pelosi, patted themselves on the back in public.

[Thanks to the United States Congress, the National Debt Clock has been spinning overtime.]

How long did this incredible resolve last? Six weeks ago, Congress passed a reduction of the Alternative Minimum Tax; the bill cut taxes by $51 billion but provides no offsetting revenues. Originally, the measure would have reduced the AMT for the middle class while raising taxes by an equal amount on the upper crust of venture capitalists and hedge-fund managers. All the revenue increases ended up deleted -- hedge-fund managers showered members of Congress with campaign donations -- but the tax cuts were approved. Congress ladled out the $51 billion entirely from deficit spending, then handed the bill to the young. Now, the stimulus package goes even further, at least $150 billion in gravy without spending cuts or offsetting revenue increases. Barely 12 months after pledging never, ever again to add to the federal debt, Congress will add at least $201 billion to the federal debt. The federal deficit for the most recent fiscal year, which ended before either of the new actions, was $163 billion. Congress has, in the past six weeks alone, added more to the federal debt than the entire federal deficit for the most recent fiscal year.It's impossible to be sure, but a rough guess might be that every dollar added to the deficit today represents two dollars subtracted from future economic growth -- which in turn means two dollars taken from the pockets of tomorrow's American adults. This is a cynical exercise, robbing future Americans in order to please voters today, and to inspire interest groups to make political donations to incumbents. When are citizens under 30 going to wake up to the disagreeable fact that the country's current leadership, of both parties, is giving them the shaft in order to heap special favors on current voters who refuse to live within their means? Then handing the young the bill.

The campaign in pictures and videos...

2008-01-28T22:29:00.000-08:00

I'm just taking a poll: how many of us have pulled this move:

So far, the Clintons haven't been able to pick up much dirt on Obama. The big one has been Obama's long-standing connections to Illinois power broker and sleazeball, Tony Rezko. I bet they weren't happy when someone found this picture (for the record this is not photoshopped):

And lastly, here's a Republican's attempt at reaching out to minority voters:

(Who let the dogs out? At least he didn't tell them they "can't touch this.")

And here's Giuliani wearing some of his less embarrassing atire...a yamaka:

Reich Blasts Clinton

2008-01-24T16:24:00.000-08:00

Former Secretary of Labor and avowed Clintonite let it known where he stood in regard to the Clinton's recent attacks against Obama with this excerpt from his blog. (Reich, by the way, ran against a certain Mitt Romney in his attempt to become Governor of Massachusetts. Also, Reich was my professor for one day.)

"

Bill Clinton's Old Politics

I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point – that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands. Many of these ideas were wrong-headed and dangerous, such as supply-side economics. But for too long Democrats failed counter with new ideas of their own; they wrongly assumed that the old Democratic positions and visions would be enough. Clinton’s 1992 campaign – indeed, the entire “New Democratic” message of the 1990s – was premised on the importance of taking back the initiative from the Republicans and offering Americans a new set of ideas and principles. Now, sadly, we’re witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics.
"

Maybe Nice Guys do Finish Last

2008-01-24T12:02:00.000-08:00

The Democratic Party and all of its major candidates seems to have agreed to a basic platform:
-Repeal of Bush tax cuts
-Middle class tax cuts
-Universal Health Care
-Out of Iraq with all deliberate speed
- More Environmental Regulation
- Programs to move towards clean energies
- A pledge to keep an eye on corporate greed
- Appointment of judges who will maintain the separation of church and state

This is the same program that Gore had in 2000 and Kerry had in 2004. In some ways, it's also the program Clinton had in 1992. The Democrats, unlike the Republicans, believe that their platform can win and that the only reason they didn't was because of the unliked personalities of their former presidential candidates and their inability to fight an aggressive campaign. That's why this nomination battle has been all about personality.

As such, I leaned towards Obama. Obama ran a campaign that we would all like to see more of: he stayed away from personal attacks, he raised campaign money (and there was a lot of it) from small donors, he dealt firmly and fairly with complex issues, he made his appeal to a wide range of voters, and he made inspiring speeches at the most appropriate times. Clinton, on the other hand, ran the type of campaign that we all hate: after Iowa, she began attacks that were personal and highly distorted, she raised most of her money from corporate and large donors, she used scare tactics to confuse issues and simplify them, and she had clearly changed positions to increase her likelihood of being elected.

But if Machiavelli has taught us anything, and honestly he hasn't taught us much, is that while political decisions may be moral, actual political maneuvering is always amoral. In other words, in politics, the ends (if righteous) will justify the means. I should have kept that in mind before I predicted that Obama would be the next president.

What the Clintons understand, and understood, is that you can't beat Republican sludge with sanitized feel-goodedness. Unless you are a masterful politician, you can't win the political battles unless you're willing to get a little bit dirty. In reality, Clinton's attacks have not been that effective (what has been much more effective are the anonymous campaign materials that have convinced a large percentage of the population that Obama is Muslim), but they have shown Democratic voters that Obama won't be able to handle the heat. What the Clintons are throwing at Obama now is nothing compared to what he will get when he runs against a Republican. Now, I think that McCain, the likely Republican nominee, has ran remarkably clean campaigns so I don't think he'll do much mud throwing, but the Republican machine (Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reily, Fox News, etc.) will do more than enough to make up for this shortcoming. And what Clinton has shown is that Obama cannot even handle her attacks. In this light, Democrats are moving towards a candidate that they know can put up a fight.

Thorough Article from Joseph Stiglitz

2008-01-23T15:10:00.000-08:00

How to Stop the Downturn

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

AMERICA’S economy is headed for a major slowdown. Whether there is a recession (two quarters of negative growth) is less important than the fact that the economy will operate well below its potential, and unemployment will grow. The country needs a stimulus, but anything we do will add to our soaring deficit, so it is important to get as much bang for the buck as possible. The optimal package would contain one fast-acting measure along with others that could lead to increased spending if and only if the economy goes into a steep downturn.

We should begin by strengthening the unemployment insurance system, because money received by the unemployed would be spent immediately.

The federal government should also provide some assistance to states and localities, which are already beginning to feel the pinch, as property values have fallen. Typically, they respond by cutting spending, and this acts as an automatic destabilizer. Federal assistance should come in the form of support for rebuilding crucial infrastructure.

More federal support for state education budgets would also strengthen the economy in the short run and promote growth in the long run, as would spending to promote energy conservation and lower emissions. It may take some time to put these kinds of well-designed expenditure programs into place, but this slowdown looks as if it will last longer than some of the other downturns in recent memory. Housing prices have a long way to fall to return to more normal levels, and if Americans start saving more than they have been, consumption could remain low for some time.

The Bush administration has long taken the view that tax cuts (especially permanent tax cuts for the rich) are the solution to every problem. This is wrong. Tax cuts in general perpetuate the excessive consumption that has marked the American economy. But middle- and lower-income Americans have been suffering for the last seven years — median family income is lower today than it was in 2000. A tax rebate aimed at lower- and middle-income households makes sense, especially since it would be fast-acting.

Something should be done about foreclosures, and appropriately designed legislation allowing those who have been victims of predatory lending to stay in their homes would stimulate the economy. But we should not spend too much on this. If we do, we’ll wind up bailing out investors, and they are not the ones who need help from taxpayers.

In 2001, the Bush administration used the impending recession as an excuse to cut taxes for upper-income Americans — the very group that had done so well over the preceding quarter-century. The cuts were not intended to stimulate the economy, and they did so only to a limited extent. To keep the economy going, the Federal Reserve was forced to lower interest rates to an unprecedented extent and then look the other way as America engaged in reckless lending. The economy was sustained on borrowed money and borrowed time.

The day of reckoning has come. This time we need a stimulus that stimulates. The question is, will the president and Congress put aside politics to get the job done?

A diatribe from TMQ

2008-01-22T20:57:00.000-08:00

"Suppose the General Manager of the Miami Dolphins Awarded Himself the Same Bonus as the General Manager of the New England Patriots: Last week, this story appeared buried inside the business pages of The Washington Post. Why wasn't the story on Page 1? The Post reports that the blue-blooded five, Wall Street's five top investment banking houses, awarded their management $39 billion in bonuses for 2007 -- a period when those firms combined to earn investors about $11 billion in profits. Merrill Lynch lost $8 billion in 2007, Morgan Stanley $3 billion and Bear Stearns $230 million, yet the executives of these companies were showered with billions of dollars in bonuses. Otherwise, they would refuse to do any work! Which, apparently, would be in shareholders' interest. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley could have done better by their shareholders in 2007 by simply purchasing Treasury bills; a software program designed to make simple conservative investment decisions about market-following mutual funds would have performed better in 2007 than the top management of most investment banking houses. And the software program would not have paid itself billions of dollars in bonuses for screwing up! (TMQ owns no stock in any of the mentioned firms.)

It's one thing when profitable firms shower money on their CEOs and other top brass; often the amounts are indecent, but as long as shareholders come out ahead, the executives have at least some justification for their windfalls. But in the modern milieu of corporate kleptocracy, even when the company does terribly and the CEO makes decisions that blow up in the firm's face, the CEO awards himself hundreds of millions of dollars, anyway. Why is this not seen as white-collar crime?

Last week's buried Post story included this priceless quote: "'To many people, [the bonuses] will be shocking and questionable,' said Jeanne Branthover, managing director of Boyden Global Executive Search. 'People in New York in the world of investment banking will understand it. It's critical that pay is still there or you're going to lose really good people.'" Beyond that executive headhunter firms such as Boyden have a self-interest in running up CEO pay -- this can increase the search firms' headhunting commissions -- consider the reasoning: OMG, we can't lose the really good people who cost our shareholders billions of dollars with dim-witted decisions! The notion that top corporate managers must be paid fantastic amounts because they possess incredible, astonishing expertise often is used to justify CEO pay, even when the managers who claim the incredible, astonishing expertise make foolish decisions. "We'll put billions of dollars of money entrusted to our care into subprime gimmick mortgages backed by no documentation of income; my incredible, astonishing expertise tells me this is totally safe!"

If corporate managers who screwed up received $5.85 an hour, the federal minimum wage, for the year in which they screwed up -- that is, if their wallets were at risk when they perform poorly -- then they might fairly argue for huge bonuses when they perform well. But there is no evidence that the people who made the big investment calls on Wall Street last year (except at Goldman Sachs, which avoided the subprime mess) are any better at what they do than people chosen at random off a Brooklyn street. You bet "people in New York in the world of investment banking" will understand huge executive bonuses paid in the same year as huge losses. What's happening is basically a hustle, intended to enrich the executives while separating the investors from their cash. "People in New York in the world of investment banking" understand that, all right!"

More Election Coverage

2008-01-15T14:09:00.000-08:00

Item #1: Who is Reaganer?
All of the Republican candidates seemed to have given up talking about "issues" or even themselves, and instead have focused on who is more like their hero Ronald Reagan. The way they were talking about him in last Thursday's debate in South Carolina, you'd think Reagan was the second coming of Christ. Everything that Reagan did was brilliant and he is the ideal president that they all aspire to be. I find this to be very disappointing.

I hold the following opinions regarding our nation:
1. Government should strive to treat all of its citizens equally.
2. Government should ensure the prosperity of all of its people.
3. The president should be somewhat knowledgeable and aware of important events.
4. Only people who are not wickedly corrupt should be appointed to serve in high public office
5. The Government should make long-term plans that go beyond the current election cycle in order to safeguard the prosperity of future generations
6. The President should not be viewed and treated as incompetent by his closest advisers.
7. Government and the President should be honest with its people.
8. The Executive Branch should not try to ignore and directly disobey the Constitution (for example, by doing things expressly forbidden by Congress, like training para-military groups in Central America to overthrow democratically elected governments or selling missiles to our nation's #1 enemy)

While many people may not ascribe to these principles, ostensibly this would include all the major candidates for President in the Republican Party, if you do believe in these principles, as I do, you would have to grade Reagan to be one of the WORST, if not THE WORST, President in American history (the current administration exempted). As long as Americans continue to think that Reagan was anything more than a horrible president, future candidates will continue to use Reagan as a historical precedent for their insane policy proscriptions and in fact use Reagan to legitimize those policies.

While I'm at it, let me tackle two more myths related to Reagan:
-Myth #1 Reagan won the Cold War
hehe...I never get tired of this one. In 1991, after leaving the presidency two years before, Reagan finally won the Cold War by charging up a mountain killing Russia's champion warrior, Mikhail Gorbachev, and conquering the last bastion of communist resistance in the Kremlin.
The way people talk about Reagan and the Cold War, you'd think this actually happened. The reality is quite different. Most idiots who claim that Reagan won the Cold War do so based on three theories:
1. Reagan was tough with the communists and they finally caved in because they couldn't take the heat.
2. The election of a fervent anti-communist like Reagan showed that the U.S. was not willing to back down. This lead to the Russians losing morale and giving up.
3. Reagan's massive military buildup could not be met by the Russians, so they folded up rather than compete.

Let's go through these shall we:
First, Reagan did not do anything different with Russia than his predecessors. End of story. It could be said that Reagan used tougher rhetoric, but in reality Reagan was never any harsher with actual Russian officials than say Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, or Carter. All of his predecessors were very tough with communists. More than anything, Reagan used his rhetoric to get elected not to really push around communists, whom he negotiated with regularly.
Second, according to most analysts, the election of Reagan was not seen as very important by most high-ranking communists. The only group that it seems to have affected were those in the military who called for MORE confrontation with the U.S. and demanded MORE influence within the Politburo. Taking into account that the military nearly put an end to Yeltsin's attempt to break apart the Soviet Union, it could be argued that Reagan's bellicose personality nearly entrenched communism for another generation.
Third, it is true that the Soviets backed down from Reagan's ridiculous military buildup. How this lead to the fall of communism is not exactly clear. It still could be said that the buildup did lead to the end of the Cold War, but two things should be kept in mind: one, this was an unforeseen consequence (Reagan had no clue that the Russians were even capable of backing down) and two, the reason the Soviets couldn't compete with the U.S. in military expenditures was that its economy and political support was collapsing. It is somewhat ironic that conservatives that credit Reagan for ending the Cold War neglect to mention that what really ended the Cold War was the inefficiencies and contradictions within communism and a command economy.

Myth #2: Reagan= Tax Cuts, Tax Cuts, Tax Cuts, and more Tax Cuts
There have been many surreal moments during this election cycle. I have two favorites. One was an exchange in a debate between Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee that went like this (paraphrased):
Thompson: I fear that Gov. Huckabee may not be willing to follow the Reagan model. He raised taxes in his state and he has endorsed liberal economic policies.
Huckabee: In Arkansas we cut taxes 63 times. And trust me, there were plenty of people who were not happy about it, but I still cut taxes because I believed that our government was too big.

In other words, 63 tax cuts was not enough.
The other also involved Huckabee, but this time with Romney:
Romney: Now answer me frankly, did you or did you not raise taxes in your state?
Huckabee: I built roads and bridges and schools-
Romney: That's political talk. Are you going to answer the question?
...
Huckabee: When I first took office we did need funds for some improvements, but once those were finished I worked to cut the fat out of the state's government. I cut taxes 63 times in my ten years as governor.

This is the state of the debates between Republicans. Who can cut taxes faster, quicker, more often and craziest deserves to be president. 'What 9.2 trillion dollar debt?'

I won't bother to mention how stupid this is and that supply-side economic theory was discredited 15 years ago and that every reasonable economist thought the Bush tax cuts to be insane and that the Bush tax cuts have been a huge failure, but I will mention Reagan. Reagan raised taxes. Twice. As Governor of California, not only did Reagan raise taxes but he did little to prevent the continued growth of state government. As President, Reagan repealed his own tax cuts once it became obvious that...well.. they were insane, making the country bankrupt, and destroying the economy.

Item #2: Civil Rights Faux Paus

Recently, Hillary Clinton made the following statement: "Dr King’s dream began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done."

There are three things to be said about this:
One, I don't mind politically incorrect statements...unless they are from a politician ...from a party that I'll be voting for.
Two, related to the first, why the hell did she say this? Why is this even relevant. Is she writing a book on the history of the civil rights movement? She's running for president, why do I need to know her particular interpretation of historical events. What was her point? The closest I've come to answering this question is that she's comparing MLK to Obama and pointing out that change only occurs when an experienced leader (like Johnson) is able to work with the system and get things done. All I have to say to that is...Hillary Clinton is no Lyndon Johnson.
Three, she's just wrong. Her interpretation is simplistic and not entirely accurate. The Civil Rights movement was a grassroots movement who's major leaders included Martin Luther King. There would have been no Civil Rights Act without pressure from prominent figures like King and there would not have been a Martin Luther King if not for the individuals who risked their lives and livelihood to stand up for justice on a daily basis for decades. LBJ just didn't wave a magic wand and get civil rights legislation passed. The turning point came when Congress was willing to go ahead with it. This happened first with the grotesque violence that occurred on the March to Selma, which spawned the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the killing of Civil Rights workers in Mississippi, which spawned the Voting Rights Act. In fact, LBJ was UNABLE to get civil rights legislation passed. If anyone should be credited, it should be the racist Southerners whose violence outraged the nation enough to forego their own racist inclinations and allow their representatives to pass some meaningful legislation. I will give LBJ credit for one thing he did all on his own: affirmative action. I should point out that the executive order that established affirmative action took no wrangling or expertise...it just took will to do it.

Item #3: Romney's last stand
Today is the Republican Primary in Michigan. If Romney doesn't win, I will consider his candidacy over. If Romney can't win in Iowa where he spent more campaign money than anyone in that state's history and he can't win in a state that neighbors one that he was governor of and has overlapping local news and he can't win in Michigan where his father was a three time governor, where can he win?

Pathetic

2008-01-05T22:58:00.000-08:00

During last night's debate, Hillary needed to rescue her campaign. Going in, there were two questions: would she go after Obama and how would she change her message. The answer to the first came with the first question of the debate. Hillary went after Obama and accused him of changing his stances on key issues. Obama, who by the way has been the most consistent on his stances, parried these attacks with some stammers along the way. But then came the surprise: Edwards came to Obama's defense! And he did so aggressively. I've watched a lot of debates and I've watched a lot of debates with these candidates, and I don't think I've ever seen a candidate defend another candidate so strongly...and effectively. Clinton was caught completely off-guard, as well she should have. Edwards campaign is basically falling apart. His post-Iowa speeches have gotten even more bitter and angry. His only hope is to emerge as the true-reform candidate. To do that he would need to deal with his biggest competitor, the even more charismatic Obama. Yet, he sided with Obama and began throwing punches at Clinton. Unless Edwards is going for another VP nomination, which I find unlikely since neither he nor whoever wins will want to bring him back after his disappointing effort in the same role 4 years ago. Honestly, I can't think of a reason why Edwards would have done this, unless he just doesn't like Clinton, which is possible.

In any case, Edwards made Clinton look ridiculous and she quickly stopped that line of attack. Next came her new message: she was also the candidate of change, but she had the experience to get it done. I don't know if that message will work...I don't know if it will work in New Hampshire and I don't know if it will work with Democratic voters. All I do know is that it didn't work for me. While the idea of Clinton--that of a seasoned reformer--sounds good and I have no problem with it, unfortunately it has little relation to reality. Hillary has almost no political experience: after graduating with a legal degree, she went to Washington as an aide for the impeachment committee of Richard Nixon. She then married Bill and went to Arkansas where she worked with a children's advocacy group before joining a firm and becoming a legal consultant. During this time, she accumulated a small fortune while her husband furthered his political career, making profits from several investments and even sat on the board of directors at Wal-Mart and TCBY. She continued her triple life as legal representative-child/education advocate-wife of a successful politician until her husband was elected president in 1992, after which she devoted herself full-time to politiking and being a First-Lady. While Clinton may have been the most prominent First-Lady since Edith Galt (wife of Wilson), to pretend that everything her husband did was part of her doing is a bit of an overstatement. Undoubtedly, Hillary's counsel was valuable, but what made Clinton such a powerful politician was his natural charm. In 2000, as her husband left office, Hillary became senator of New York. It is the only political office she has ever held. While Clinton clearly has had more experience than any other candidate around the executive office, she is hardly a seasoned veteran who has successfully produced change. In fact, her most prominent post was as Chairwoman of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, which turned out to be an unmitigated failure. Personally, I don't find Hillary's resume that much more impressive than Obama's who worked as a community organizer (among other things) from 1983-1996, was a state legislator from 1998 to 2004 and has been a senator since 2004. On top of all this, one must consider that Bill Clinton himself was unable to pass all the "change" that he wanted (even with a Democratic Congress and Senate in his first two years). In sum, I don't find the claims that Hillary is a seasoned veteran with a track-record of bringing people together to be all that convincing.

This was not originally meant to be slam on Hillary, but I guess it has somewhat become that. Honestly, I just found her so irritating in last night's debate. While I'm at it, I would also like to go through Hillary's attacks on Obama's stances. Throughout the campaign, Hillary has made two major attacks and seems to always point these out when asked to locate differences between the two candidates. She did so last night. Honestly, I find her characterization of those differences insulting...insulting to my intelligence. The first one relates to social security. To see a full discussion of why social security is in no danger, see my diatribe about it here. One of the things I mention is that the easiest way to save it would be to raise the ceiling upon which the payroll tax applies to. I don't want to repeat myself, but suffice it to say, it is a very fair way to handle the problem, and only a crooked tycoon would find it unfair. It was on this issue that Hillary accused Obama of trying to raise taxes. Just so it's clear, that was a disingenuous and dishonest attack straight out of the tactical handbook of the "vast Right-Wing conspiracy." The second item relates to Health Care. Let me take a quote from another of my diatribes on healthcare: "Because his plan is not compulsory, strictly speaking, Obama's plan is not a true universal health insurance coverage plan. This is more a technicality more than anything else. Look for all the other candidates to exploit this in debates." How perceptive and prophetic of me. There is a minuscule, completely meaningless part of Obama's plan that strictly speaking does not require everyone to get health care. In reality, if it turns out that this is a big problem, it could easily be changed. All it does is give people some flexibility in their health care choices at the cost of preventing the plan from being called a "universal" plan. To harp on this intricacy is also disingenuous. I just expect more intellectual responsibility from my candidates.

No Surprise: Republican Campaigns Getting Dirty

2008-01-05T15:26:00.000-08:00

Despite not really having any good candidates, the Republican party is trying to hurt itself further through random acts of cannibalism. Vicious mudslinging has intensified in the last week and will probably heighten as the stakes become higher and candidates have less to lose.

For whatever reason, almost all the Machiavellian cynicism is centered around Mitt Romney: both as a victim and as a perpetrator. Romney has suffered from underhand tricks throughout the campaign as other candidates have tried to scare off "Evangelicals" by accenting his Mormonism. Although it's not clear if Huckabee is sending signals to his base or if he is just that stupid, but in several instances during debates and stump speeches, Huckabee has brought up Mormonism when it was completely irrelevant. Famously, he questioned if Mormons believed that Jesus was the brother of Satan, but throughout debates, with a wink and a nod, he has also focused on his religious beliefs (he is a former Baptist Pastor) with the assumption that some of the candidates beliefs (namely Romney and Giulianni) are quite different. Additionally, many religious leaders that have given their support to Huckabee and other Baptists, have given speeches that focus on the differences between Mormonism and mainstream Christianity, often referring to it as a "cult." Speaking of Giulianni, who has also been the victim of campaigns that have attacked his stance on abortion, there is some evidence that he is behind some of the more unusual underhanded tactics, such as a false Christmas Card sent to South Carolina Republicans, wishing a "Happy Holiday" (rather than a "Merry Christmas") and includes controversial passages from the Book of Mormon and reports to be supported by the "Boston Massachusetts Temple." There have also been reports of phone calls to Iowa voters on the night before the Caucus that included praise of John McCain and some disparaging remarks towards Romney and Mormonism.

But, Romney is no innocent victim. In Iowa, Romney flooded the airwaves with political ads, most of which were negative and most of which were directed towards Huckabee. He is repeating his failed strategy in New Hampshire with John McCain. In South Carolina, Romney has employed the support of nefarious political consultant, Warren Tompkins. Tompkins, a former trickmeister for another dirty trick artist, Lee Atwater (the famous campaign organizer for George H.W. Bush who created the Willie Horton campaign, one of the most egregious examples of race-baiting in the last 25 years), was linked to shenanigans in South Carolina in 2000 where anonymous phone calls were made to Republican voters that claimed that McCain had an illegitimate black child (McCain had adopted a son from Bangledash). Tompkins was caught red-handed in September for setting up a ridiculous anti-Thompson blog called Phony Fred that featured the candidate in different costumes. As the race heads towards the South expect more dirty maneuvering.

Remember, for every dirty trick discovered, there's probably 10 more vicious ones that will never be known publicly. I'm sort of glad that Republicans have to resort to such dirty tactics...they're desperate.

Iowa Diatribes

2008-01-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

I think recent events deserve some diatribing...let's go through some:

Item #1: The Obama Surge
Only 3 months ago, Hillary Clinton had pretty much wrapped up the Democratic nomination. So, what just happened? Clinton essentially had four things going against her:
1. Too far ahead too early
2. Trying to wrap up the primaries by exposure as a national candidate
3. An overrated self-sense of charisma
4. Peculiarities of the Iowa caucuses

Quite frankly, Hillary peaked too early. It's the same mistake that Dean made 4 years ago. By becoming THE candidate in October, Clinton left herself open to constant attacks for 3 months. These eventually brought her down and made her look vulnerable.

Hillary expected that her high poll numbers across the country would give her the automatic support from those essential early states, like Iowa. This was a serious blunder, because recent elections and the crunch of this primary schedule meant that early momentum was essential, especially in Iowa. Kerry and Edwards made their campaigns in Iowa 4 years ago. This year, Edwards and Obama focuses almost all of their resources in Iowa. Clinton did not meet the challenge and the tactical error could cost her the election.

Hillary, by most accounts, was exceptional in the like 300 debates the Democrats had leading up to yesterday. She, the media, and her campaign staff assumed that these skills would translate to stumping. Unfortunately, they all forgot that she has almost no grassroots political experience beyond campaigning alongside her husband. Iowa is a door-to-door type campaign. Hillary simply did not appear likeable and personable in Iowa's diners, cafes, and fairs.

The Iowa caucus is very unusual (more on that later), but one of its peculiarities is that to get votes within a caucus a candidate must get around 15% of the voters. If they do not, those voters disperse and head to other candidates. Since people voting for candidates other than Hillary were already choosing an anti-Hillary/frontrunner candidate, they were more likely to join the Edwards and Obama groups. Perhaps if a straight vote were given Hillary might have won or at least come in second as there would be more splitting of the vote. As it was, Biden, Kucinich, and Dodd had a combined one caucus vote for them (basically 0%.) If those voters were not allowed to move to other candidates, each of these candidates would probably have gotten 2-3%.

On all these issues, Obama had the advantage. He became the consensus alternative choice, he focused his energy in Iowa since he began campaigning (he only opened a California branch a couple months ago, for goodness sake), he was more likeable on a personal basis where he was given more than 30 seconds to explain his positions, and he benefited from the Iowa caucus system.

Item #2: Iowa?
To the outsider it may seem odd that Iowa, a state with a population of 3 million (1/30th of California) that is 95% white, has garnered so much attention. Those in the know will recognize that Iowa is only important because it is first. The next question is why does Iowa deserve to be first?

The quick answer is that it doesn't. Iowa by almost any measure is not representative of the nation at large. It unfairly benefits from millions of dollars being spent in the state every 4 years by politicians and media outlets. And it gives a small minority (despite everything only about 1/10 of eligible voters in Iowa actually showed up to caucus) incredible power. It also has a voting system that is as quaint as it is ridiculous: voters go to someone's house at exactly 7:00, get into groups, argue around a dinner table, and finally the entire caucus chooses one candidate. There is no anonymity, voters are encouraged to switch sides by their neighbors who just made them that delicious fruitcake for Christmas, and the chief activity of each candidate's campaign staff on this day is baking cookies.

Yet, I think it is fantastic. I just love the Iowa caucuses. Iowa forces the candidates to meet real people. Aside from the mega-weekend leading up to New Hamphire begun this morning, this will be the only time that candidates will be going to door to door, shaking hands at Denny's, or holding rallies in a family room. And I must say, Iowans, or at least those that vote, take it very seriously. It may sound incredible, but it is not uncommon or really difficult for a voter to meet EVERY candidate. Iowans do for America what realistically cannot be done after New Hampshire: they figure out if candidates are 'real.' They have real conservations with them. They get to see them outside of the glamor of tv commercials and they force the candidates to remember who they are serving and how politicians are supposed to get people's vote.

My only complaint with Iowa is that every serious candidate must endorse ethanol, despite the fact that it uses more petroleum than it saves simply because the state is the leading producer of corn in the nation.

Item #3: Hucka-who?

I've long thought that a social conservative with an economically populist message would have their way paved to the Whitehouse...if he/she were a Democrat. Unfortunately, Huckabee is in the wrong party. He's also, in my estimation, not a serious candidate. Don't get me wrong, what Huckabee did in Iowa was astonishing: the least funded Republican in the field just dominated the primary despite promising to make Steve Colbert his VP (not seriously, I assume), planning to throw out the tax system with the bath water, defending creationism, comparing Rowe vs. Wade to the holocaust, being a member of a rock band called "Capitol Offense," asking Mitt Romney in a debate if Mormons believed Jesus was the brother of Satan, and a hare-brained immigration reform scheme wherein immigrants would be required to return to the country they originated from for one day.
Even Huckabee must realize that he has little hope of competing nationally. Huckabee's economic policies will alienate the libertarian wing of the party that is already uncomfortable with his social conservatism. Huckabee won Iowa because of the support of evangelicals. This support will carry him through the South and parts of the Midwest, but without attracting swing voters that Republicans are going to need in droves, most will give up on him as they realize he has too much baggage.

Item #4: The Fair Tax
I'm amazed that the media hasn't talked about this more, but Huckabee has a clear plan to reform the tax system. It is not a new idea, but certainly is a radical one. Quite honestly, I don't know how I feel about it yet. All I can say is that it has long been the dream system for economists who specialize in the tax system.
For a more thorough description of the plan, I would recommend viewing this surprisingly good summary from wikipedia. Basically, the plan would eliminate income taxes (and with it the IRS), and just have people pay sales taxes (of about 25%). To make the tax progressive (since poorer people spend a higher percentage of their income on necessity consumption), a tax rebate would be given to poor families based on family size. I don't know if this is a good idea, but it is a different idea. It would encourage saving and investment, get rid of all the expenditures associated with the IRS, and bring in offshore accounts (which some estimates say are as high as $11 trillion.)

Obama will have my vote

2008-01-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

This site and all its affiliates officially endorse Obama for the Democratic Nomination and the presidency.

Finally,...

2007-12-20T22:36:00.000-08:00

The New York Times finally opened up its editorial section (the only section that matters) to their free internet website. Translation: You'll see a lot more articles from Paul Krugman on this blog.

Here's his latest about the housing crash debacle. As Krugman points out, Greenspan, who oversaw unregulated lending and then cashed in by writing one of the most inane books in history, was (and is) a super-ultra-crazy-wacko libertarian conservative in the mold of his messiah, an equally insane writer by the name of Ayn Rand. Greenspan was lucky to oversee the late 90s economic boom, but unfortunately he will not be remembered for legitimating Bush's crippling tax cuts, allowing--and ENCOURAGING--the debt to explode, and setting up the conditions for a housing collapse...enjoy

Blindly Into the Bubble

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 21, 2007

When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision as follows: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

There was a definite Hirohito feel to the explanation Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave this week for the Fed’s locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone decision to modestly strengthen regulation of the mortgage industry: “Market discipline has in some cases broken down, and the incentives to follow prudent lending procedures have, at times, eroded.”

That’s quite an understatement. In fact, the explosion of “innovative” home lending that took place in the middle years of this decade was an unmitigated disaster.

But maybe Mr. Bernanke was afraid to be blunt about just how badly things went wrong. After all, straight talk would have amounted to a direct rebuke of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, who ignored pleas to lock the barn door while the horse was still inside — that is, to regulate lending while it was booming, rather than after it had already collapsed.

I use the words “unmitigated disaster” advisedly.

Apologists for the mortgage industry claim, as Mr. Greenspan does in his new book, that “the benefits of broadened home ownership” justified the risks of unregulated lending.

But homeownership didn’t broaden. The great bulk of dubious subprime lending took place from 2004 to 2006 — yet homeownership rates are already back down to mid-2003 levels. With millions more foreclosures likely, it’s a good bet that homeownership will be lower at the Bush administration’s end than it was at the start.

Meanwhile, during the bubble years, the mortgage industry lured millions of people into borrowing more than they could afford, and simultaneously duped investors into investing vast sums in risky assets wrongly labeled AAA. Reasonable estimates suggest that more than 10 million American families will end up owing more than their homes are worth, and investors will suffer $400 billion or more in losses.

So where were the regulators as one of the greatest financial disasters since the Great Depression unfolded? They were blinded by ideology.

“Fed shrugged as subprime crisis spread,” was the headline on a New York Times report on the failure of regulators to regulate. This may have been a discreet dig at Mr. Greenspan’s history as a disciple of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism known for her novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending — like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood — just doesn’t happen.

But Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 — just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild — to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw.

Also in attendance were representatives of financial industry trade associations, which had been lobbying for deregulation. As far as I can tell from press reports, there were no representatives of consumer interests on the scene.

Two months after that event the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the tree-shears-wielding agencies, moved to exempt national banks from state regulations that protect consumers against predatory lending. If, say, New York State wanted to protect its own residents — well, sorry, that wasn’t allowed.

Of course, now that it has all gone bad, people with ties to the financial industry are rethinking their belief in the perfection of free markets. Mr. Greenspan has come out in favor of, yes, a government bailout. “Cash is available,” he says — meaning taxpayer money — “and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”

Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs.

The Slow Demise of Professional Sports

2007-12-14T18:58:00.000-08:00

Of course, the title is an exaggeration, but it gets the point across. Professional sports is and has been plagued for some time by a glaring structural problem that will probably not lead to its demise, but has and will taint athletics and I would argue become a major politico-economic problem that must be dealt with. What's the problem? MONEY. In particular, outrageous salaries to players.

I am a lifelong fan of professional sports, some would say a near fanatic especially for football and soccer. I love to pull for my teams and follow every detail with near obsession. But for as long as I fully understood it, I have been frustrated with the ridiculous salaries that professional athletes receive for less than half a year of "work" (if you can call playing a game work). Before I get to ways to change it, let me first go through why professional athletes do deserve high salaries.When I say high, I mean at most maybe 1-2 million dollars a year. That is about 20-40 times a normal salary.

Reason#1: Athletes can really only have a "career" in professional sports for at most 15 years, but more likely about 8-10 years. I'm perfectly comfortable allowing players to live their lives in leisure after they finish their careers (I feel this way because I realize that becoming a professional sports player usually means sacrificing the development of other marketable skills, despite what college athletic programs claim. It would be unfair to ask these athletes to work menial jobs the rest of their lives, if for no other reason than they'll be hounded by every janitor they're working with to sign autographs). Since professional athletes basically retire by age 32, they'll need enough income while they're working to cover expenses for the rest of their lives. To do that, they need pretty high salaries.

Reason #2: Jobs in the public eye demand higher salaries. The difference between an amateur olympic athlete and a professional athlete is that athletes in professional sports have to deal with ongoing public pressure and exposure. Normally, such occupations demand high salaries. Of course, there are plenty of athletes that face ongoing public pressure and don't get paid at all (Collegiate athletes, for example. These athletes do get paid in another way, though: scholarships to prestigious universities. Considering how profitable college sports are, particularly men's basketball and football, these players are actually grossly underpaid. Many of them are getting very poor educations. But that's all another diatribe...) In any case, high profile occupations generally command high salaries, so it is somewhat reasonable for players to ask for huge salaries, despite the fact they're only playing a game.

Reason #3: Professional athletes are entertainers. When you put their salaries up next to other entertainers, say in music or film, their salaries are actually relatively low.

Reason #4: Sports generate tons and tons of money. Since the players are the ones playing the game, don't they deserve to reap the benefits of their efforts? Who else deserves the money? The owners? The players drive the sports and their rare skills are what make watching them entertaining.

The above are the reasons that professional athletes deserve much higher than average salaries despite only playing about half of the year in 2-3 hour spurts. Yet, they do not deserve, nor should they receive, salaries in the range of tens of millions of dollars. After all, they are just playing a game and they are just serving a fan base. They contribute nothing particularly valuable to society (except for occasionally being good role models, which, by the way, they are not paid for being) and they are an elite few who have been given talent far beyond anyone else. No matter how hard I worked, I could never become a professional athlete. By random, these professional athletes have taken advantage of their God-given talents, which admittedly took a lot of work on their part, and are receiving ridiculous salaries because of their freak athleticism. How fast a WR can run his 40 or the wingspan of a small forward will have no corresponding change in our GDP or our standard of living. Ironically, a serious cutback in salaries will have negligible impact on how interested athletes are in joining professional sports teams. Professional sports will have plenty of applicants regardless of salary (in economics we call this an inelastic labor market). Cutting back on player salaries will not change little Johnny's boyhood dream to play for the Dodgers. Raising salaries will not attract any new entries into the sport. The continued growth of these salaries is an economic injustice.

So, how should we fix the problem. I have an easy solution. In fact it's so easy, there is no way it will ever happen. My solution calls for 2 steps:

Step 1: Packerfy all Franchise sports teams. In case you weren't aware, the Green Bay Packers are the only team in American sports that is publicly owned. The Packers are not owned by a person, but rather by the city of Green Bay. Management issues are dealt with through an advisory council, which, by the way, is the way about 90% of American sports teams are run. The big difference is that some jackass named Cuban, Steinbrenner, or Modell doesn't earn a profit on the team. All "profit" is reinvested in the team. Doing this would essentially Europeanize American Sports. This has some advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that, like I said, some jackass isn't earning a profit on your outrageously priced seats and there is no way the team could pack up and leave. The disadvantage is that there would be no flexibility in where teams are located. For example, Los Angeles, as it turns out, is a surprisingly lousy place to be a football team. If all teams were public, the Los Angeles Rams, as an example, who would have been owned by a Greater Los Angeles District would remain there forever. But, in a way that I believe offsets any negatives to making the change, by Packerfying American sports, there would no longer be the tension between awarding profits to owners vs. players. This would also eliminate price gouging as the team would be serving whom they're supposed to be serving: the fans. An alarming trend in American sports is to outprice about 85% of the population by charging ridiculous fees by building smaller, grander stadiums with absurd numbers of luxury boxes. This is the most profitable way to run a team. If an owner is not accountable to the fans, they have no reason to do otherwise. Packerfying would also eliminate ruthless bargaining by sports team owners with city officials. 'If they won't build us the stadium we want to play 8 games a year in, we'll just leave.' And they can. Economically they should. Of course, losing a sports team can cost a city tens of millions of dollars a year, not to mention public outrage. It's such an enormous incentive, that cities will actually fork over the money to build such ridiculous stadiums.

Step #2: Of course, Europeanizing will only be half of a solution. After all, European soccer players make just as much money as American football players. But, Europeanizing will allow the second step because it will no longer favor the wildcat owner over the hard-working players: A Drastic and Heavy salary cap. A salary cap that would mean that top players make at the very most 3 million dollars a year, but more like 1-2 million dollars a year for most elite players. See, the reason that salaries have gotten so high is that teams understand that winning sells tickets. Since a couple of players can be the difference between a championship and being...the 49ers, owners are willing to pay those salaries because there is competition to do so and their team can still be profitable. If a salary that severely cut a team's payroll were enforced, and the team was Packerized, that money could be saved and reinvested, or even better...invested into the community. Since playing professional sports is so wage inelastic, one could set salaries at just about any amount and still attract sufficient (probably the same number of) applicants. As I mentioned earlier, professional athletes still should get paid a lot, but not as much as they're getting.

Placing this salary cap and Packerizing American Sports would have the following effects:
1. More investment in fan services
2. cheaper tickets
3. Less gross inequalities in our society
4. more connection between sports players and fans (which would be better for the game)
5. Less idealization of sports players. As is, professional athletics is unfortunately an inner-city African-American kid's perceived best shot at improving his lot in life (Why study in school when you could be practicing your free throws?)
6. An end to that uncomfortable situation where that creepy old guy lifts the Lombardi trophy and all your favorite players and coaches hail him for doing such a great job of making millions off of them.
7. No more blackmailing of cities by owners looking for bigger stadiums
8. More investment in the community through taxes or otherwise.
9. Better run teams (Al Davis has no idea what he's doing. He would have been voted out decades ago.)
10. A stop in the Bourgeiosefication of stadiums. Luxury Boxes could be filled with real fans, not hip yuppies looking for a seasoned Warriors game to go with their Brie and Merlot.

Honestly, sports is just one area where intense economic injustices are taking place. To truly tackle this problem and others like it, we must first rethink how he distribute wealth in our society and alter it accordingly. No matter how much A-Rod makes this year, the insanity of CEO salaries is far more egregious. Perhaps some of the strategies used to fix sports could be used to fix our society at large...I'll save that for another diatribe.

CIA sets record for worst excuse ever...

2007-12-08T11:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the Central Intelligence Agency broke the world record for worst excuse ever recorded when it claimed that it had destroyed interrogation tapes in 2005 to protect them from being leaked. They claimed they feared that keeping the tapes would result in the interrogators being vulnerable to attacks from Al Quada. The record breaking performance, which suprassed then 6 year-old Billy Johnson's 1913 claim that his dog ate his homework, ignored several obvious problems with the excuse that would have been obvious to...well a 6 year old. Among them, according to local grade schooler, Krystal Smith, was that "couldn't the CIA have destroyed all but one tape and kept that one in a safe or something...I mean you're telling me that the CIA doesn't think it can hold such a basic secret?," and "It is obvious that the tapes were destroyed because the interrogators were using illegal torture methods, as has been widely reported. There is absolutely no plausible reason to legally destroy those tapes" This is all not to mention, 3 year-old Thomas Somoza's point, "doesn't Al Quada have like a million people already on its list. It's not like the one thing stopping them from killing people is video evidence."

An outstanding performance.

From a paper I wrote in one of my classes...

2007-11-24T16:48:00.000-08:00

As pretentious as possible:

"

My rule of thumb is to not hate the immigrant, but to criticize the illegal immigration. Although I completely agree with the thrust of all the readings: that immigrants illegal or otherwise make important contributions to our society, are just as likely to be great people, and are not the chief obstacle to economic prosperity, illegal immigration does have its down side. Employers often use illegals to break unions and because illegals are afraid of being caught they rarely report acts of exploitation. Since the importation of Chinese workers in the mid-19^th century, employers have used exploited immigrants to drive down wages. The idea that “Mexicans are doing work that Americans just won't do,” is a myth. A basic understanding of economics will tell you that this is nonsense. Americans have all kinds of crappy jobs. The reason that some jobs (migrant agricultural labor, construction, and small business service work--like restaurants--especially) are dominated by illegal immigrants is not because they are intrinsically horrible jobs. They are only horrible because, for the amount of work, they pay very little. They pay little mostly because, yes this is a circle, they have so many illegal immigrants employed in those sectors. If wages for these jobs were raised, "Americans" would be willing to do them. So, the question is, why are so many illegals in these sectors? The answer is quite simple: these sectors are almost impossible to regulate and where they could be regulated, there hasn't been much pressure to do so because labor unions in these sectors are weak (because it is so easy to find "strikebreakers," unions have no clout). Thus, despite what news anchors who don't know what they're talking about say, if we were to cut off immigration completely, we could still find people to do all sorts of dirty work. The only difference would be that wages would rise to attract more people into these sectors.

Of course, there are several solutions to these problems, ranging from complete open borders to complete closed borders. Actually, I think these are both band-aid solutions. A real answer must be larger: the real problem here is poverty and outrageous wealth inequality. Immigrants will come to this wealthier country because they are so much poorer in their own country. There are several ways to combat poverty, but I’ll suggest two that would have immediate and dramatic impact and could be done by American alone:

Eliminate hunger: Hunger is not a production problem, it is a economic distribution problem. According to the United Nations Development Program, it would take about $13 billion dollars to feed all of the hungry people in the world (about 850 million people). Just to make some comparisons: the United States spends about $41 billion on pet food every year and the War in Iraq costs about $12 billion every month and a half. Ted Turner alone has offered $8 billion to this cause if an organization can solve the distribution issues and come up with the remaining $5 billion dollars.

Enact a Worker’s Bill of Rights: If the United States declared that it would not trade with anyone who did not provide its workers with basic rights( minimum wage, working conditions, collective bargaining, etc.), it would immediately halt the exploitative practices of multinational corporations across the globe. Of course, there would be some hardships: a decline in production and investment in poorer countries, more expensive consumer goods here, for example. Yet, the benefits would be far better: eventually, developing economies would be able to produce for themselves and cannibalize their wealth rather than shipping it out to Wal-Mart. This is not to mention the benefits of no longer having workers exploited across the world. In this way, the benefits of trade could be enjoyed by everyone, not just the wealthy corporations.

Excuse the digression. Regardless of our failure to follow through on basic common sense proposals, as a teacher (especially in the Bay Area) I will be interacting with immigrants, illegal and legal, on a daily basis. I look forward to this. My father was an immigrant and my mother was the daughter of an immigrant whose father was from Spain and mother was from Mexico. I have a lot of respect for immigrants and attending an inner-city school in San Jose exposed me to the hardships of immigrants from Mexico, in particular. Unfortunately, too much of our politics (especially in this state) center around paranoid xenophobia disguised as an attempt to institute law and order. Immigrants have amazing stories, captivating experiences, and I would be thrilled to have as many of them as possible in my classroom. My task should be to make them feel safe, secure, part of a community, and, if they are comfortable doing so, allow them to bring their experiences into the classroom."

Another kudos to TMQ

2007-11-13T23:01:00.000-08:00

From this week's TMQ, Greg Easterbrook:

"Those Hollywood Searchlights Around Gore's Home Sure Eat Power: Gore wasn't the first quack to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and history suggests he will not be the last. Gore spent eight years in the White House, and in that time took no meaningful action regarding greenhouse gases. The Clinton-Gore administration did not raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks or propose domestic carbon trading. Though Clinton and Gore made a great show of praising the Kyoto Protocol, they refused even to submit the treaty to the Senate for consideration, let alone push for ratification. During his 2000 run for the presidency, Gore said little about climate change or binding global-warming reforms. In the White House and during his presidential campaign, Gore advocated no consequential action regarding greenhouse gases; then, there was a political cost attached. Once Gore was out of power and global-warming proposals no longer carried a political cost -- indeed, could be used for self-promotion -- suddenly Gore discovered his intense desire to demand that other leaders do what he had not! It is a triumph of postmodernism that Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for no specific accomplishment other than making a movie of self-praise. Gore caused no peace nor led any reconciliation of belligerent parties nor performed any service to the dispossessed, the achievements the Peace Prize was created to honor. All Gore did was promote himself from Hollywood, and for this, he gets a Nobel. Very postmodern.

An annoying complication of Gore's Nobel is that few realize the award was given jointly to him and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization well worthy of distinction. The IPCC is a group of scientists who have spent two decades studying climate change in obscurity, and in many cases without pay. The IPCC's efforts have been selfless, motivated only by concern for society. Had the Nobel Peace Prize gone solely to the IPCC, it would have been a great day.

An astonishing measure of how out-of-touch the Norwegian Nobel Committee seems is that it gave a prize to Gore for hectoring others about energy consumption in the same year it was revealed that Gore, at his home, uses 20 times the national power average. Gore's extraordinary power waste equates to about 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gases annually, or about 20 Hummer Years worth of global warming pollution. (A Hummer Year, TMQ's metric of environmental hypocrisy, is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in a typical year of driving a Hummer.) When his utility bill made the news -- though apparently not in Oslo -- Gore responded by saying he buys carbon offsets. That takes you back to the offset problem: All offsets do is prevent greenhouse gas accumulation from increasing. If you really believe there will be a global calamity unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced 80 percent, as Gore told the Live Earth crowd, you would buy offsets and cut your own energy use. Instead, Gore flies around in fossil-fuel-intensive jet aircraft telling others: Do as I say, not as I do!

After news of Gore's personal energy consumption broke, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider told The Associated Press the utility bill was justified because "Al and Tipper both work out of their home." This raises the question -- what kind of work are they doing? Perhaps reanimating Frankenstein; in Frankenstein movies, there is always a lot of electricity crackling wastefully about. Here are other possible reasons the Gores' home requires so much energy:

• Gore is building a time machine to return to Palm Beach, Fla., in October 2000.

• The former vice president is doing everything he personally can to cause global warming, so he can claim is predictions came true.

• Gore is growing marijuana in his basement. [Note from the corporate legal department: This is strictly a joke, ESPN is not accusing Al Gore of growing marijuana. We stand by our allegation that he is a sinister kingpin of international rare-bird smuggling.]

• Members of Gore's species require high power levels to maintain human form.

• Al and Tipper don't just leave the lights on when they make out, they leave the lights on all over the house."

Look at these smug jackasses

2007-10-21T20:04:00.001-07:00

...Start the goose-stepping...

2007-10-04T19:11:00.001-07:00

'Honk for peace' case tests limits on free speech

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

When one of Deborah Mayer's elementary school students asked her on the eve of the Iraq war whether she would ever take part in a peace march, the veteran teacher recalls answering, "I honk for peace."

Soon afterward, Mayer lost her job and her home in Indiana. She was out of work for nearly three years. And when she complained to federal courts that her free-speech rights had been violated, the courts replied, essentially, that as a public school teacher she didn't have any.

As a federal appeals court in Chicago put it in January, a teacher's speech is "the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary." The Bloomington, Ind., school district had just as much right to fire Mayer, the court said, as it would have if she were a creationist who refused to teach evolution.

The ruling was legally significant. Eight months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in a case involving the Los Angeles district attorney's office that government employees were not protected by the First Amendment when they faced discipline for speaking at work about controversies related to their jobs. The Chicago appeals court was the first to apply the same rationale to the classroom, an issue that the Supreme Court expressly left unresolved.

But legal analysts said the Mayer ruling was probably less important as a precedent than as a stark reminder that the law provides little protection for schoolteachers who express their beliefs.

As far as the courts are concerned, "public education is inherently a situation where the government is the speaker, and ... its employees are the mouthpieces of the government," said Vikram Amar, a professor at UC's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Whatever academic freedom exists for college teachers is "much, much less" in public schools, he said.

A recent case from a Los Angeles charter school offers more evidence of the limits teachers face in choosing curricula or seeking redress of grievances. The school's administrators forbade seventh-graders from reading aloud at a February assembly the award-winning poem "A Wreath for Emmett Till," about a black teenager beaten to death by white men in 1955.

In an online guide to teaching the poem in grades seven and up, publisher Houghton Mifflin recommends telling students that it will be disturbing; administrators said they feared it would be too much for the kindergartners in the audience and then explained that Till's alleged whistle at a white woman was inappropriate. When social studies teacher Marisol Alba and a colleague signed letters of protest written by students at the largely African American school, both teachers were fired.

The Mayer ruling was disappointing but not surprising, said Michael Simpson, assistant general counsel of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. For the last decade, he said, federal courts "have not been receptive to arguments that teachers, both K-12 and higher education, have free-speech rights in the classroom."

That's unacceptable, said Mayer, 57, who now teaches seventh-graders in Haines City, Fla. She said she's scraped up enough money, by selling her car, to appeal her case to the Supreme Court, though she doubts the justices will review it.

"If a teacher can be fired for saying those four little words -- 'I honk for peace' -- who's going to want to teach?" she asked. "They're taking away free speech at school. ... You might just as well get a big television and set it in front of the children and have them watch, (using) the curriculum the school board has."

On the other hand, said Francisco Negrón, lawyer for the National School Boards Association, if teachers were free to express their viewpoints in class, school boards would be less able to do their job of determining the curriculum and complying with government demands for accountability.

"Teachers bring their creativity, their energy, their skill in teaching the curriculum, but ... a teacher in K-12 is really not at liberty to design a curriculum," said Negrón, who filed arguments with the court in Mayer's case supporting the Bloomington school district. "That's the function of the school board."

The incident occurred in January 2003, when Mayer was teaching a class of fourth- through sixth-graders at Clear Creek Elementary School. As Mayer recalled it later, the question about peace marches arose during a discussion of an article in the children's edition of Time magazine, part of the school-approved curriculum, about protests against U.S. preparations for war in Iraq.

When the student asked the question about taking part in demonstrations, Mayer said, she replied that there were peace marches in Bloomington, that she blew her horn whenever she saw a "Honk for Peace" sign, and that people should seek peaceful solutions before going to war.

A student complained to her father, who complained to the principal, who canceled the school's annual "Peace Month" observance and told Mayer never to discuss the war or her political views in class.

Mayer, who had been hired after the semester started and had received a good job evaluation before the incident, was dismissed at the end of the school year. The school said it was for poor performance, but the appeals court assumed that she had been fired for her comments and said the school had acted legally.

"Teachers hire out their own speech and must provide the service for which employers are willing to pay," a three-judge panel of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Jan. 24. "The Constitution does not entitle teachers to present personal views to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials."

Mayer, the court said, was told by her bosses that she could teach about the war "as long as she kept her opinions to herself." Like the Los Angeles district attorney's employee whose demotion led to the Supreme Court's 2006 ruling, the appellate panel said, Mayer had no constitutional right to say anything on the job that conflicted with her employer's policy.

Mayer's lawyer asked for a rehearing, saying the evidence was clear that the school had no such policy when Mayer answered the student's question. The court denied reconsideration in March without comment.

Mayer, who had taught for more than 20 years, couldn't afford to keep her Indiana home after being fired and left the state. She got another teaching job in Florida, but lost it after disclosing her previous dismissal, and didn't get another position until last fall.

As all parties to Mayer's case recognize, her statements would have been constitutionally protected and beyond the government's power to suppress if she had been speaking on a street corner or at a public hearing.

But in the classroom, as in the workplace, courts have upheld limits on speech. In both settings, past rulings have taken into account the institution's need to function efficiently and keep order, and the rights of co-workers and students not to be subjected to unwanted diatribes.

In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld a high school student's right to wear a black armband as a silent protest against the Vietnam War and barred schools from stifling student expression unless it was disruptive or interfered with education. The court retreated from that standard somewhat in a 1988 ruling upholding censorship of student newspapers, and will revisit the issue in a pending case involving an Alaskan student who was suspended for unfurling a banner outside the school grounds that read, "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

The Supreme Court has never ruled on teachers' free speech. In lower courts, teachers have won cases by showing they were punished for violating policies that school officials never explained to them beforehand or invented after the fact. A federal appeals court in 2001 ruled in favor of a fifth-grade teacher in Kentucky who was fired for bringing actor Woody Harrelson to her class to discuss the benefits of industrial hemp, an appearance that school officials had approved.

But teachers who were on notice of school policies they transgressed have usually lost their cases. In one Bay Area case, in August 2005, a federal judge in San Jose rejected arguments by Cupertino elementary school teacher Stephen Williams that his principal had violated his freedom of speech by prohibiting him from using outside religious materials in history lessons.

Unless the Supreme Court takes up Mayer's case, its legal effect is limited to federal courts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, the three states in the Seventh Circuit. But Amar, the Hastings law professor, and others said the ruling could be influential elsewhere because there are few appellate decisions on the issue, and because the author, Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, is a prominent conservative jurist.

"Very few schools are going to be that harsh in muzzling or silencing their teachers," but the ruling indicates they would be free to do so, Amar said.

Simpson, the National Education Association's lawyer, said the ruling, though within the legal mainstream, was bad for education because teachers are not "hired to read a script." The case might interest the Supreme Court, and the NEA will probably file a brief in support of Mayer's appeal should the justices take the case, he said.

Beverly Tucker, chief counsel of the NEA-affiliated California Teachers Association, said she doubts that federal courts in California would take as conservative a position as the court in Mayer's case. But she expects school districts to cite the ruling in the next case that arises.

"If I were a public school teacher, I would live in fear that some innocuous remark made in the classroom in response to a question from a pupil would lead to me being terminated" under such a ruling, Tucker said.

As for Mayer, she isn't sure what rankles her most -- the impact on her life, the stigma of being branded a rogue teacher, or the court's assertion that a teacher's speech is a commodity purchased by the government.

"My free speech," she said, "is not for sale at any price."

He Vetoed That?

2007-10-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

After not vetoing a single bill for 6 years as president, Bush has had a string of vetoes since the Democrats took both houses. Today, Bush vetoed a bill that would CONTINUE health care coverage to uninsured children. Now, there will be a "donut" of health care coverage for children: impoverished children are entitled to healthcare through Medicaid and those with parents lucky enough will be covered by their parents' HMO. Without the extension of the program called SCHIP, uninsured families with children will no longer receive any assistance in giving their children basic health coverage.

How very conservative of you, Mr. Bush.

Might as well move to Canada...

2007-09-23T16:03:00.001-07:00

The Canadian dollar, once the punching bag of several currency related jokes, is poised to become more valuable than our own American dollar. On Friday, the exchange rate reached .9991, meaning that it took .9991 American dollars to buy one Canadian dollars. Most assume that by the end of Monday, the Canadians will finally pass us.

We should all be ashamed...a perfect storm of overimportation of consumer goods from around the world, underexportation resulting from the debilitation of American manufacturing, our spiraling debt, and the Fed's decision to drop interest rates in the face of a housing price collapse has resulted in the plummeting of the American dollar.

Easterbrook Strikes Again!

2007-09-18T22:23:00.001-07:00

Why am I finding great political articles on ESPN's webpage?

From TMQ:

"Oh Ye of Little MPG: Recently, the CEOs of Chrysler, Ford and General Motors lunched with Senate leaders, telling them the one-third vehicle mileage increase proposed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- you heard that right, Bush and Obama have offered nearly identical fuel-efficiency plans -- was impossible. Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, said at a news conference after the lunch that a one-third mileage improvement "doesn't look achievable." This is exactly the kind of excuse-making that allowed Honda and Toyota to wrap their hands around the Big Three's necks in the first place! As the UAW-Detroit contracts talks heat up, the relationship between mpg and saving Chrysler, Ford and General Motors bears exploring.

The National Academy of Sciences said in 2002 that a one-third improvement in mpg is practical using existing technology, and without sacrifice of safety or passenger comfort. Now, the U.S. automakers claim a one-third improvement can't be done. It's not that Detroit cannot achieve better fuel economy -- it's that Detroit doesn't want to. What the current executive-suite suits at the Big Three want is to maximize their bonuses and stock options during their short stays at the top, then let somebody else take the blame for the next round of decline of the U.S. auto industry that is inevitable if fuel economy does not improve. And that's setting aside the national-security implications. A one-third increase in car and SUV mpg is what's needed to break U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf oil. Wouldn't it be nice if Detroit CEOs acted as though they cared about national security!

This summer, the Senate passed something that on paper seemed even better than the Bush-Obama plan, ordering a 40 percent mpg improvement by 2020; the House has yet to act. But although the Bush-Obama plan had teeth, specifying that carmakers show annual mpg improvement beginning immediately, the Senate provision contained a huge asterisk: There are no annual milestones, just a requirement that the mpg rise be accomplished by 2020. That gives Detroit the green light to spend most of the next 13 years doing nothing about petroleum waste, and there is no endeavor in which American automakers are more accomplished than doing nothing about petroleum waste. Plus, the Senate bill contains a waiver provision -- as the 2020 deadline approaches, automakers can request a waiver. Thus the Senate mpg bill, widely praised by gullible editorialists, actually is pure froth.

Now remember that little phrase, "the House has yet to act." Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who boasts about how she will take the bold steps the president will not, won't allow a floor vote on any mileage provision. Pelosi says new mpg rules can be negotiated in conference committee -- that is, in secret, with no public disclosure. And she hasn't even scheduled a conference. George W. Bush proposed a strong, binding program of immediate mpg increases, and Democrats in the House refuse to allow an up-or-down public vote. The calculus is that Pelosi wants to prevent any kind of reform from passing so that, in the 2008 presidential election, Democrats can denounce Republicans for lack of progress on mpg. Wouldn't it be nice if House Democrats acted as though they cared about national security!

While the Senate was considering mpg rules, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a mostly Detroit-run lobby group, aired radio ads that were monuments to deceit. Two women were heard discussing how new mpg regulations could "force" automakers to "put safety in the back seat." One said, "I want to keep my SUV because it makes me feel safe." Several senators speaking against the tough Bush-Obama version of the mileage rules declared that higher mpg would imperil lives by replacing safe large SUVs with small cars. But the Bush-Obama proposal would not require automakers to reduce the size or weight of passenger vehicles. Fuel economy could be improved through engineering changes including reducing horsepower, which many vehicles presently have too much of anyway; the new Acura TL has an absurd 286 horsepower in a midsized sedan, showing that even former good-guy Honda has abandoned corporate responsibility regarding horsepower. Reducing the horsepower of new vehicles would reduce crash rates, thus improving safety.

And although being in a heavy SUV might make the driver feel safer, the reality is the opposite. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety continues to find that you are more likely to die in an SUV than in a regular car. In its most recent study, "very large" SUVs had a higher occupant death rate than midsized cars -- that is, trading in your large SUV for a regular-size car makes you less likely to die. The IIHS also finds that econobox-sized cars are death traps in crashes, so don't switch to a tiny car to save fuel, switch to a midsized vehicle with a middling-horsepower engine. Here are the most recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figures on fatality rates by vehicle class. They show that people in "light trucks," the class that enfolds SUVs and most pickup trucks, are roughly one-third more likely to die per mile traveled than people in regular-size cars. It was quite cynical for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers to tell consumers that SUVs will make them feel safe when statistics show that buying an SUV makes the driver more likely to die.

Not only has it been nearly two decades since the average fuel economy of new vehicles sold in the United States improved -- the sad story is here -- but the EPA continues to publish Pollyannaish statistics that make it seem as though American vehicles burn less fuel than they actually do. According to the EPA figures used to enforce the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, this year's new cars average 27.5 miles per gallon and new SUVs average 21.6. Is there one single person in the United States whose SUV gets 21.6 mpg? There can't be many regular cars that actually get 27.5 mpg, either. Researchers have long complained that claimed EPA averages are unrealistic -- vehicles tested using gentle acceleration with air conditioners off, with no weight onboard, and employing other gimmicks to make fuel consumption appear lower. Surely government-issued unrealistic mpg figures are a leading reason for years of national complacency about petroleum use. People go into auto showrooms and see impressive-looking government window stickers declaring that cars get 28 mpg and SUVs get 22 mpg. People think, "That's pretty good." They don't worry, buy something huge, then find themselves lucky to record 15 mpg.

Beginning with the 2008 model year, the EPA is switching to what it asserts is a realistic method of computing fuel economy; the agency's estimates of actual mpg performance have fallen about 10 percent as a result, although still seem on the high side to me. Good luck actually getting 17 mpg in the city driving your 4,090-pound, all-wheel-drive Lexus RX350! But although EPA estimates of fuel use are being adjusted for realism as regards individual vehicles, the big overall number has not been adjusted. The EPA still claims that new cars average 27.5 mpg and new SUVs average 21.6 mpg, which is plainly absurd.

Fuel note: In policy-wonk slang, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy law is shortened to CAFE. If you type CAFE using Word, the AutoCorrect feature changes what you typed to CAFÉ, the correct uppercase spelling for a place to meet someone for a glass of wine. Watch carefully -- I've seen The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal refer to "the CAFÉ standard" in automobile stories recently.

California note: for two generations, California has been ahead of the nation both in car-culture trendsetting -- Toyota and Honda cracked the U.S. market partly by moving their design studios to California in the mid-1970s and listening closely to what high school kids were saying about cars -- and in auto-emission reductions. The strict anti-air-pollution rules enacted by California in the 1970s and 1980s, which led to spectacular smog reductions throughout the state, gradually were matched in the Northeast, then by federal rules. Two years ago, California mandated a one-third increase in auto and SUV fuel economy beginning in 2010. Instead of racing to meet the rule, American automakers are suing to block it -- Detroit, get your heads out of the sand and get your engineers to work solving the problem! This month California officials also proposed standards for proper tire inflation. Merely keeping America's tires at proper pressure would cut vehicle petroleum consumption 5 to 10 percent -- which is important in the big scheme. Yet most people never bother to check tire pressure, and states don't require filling stations to have working, free-of-charge air pumps. The president of the United States and the Congress of the United States are wringing their hands in public about petroleum waste, yet we don't even have the national resolve to pump a little air into our tires!"

You guys suck

2007-08-29T22:23:00.000-07:00

Or more precisely, blogger sucks.

I posted my brilliant Tax diatribe here almost a month ago and received 1 comment.

I posted the same article on Daily Kos and received...53 comments within 24 hours. You guys suck.

As such, I'm retiring this blog. Anything new I post on DailyKos will appear on this blog, but I will no longer continue posting for it. (That means no more Monthly Machiavellis or Forwarded Articles--unless it's one I really like.) You should all be ashamed of yourself.

Monthly Machiavelli: August

2007-08-26T23:21:00.000-07:00

...and the award for 'Outstanding Political Acumen' goes to:

Hillary Clinton!
Why she won: There are several reasons why Hillary deserves the award this month.

For one, a little over a month ago, I declared that I would never vote for Mrs. Clinton no matter what party nominated her. Since that time, her poise in debates, a recalculation on my part on her possibilities of winning, sound political maneuvers, and some self-destructions by rival candidates have moved me from considering voting for her and even leaning towards a vote for her.

In debates, and there have been many of them, Hillary has shined as a politician with skills above the rest. I was surprised by this considering that she had never engaged in a competitive debate previously. She is now the obvious front runner among both parties and is accumulating a small fortune in campaign donations...
The next president?

Welfare in America

2007-08-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

I just couldn't resist. Imagine how many employed poor people (or even those lazy unemployed poor people) we could help if it weren't for these welfare hogs:

A couple paragraphs from another one of my heroes, author of the weekly ESPN magazine articles entitled "Tuesday Morning Quarterback", Gregg Easterbrook:

<< Wealthy ex-presidents reach into your pockets: Recently, the Congressional Research Service announced the federal subsidies requested for the coming fiscal year by ex-presidents Jimmy Carter, George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton. Globe-trotting Carter asked for only $2,000 for travel; Bush and Clinton, both millionaires, wanted $50,000 from taxpayers for travel. Bush said he needed $69,000 for "equipment" and $13,000 for postage. Is Bush planning to mail 32,000 thank-you notes next year?

AP Photo

Hi, we're rich, give us your money.

What's really offensive is that all three filed for the maximum presidential retirement payment of $191,000 annually. All these guys are wealthy, the elder George Bush having significant inherited wealth, yet all want taxpayers to hand them pensions seven times higher than the typical Social Security sum. This is extra galling because Carter and Clinton aren't even retired! Carter continues to write books that sell well; Clinton is active on the corporate speaking circuit, having earned an estimated $10 million speechifying in 2006. Clinton prattles on and on about the horrors of inequality, yet demands $191,000 in bonuses from taxpayers whose median household income is about 1/20th of his estimated $10 million. Why didn't the three ex-presidents request no pension at all? That would have been the dignified thing to do. To top it off, Clinton requested $79,000 for telephone service. It is impossible, physically impossible, to spend $79,000 on telephones! If Clinton had a 10-cents-a-minute long-distance plan, he could talk long-distance 24 hours a day, 365 days per year -- and you can imagine Clinton doing this -- yet fail to burn through $79,000. The most expensive package offered by Verizon Wireless is an international super-phone with unlimited texting and four hours of talk time daily; this sells for about $3,000 per year. Clinton could purchase two dozen of the most expensive cell accounts available in the United States for the tax-subsidized telephone budget he requested. Is Clinton's $79,000 phone request fraud, or is Clinton planning to use the money to buy phones for staffers working on his private speaking business? An ex-president who had financial problems might legitimately turn to the taxpayer. For all three living ex-presidents to be quite wealthy yet demanding public subsidies is shameful -- to say nothing of a failure of leadership.

>>

Another forwarded post...

2007-08-20T01:14:00.000-07:00

I apologize. Recently, this site has seen a lot of reposting of others rather than original diatribes. I am working on a couple ideas, but they take time. Instead I'll continue reposts as long as they fit under the general rubric of "Boring Political Diatribes."

This one comes from Robert Reich's Blog. Reich was my professor for one day and he is one of few economists who actually knows what he's talking about. You may notice that he was inspired by my other blog, but I can't really blame him for copying me, considering my immense popularity. Without further delay--Bailing Out the Speculators:

<<

Bailing Out the Speculators

Last night the Federal Reserve Board, acting as America’s central bank, sliced half a percentage point off the discount rate it charges banks for loans. The move was designed to give banks, in turn, more money to lend to their customers. But its primary purpose was to lift the confidence of investors and consumers in the United States and around the world that America’s central bank would do whatever necessary to keep the American economy going.

Ordinarily, central banks shouldn’t bail out speculators. It’s not their job to protect investors from themselves. In particular, it’s bad policy to make money cheaper – and investments thereby less risky – after investors have been hoisted on the petards of their own foolishness. That only invites more foolishness next time around.

Yet there’s precedent: In August of 1998, despite growing evidence of inflation, the Federal Reserve Board lowered interest rates in order to forestall a global credit crisis after Russia defaulted on its loans (many of which had been underwritten, foolishly, by several large Wall Street investment banks that assumed Russia would never default). Weeks later the Fed pressured banks to reschedule the debts of a giant hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, for fear that if the hedge fund went belly up, it would cause a crisis in credit markets.

In other words, ordinary rules don’t apply in extraordinary circumstances. That several thousand lower-income Americans inability to meet their mortgage payments set off a chain reaction leading to a worldwide credit crunch is an another such extraordinary circumstance. This one may require even more intervention by the Fed and other central banks around the world than we’ve witnessed already, in order to avoid a global financial meltdown. How much more? We’ll know more this coming week.

But what exactly happened to set this off? The story isn’t simple, but I’ll try to state it as simply as I can. In recent years, with so much money sloshing around the global economy, American banks and other mortgage lenders found themselves with lots of cash. They thought they could make a tidy profit by pushing home loans – not only on average Americans (whose eagerness to own a home or two thereby bid up housing prices) but also on poorer Americans who wanted to own a house but normally couldn’t afford the interest on the loans. Oddly, private credit-rating agencies judged these “sub-prime” loans to be relatively good risks. The loans were then sliced up and sold to other financial institutions where they were repackaged with other loans. Meanwhile, hedge funds created what can only be described as giant betting pools – huge amalgamations of money from pension funds, university endowments, rich individuals, and corporations – whose assumptions about risk were derived from the assumed low risks of the home loans (hence, the term, “derivatives”). Investors in these hedge funds had little or no understanding of what they were actually buying because hedge funds don’t have to disclose much of anything.

It was not just a housing bubble but a financial house of cards that would tumble when central bankers tightened up on the global money supply in order to fight inflation, as they inevitably would, and when the home loans were thereby revealed to be far riskier than thought. Because the bad loans are so widely dispersed and because so much additional credit is connected to them through derivatives, a contagion of fear has spread through financial markets. The credibility of the whole financial system has become shaky. Large numbers of stocks and bonds appear riskier than before, which is why Wall Street is taking a beating.

Americans are understandably nervous. Most American households have invested their savings in stocks and bonds. Most have also relied on the rising values of their homes as “nest-eggs” when they retire. The fact that the housing bubble has burst while stocks and bonds have lost ground is likely to cause American consumers to tighten their belts and cut their spending. Given that consumers comprise 70 percent of the economy, this could push America economy into a recession.

Europe and Asia are feeling the effects. The global financial market is now one big pool of money with spigots and drains all over the world. A loss of confidence on Wall Street is felt almost instantly in other financial capitals. Moreover, American consumers are the “energizer bunnies” of the global economy. Their purchases have maintained global demand even when other economies have sagged. The possibility that they won’t or can’t continue to buy is rocking all global corporations that sell them goods or services.

In other words, the Fed has to bail out the speculators because we’ll all suffer if it doesn’t.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the irresponsibilities now so clearly revealed in American financial markets should be excused or forgotten when the crisis ends. Wall Street has been living in an anything-goes world for too long. It has been widely – and wrongly – assumed that investors, creditors, and borrowers are smart enough to take care of themselves, especially if they’re big. That’s wrong.

The system has become so fast and so loose that many of the fancy financial instruments now in use, and the mathematical models on which they’re based, are too complicated for anyone except a computer to understand. Fortunes have been made exploiting tiny opportunities for arbitrage or devising new derivatives on the basis of data and risk assessments far less certain than they’re assumed to be.

Hedge funds have been operating huge financial casinos without having to disclose what they’re betting on, or why. Credit-rating agencies have cut corners or averted their eyes, unwilling to require the proof they need. They’ve been too eager to make money off underwriting of the new loans and other financial gimmicks on which they’re passing judgment. Banks and other mortgage lenders have been allowed to strong-arm people into taking on financial obligations they have no business taking on.

In order for the financial market to work well – to ensure fair dealing and to prevent speculative excess – government must oversee it. This mess occurred because no one was watching. The Fed and other central banks now have to clean it up. But regulators in American, Europe, and Asia have to make sure it stays clean. Hedge funds have to be more transparent. Credit-rating agencies must not have any relationship with underwriters. Banks and other mortgage lenders should be better supervised. Finance is too important to be left to the speculators.
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Bush Legacy Article

2007-08-16T23:54:00.001-07:00

Usually, Pat Buchanan and I fundamentally disagree. Occasionally, though, him and I seem to find some common ground. One such instance is the following very insightful article:

<<

"Bush-Rove era left party in shambles

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Article Launched: 08/16/2007 01:51:24 AM PDT

If one had to sum up the legacy of Karl Rove as political adviser to the 43rd president, it could probably be done in four words: tactical brilliance, strategic blindness.

Though George Bush was not given the natural gifts of a Ronald Reagan, his victories in Texas, followed by successive victories in the presidential contests in 2000 and 2004, put him in the history books alongside Reagan, who won California and the presidency twice.

None of Bush's wins were nearly so impressive as the Reagan landslides in the Golden State and the nation. But it is a testament to Rove that he and Bush never lost a statewide or national election in the four they contested from 1994 to 2004. Rove has two Super Bowl rings. How many political advisers can say as much?

But if Rove's contribution to the career of George Bush will put him in the Hall of Fame, the Bush-Rove legacy for their party is worse than mixed. Rove wanted to be the architect of a new Republican majority. Instead, he and Bush presided over the loss of the Reagan Democrats and both houses of Congress.

The house Nixon and Reagan built, Bush and Rove tore down, leaving rubble in its place. Rove's failure was a failure of vision. He and Bush believed the future of the party lay in adding to the Republican base the Latino vote, now the nation's largest minority at nearly 15 percent of the population.

They went about it the wrong way.

Pandering to that voting bloc, Bush stopped enforcing the immigration laws and offered amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and the businesses that hired them. Bush and Rove were going to lure the Latino vote away from the Democratic Party by putting illegals on a path to citizenship.

But as we saw in June, when the nation rose up in rage against the Bush amnesty, the pair did indeed unite the GOP - against themselves, and they severed themselves from the Reagan Democrats and the country.

It was cynical politics, and it backfired, crippling the presidential candidacy of Sen. John McCain in the process.

But even before the disastrous immigration reform bill, Bush had become a zealot of NAFTA, GATT and most-favored-nation status for China. These have left his country with the worst trade deficits in history, put the United States $2 trillion in debt to Beijing and Tokyo, cost Middle America 3 million manufacturing jobs and arrested the income rise of the middle class as our capitalist pigs and hedge-fund hogs have happily gorged themselves at the capital gains tax trough.

Bush's original idea of "compassionate conservatism" was a fine one. But under him and Rove, compassionate conservative turned out to be code for a cocktail of Great Society Liberalism and Big Government Conservatism. How could professed admirers of Ronald Reagan think that by doubling the budget of the Department of Education the tests scores of schoolchildren would inexorably rise?

Even earlier in the Bush years, the president, after the trauma of Sept. 11, had a Damascene conversion to neoconservatism, a neo-Wilsonian ideology and secular religion. Among its tenets: that we are a providential nation whose mission on Earth is to liberate mankind and democratize the planet; that we are in a world-historic struggle between good and evil; that our triumph is to be accomplished by the robust use of U.S. military power - beginning with the benighted nations of the Islamic Middle East that represent an existential threat to America, democracy and Israel.

Sometime between Sept. 11 and his axis-of-evil address, Bush sat down and ate of the forbidden fruit of messianic globaloney. Consuming it, he got up and committed the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history by ordering the invasion of a country that had not attacked us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us.

The Bush-Rove rationale: For our survival, we had to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that we now know it did not have.

The great political architects of the 20th century are FDR and Nixon. After the three Republican landslides of the 1920s, FDR put together a New Deal coalition that controlled the White House for 36 years, with the exception of two terms for Eisenhower.

After the rout of the Republicans in 1964, Nixon pulled together a New Majority that held the White House for 20 of 24 years, racking up two 49-state landslides for Nixon and Reagan, as FDR had won 46 states in 1936. In his re-election bid, Bush won 31 states.

In seeking a new GOP majority, Bush and Rove rejected the Nixon-Reagan model. Instead, they embraced the interventionism of Wilson, the free-trade globalism of FDR, the open-borders immigration ideas of LBJ and the budget priorities of the Great Society. It was a bridge too far for the party base.

Now, Rove walks away like some subprime borrower abandoning the house on which he can no longer make the payments. The Republican Party needs a new architect. The firm of Bush & Rove was not up to the job."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Taxes

2007-08-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Franklin said that there are only two sure things in this world: death and taxes. I don't know if that's relevant, but any good diatribe involving taxes needs to include that quote.

Relatedly, another good quote comes from the blind irony of George W: "The death penalty, as we know, is unjustifiable." Of course, the President wasn't referring to the 152 individuals that were subjected to a "justifiable" penalty during his term as Governor of Texas...no, he was referring to the Estate Tax.

Americans are obsessed with taxes. We've been obsessed with taxes since the beginning. We declared independence to avoid British taxes and our Constitution was written as a response to a revolt against a tax (the "Whiskey Tax"). In the last 4 presidential elections the candidates of both parties have promised to cut taxes (the last one to not explicitly do so was Dukakis) and the next election will probably not be any different. Reagan changed American politics by riding a wave of "tax revolt," Mondale guaranteed Reagan a landslide victory in 1984 with this political blunder: "Mr. Reagan will raise your taxes and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did" (Reagan went on to raise taxes), in '88 George I won by advising people to read his lips and in '92 he lost after people found out his lips were lying, the most fiendish word in conservative talk-radio is a "tax-and-spend liberal" (as opposed to a "just-spend-conservative," apparently), and Democrats have totally given up a "war on poverty" as their rallying cry and have turned to "middle-class tax cuts" to find resonance with voters.

With such an overwhelming obsession with taxes you would think that Americans must be the most overly taxed people on the planet. You might think that such an obsession is the result of the crippling nature of the American tax code. Of course, you and I know better.

As you may (or should) know, the U.S. has the lowest tax rates in the developed world, with the exception of Japan, which has a cap on military spending that stands at 1% of GDP. As a percentage of GDP, government in the U.S. extracts about 26% from its citizens. For Canada the number is about 38%, for France 45%, and for the crazy Swedes about 57%.

What's most amazing about these numbers is how low the American tax rate is considering our military spending. Currently, the U.S. government spends over $600 billion a year on military matters. This outrageous number is about 46% of the world's total military spending. In other words, the U.S. almost spends more on the military than the rest of the world...COMBINED! The second largest spender, China, spends 1/7 the amount that America does; Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria, North Korea, and Libya (the "rogue belligerent states") spend 1/29th as much as we do...COMBINED!

Given our high rate of military spending, you would think that our tax rates would be comparably high to pay for all that spending. Since the rest of the world is spending so much less on their military than us, their government spending should be much less. So, the next question is, what are all these countries spending money on that we aren't spending on?

One item is health care. Unlike the rest of the world, with the exception of our Medicare and Medicaid programs, our health care system is not publicly funded. It's not that we don't spend money on health care (as I mentioned in a previous diatribe, we spend almost twice as much as any other country) it's that our dollars go to private corporations rather than the government.

Another one is the variety of social programs common in the rest of the world. These include maternity/paternity leave, a variety of daycare services for families with children, and much more generous old-age insurance and unemployment insurance.

The final big item is redistributive programs. These include welfare in all its varieties, tax breaks for the poor, food programs, health care for the unemployed/ impoverished, etc. Currently the U.S. spends about 21% of the federal budget on such programs, while the rest of the world spends about twice that much.
Contrary to popular belief, our spending on education and infrastructure is comparable (above average on education, below average on infrastructure) to the rest of the world.

When Americans complain about high taxes they are usually complaining about one particular tax: the income tax. Unless you're super rich, the Estate Tax will never become an issue and most people don't complain about their social security payroll taxes. So, where do our income taxes go? The easy answer is the federal government. More than 90% of income taxes go to the federal government, and 9 states have no income tax. The more complicated answer is the following:
For every dollar:
-42 cents goes to military spending, veteran's care, and military generated debt interest.
-17 cents goes to fund Medicaid.
-10 cents goes to paying interest on non-military generated debt.
-19 cents goes to running the government (including homeland security in all its forms)
-9 cents goes to education, etc.
-2 cents goes to public lands administration
-8 cents goes to welfare programs like AFDC, food stamps, job training, disability assistance, public housing, etc.
-1 cent to diplomatic services/international aid

The other tax that has generated interest recently for obvious reasons is the gas tax. The American gasoline tax is the lowest in the developed world (18.2 cents) and is all spent on road maintenance (and not at all on researching alternative energies).

Unlike most of the rest of the developed world, the U.S. does not have a national sales tax/ Value Added Tax (VAT), but state and local governments often impose one. In my state, California, there is a 7.25 % sales tax. Local authorities have added an additional 1% to that tax to pay for a variety of services. In most of the rest of the developed world, a VAT is administered nationally, is imposed upon consumers AND retailers, does not apply to base items like food and clothing, and can be as high as 20 or even 30%.

I won't even spend time talking about the estate tax, which only applies to 2500 families in the country.

To conclude, the American people are probably the most undertaxed people in the developed world. We are so undertaxed that we don't even pay for the smallest government in the developed world as a percentage of GDP. I can understand if Sweden had a huge deficit (which they don't), but how is it that we have a national debt of nearly $9 Trillion!!! Here's some fun numbers: to pay for the debt each citizen would have to pay, on average, $29,500 (in other words we, by we I mean every man, woman, child, baby, on average have been running our government credit card bills to the size of nearly $30,000...a family of four, then, on average owes the government $120,000), the debt is growing $1.39 billion...a day!, if you set aside $7 million dollars every day since the birth of Christ you would have enough money to pay off the debt some time in March of 2458, etc. But there's good news! This year's deficit will probably be around $148.5 billion, down from the high point of $412 billion in 2004 [cheers all around]. So, what does that mean? It means that our debt is only GROWING by about $150 billion this year...I think we all have reason to be proud. Miracuously, during the late 90s, Bill Clinton was able to generate a surplus of $400 billion, meaning that we were actually able to reduce our debt! Of course, we didn't...that money mostly went to tax cuts. Hopefully, some day we'll actually have a surplus and be able to begin to pay off the debt, but one can only dream.

'How did we get this HUGE debt?', hopefully you're asking. As recently as the early 1960s we had almost no debt whatsoever. What happened? Well, Vietnam happened. OPEC happened. Reagan and defense expenditure growth happened. Also the "enormous" increase in welfare spending happened, according to conservatives, reaching as high as 1/4 of our defense spending at one point. But even more importantly, tax cuts happened.

Kennedy inaugurated the era of the tax cuts. Kennedy began a trend that has continued to this day. In 1962 his tax bill called for massive tax cuts. For the median income earner, the tax rate dropped from about 32% to 28%. Since that time, taxes have continually been slashed for middle income families until they've reached the present bottom of...26%. ...Wait...the drop from 1962 to 2007, after Reagan and Bush and Bush has only been 2%? So where has the drop of taxes gone? Well, for one, more impoverished people have become excempt from paying taxes and their tax rates have gone down. But, this is a miniscule drop. The real drop can be found somewhere else:

Let's look at the tax rate for the highest bracket incomes (currently these apply to individuals who make more than $336,500 a year). Under the obviously socialistic Eisenhower, the highest tax rate was 91%! Kennedy slashed it to 77%, Johnson to 70%, Reagan to 50%...then 38%, and finally George W. dropped it to 35%. That's quite a rapid drop. Considering that it is these high incomes that contain nearly half of our nation's wealth, this is a pretty serious drain on revenues. Possibly serious enough to cause a $9 trillion debt? I'll let you decide.

By the way, Kerry was attacked in 2004 for trying to raise taxes. He was proposing raising the highest bracket tax rate. His proposal would raise it to 38%...communist.

Read This!

2007-08-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

An amazing follow up to my own article about health care by my hero Paul Krugman (I mean,... Machiavelli Krugman). Link

Why Supply Side Economics Doesn't Work: An Intro

2007-07-24T00:56:00.001-07:00

From Alex Berenson, NY Times, 7/24:

"

Tax Break Used by Drug Makers Failed to Add Jobs

Two years ago, when companies received a big tax break to bring home their offshore profits, the president and Congress justified it as a one-time tax amnesty that would create American jobs

Drug makers were the biggest beneficiaries of the amnesty program, repatriating about $100 billion in foreign profits and paying only minimal taxes. But the companies did not create many jobs in return. Instead, since 2005 the American drug industry has laid off tens of thousands of workers in this country.

And now drug companies are once again using complex strategies, many of them demonstrably legal, to shelter billions of dollars in profits in international tax havens, according to their financial statements and independent tax experts.

In one popular accounting move, companies declare their foreign markets as far more profitable than their American businesses — even though drug prices are typically higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

Drug makers are not the only American multinationals using tax loopholes to declare large portions of their income beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service. The Brookings Institution estimates that multinational companies are using overseas tax shelters to lower their payments to the Treasury by about $50 billion a year.

But the drug industry accounts for one of the biggest portions of that shortfall, according to the I.R.S. and independent tax experts. And the nature of their business gives drug makers techniques, like sheltering valuable pharmaceutical patents in tax-friendly havens like Ireland, that many other industries cannot use.

Moreover, the sheer heft of the American drug industry, which had about $60 billion in pretax profits last year, can give disproportionate weight to the economic impact of its tax sheltering techniques.

Even though the tax amnesty legislation has expired, its passage encouraged companies to be even more aggressive about sheltering money, expecting another holiday in the future, said H. David Rosenbloom, director of the international tax program at New York University. Democrats and Republicans supported the legislation, which passed with sizable majorities in October 2004.

“Congress can swear on two stacks of Bibles that it’ll never do it again,” Mr. Rosenbloom said, “but they’ve lost their virginity.”

With a few narrow exceptions, the drug companies are supposed to be paying as much as 35 percent of their worldwide profits in United States federal taxes. In reality they pay much less.

Last year, for example Eli Lilly, the sixth-largest American drug maker, paid less than 6 percent of its profits of $3.4 billion to the United States government, according to its financial statement.

Amgen, the American biotechnology giant, which reported last year that 80 percent of its $14.3 billion in sales occurred in this country, paid about 22 percent in United States federal tax on its $4 billion in profits.

The discrepancy was possible because Amgen claimed a profit margin of almost 100 percent on its foreign sales, but only 15 percent on its American sales.

The I.R.S. has recently increased the number of examiners trying to find hidden profits overseas. It has even had some victories, as in February when the drug maker Merck agreed to pay $2.3 billion to the government to settle a claim it had hidden profits in a Bermuda partnership.

“This is really a priority for the service right now — there’s a lot of focus on cross-border transactions,” said Frank Y. Ng, the I.R.S. deputy commissioner for international tax matters. But even after adding resources, the I.R.S. has only about 500 examiners to review international returns.

Lilly said in a statement that it complied with the law in taking advantage of the 2005 tax amnesty, which enabled the company to avoid more than $2.3 billion in American taxes. Lilly said it believed that the 2005 tax break had encouraged investment in the United States, noting that the company, which is based in Indianapolis, has invested $1.3 billion in the state of Indiana alone.

Still, since the beginning of 2005, Lilly has cut its United States work force by more than 8 percent, reducing it to 22,000 jobs by last January.

Lilly also noted that its overall reported worldwide tax rate for 2006 — which includes taxes paid to other countries and taxes that it has deferred but will theoretically pay at some future date — was about 20 percent in 2006.

Pfizer, Merck and Amgen declined requests for comment.

Tax experts like Michael J. McIntyre, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, say the drug makers are taking advantage of antiquated rules that work better for manufactured products like steel and automobiles.

Under this system, when companies transfer products between divisions in different countries, they must account for the sales internally through “transfer pricing.” But they have significant discretion in how they set prices for these transactions.

That turns out to be especially so for high-margin products like drugs, which in pill form cost only a few cents each to make once they have been invented, but can be sold for several dollars apiece. The hefty profit margins result in part from patents that can protect the drugs from competition for years. And by transferring those valuable patents overseas, companies can declare that their profits should follow the patents overseas as well.

Under the rules of transfer pricing, if a company moves patents or other so-called intangibles from its United States division to a foreign subsidiary, the foreign unit is supposed to pay the American division a fair-market price. But outsiders have a difficult time determining if companies have properly assessed the value of patents, trademarks and other intangible properties.

To further complicate matters, some corporate subsidiaries in tax-haven countries, like Singapore and the Netherlands, now directly finance research in the United States. So they own the patents without ever having to “buy” them from their American parents, Mr. McIntyre said.

“They don’t even have to push it offshore,” Mr. McIntyre said. “It’s already offshore. And once it’s offshore, they strip the income from the onshore activity.”

In theory, companies are only deferring taxes on the profits they shelter overseas, not permanently avoiding tax. If they bring the money back to the United States to distribute to their shareholders, they still have to pay American taxes on it.

But those rules were temporarily suspended when President Bush signed legislation in 2004 to let companies return overseas profits at a rate of 5.25 percent, far below the official tax rate of 35 percent, if they moved the money back by 2006.

During that period, multinational companies of all stripes moved a total of about $300 billion into the United States, avoiding about $90 billion in taxes. Among them, the pharmaceutical industry was the largest single beneficiary. Leading the pack was Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, which repatriated $36 billion.

The quid pro quo was supposed to be that the drug industry would invest some of its tax windfall in American operations and jobs. Instead, struggling with a dearth of new blockbuster drugs, they have had mass layoffs. Again, Pfizer has been the leader, reducing its work force by about 8,000 in 2006 and saying early this year that it would lay off an additional 10,000 employees.

Some experts now say the current system of taxing overseas profits should be scrapped. Even the companies that take advantage of loopholes might benefit if the system were changed, because they could save money on tax planning and have more certainty that the I.R.S. would accept their returns, said Michael C. Durst, a former I.R.S. official who is now special counsel to the law firm Steptoe & Johnson.

The simplest solution, Mr. Durst said, would be shifting to a system in which companies would assign a portion of profit to each country where they made a sale, relative to the size of the sale. Instead of trying to tax profits made overseas, the United States government would simply take its share of the profits on American sales. Such a system would be harder for the companies to game, Mr. Durst said.

But he and other tax experts say that any effort to close loopholes, to be politically viable, might have to be combined with a lowering of the corporate tax rate from its current 35 percent. And no one expects any legislation of that sort, at least not before the next election."

Torture

2007-07-22T19:29:00.001-07:00

This one will be short and to the point...

The issue of torture has been in and out of the news recently and particularly has shown up in Republican presidential debates. There have been numerous allegations of use of torture in Guantanamo Bay and through repressive regimes in Egypt, East Europe, and Uzbekistan. Of course there was also the Abu Graib scandal. Some cable news networks have devoted discussions as to whether certain practices (water-boarding, forced standing, sleep deprivation, etc.) should be classified as torture.

Central to any of the recent debates about torture have been two questions:
1. What constitutes torture?
2. Are there situations when the use of torture is permissible?

I believe the first question is irrelevant. The only reason to carefully define torture is in order to inflict punishments that are borderline "not torture." Luckily for us, there is no reason we need to engage in such discussions. This is because the issue was already solved 200 years ago. The Bill of Rights 8th amendment prohibits the use "cruel and unusual punishment." Thus, we don't need to define torture, we need to define cruel and unusual punishment. I'll leave that to the courts, but we all know that all of the borderline practices being practiced in Guantanamo ARE cruel and unusual. As such, they are illegal if they are being inflicted on U.S. citizens, and should not be practiced if they are being used on enemy combatants. End of story. The entire torture debate is like trying to decide if asking who married Cain is blasphemy: it's completely outside the realms of our legal system and somewhat esoteric.

The second question is not a question at all. It's a rhetorical device. Torture or cruel and unusual punishment should not be used at all by anyone. Additionally, it is illegal for our government to use it against its citizens and illegal under international law (to the extent that international law has any jurisdiction in the United States) to use it against enemy combatants. Yet, talking heads keep asking the hypothetical question that goes something like this: "Suppose we caught a member of a terrorist cell trying to attack a major metropolitan area. Should we tie our hands and not allow intelligence personnel to use whatever means necessary to figure out the details of the plans even if it would cost perhaps thousands of American lives?" It's a nice little question that has no relation to reality and seems like a good plot for an action movie. Such a scenario has never happened and probably will never happen. If it does happen, you can bet that the terrorist will be subjected to "any means necessary" to get him to talk. After the torture, whoever green-lighted it would probably be absolved. In reality, it's a non-issue with such a specific set of circumstances that it is almost meaningless. So why does it keep coming up? Because they understand that the slippery slope goes both ways. Because torture in some outlandish scenario would be somewhat reasonable, one could argue that it could be justified in other, more realistic scenarios. Before you know it, "terrorists" are being tortured for all kinds of rationales. Asking the question is an argumentative tool for convincing people that torture is ok. Of course, in specific circumstances just about any action could be justified to some degree, but that doesn't give it legitimacy as public policy. Torture, as a matter of principle, should never be used for any purpose.

Monthly Machiavelli's: A New Feature?

2007-07-21T17:41:00.000-07:00

Yes!, a NEW feature on this site. Every month I will award a "Machiavelli" to the person who displays 'Outstanding Political Acumen.'

I was going to wait until the end of the month, but I'll just start prematurely with the first recipient of the award.

And the Machiavelli goes to....:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid! [Cheers]

Why he won: As majority leader, Reid organized the overnight debate and vote in the senate over withdrawal from Iraq. From a Machiavellian standpoint, this was absolute genius. A number of Republican senators recently had been defecting from the President's position in Iraq because...well, they'll probably be voted out of office if they hadn't. Despite the "bravery" of openly and belatedly proclaiming that everything in Iraq wasn't peachy pie, most were not willing to push for immediate withdrawal.

In response, Reid put them on the spot, forcing them into an all-night filibuster. Republicans were forced to either vote for immediate (actually by April 2008) withdrawal or support the president. Since most of those Republicans really wanted some make-believe middle course, they were not happy about having to take sides. Most decided to prevent an open vote and continue the filibuster, which can be translated to support for the President's war.

The reason why this move was so brilliant is that it forces the Republicans in the senate, and Republicans in general (including presidential candidates) to become attached to Bush's wildly unpopular position in Iraq. Additionally, it strengthens Democrats credentials as the 'get out of Iraq' party, which is politically wise. To prevent compromise measures that would have allowed Republicans senators to separate themselves from Bush, Reid announced that there wouldn't be any more debate on Iraq until September.

Well done.

Cuba

2007-07-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

Michael Moore's recent documentary has redrawn some attention to Cuba. In the movie, Moore takes several 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba to receive medical care. Those rescue workers were refused care by the U.S. government despite the fact that they were harmed during rescue attempts and not told about the dangers to their respiratory system from working so long around the WTC rubble. In Cuba, the rescue workers simply walked into a local pharmacy and then a hospital in Havana to receive free state-of-the-art medical care. For his transgressions, Michael Moore is being investigated for breaking American law by visiting Cuba without permission.

The point of this post is not to talk about Cuba's health care program. The point is to talk about the insanity of our current trade embargo and visiting restrictions on the country. But before I get to that, I want to talk a little about health care in Cuba. The documentary has spawned a reaction form both conservative and mainstream media trying to debunk the myths supposedly perpetuated by Moore in the film. I'll just say it: these "journalists" don't know what they're talking about. They assume that because it's Castro's Cuba, the country could not possibly have a comparable if not better health care system than the United States. There must be some hidden evil. A basic exploration of the country would prove otherwise: Cuba has devoted itself to building an exemplary health and educational system that some Americans would find envious. They have done this by sacrificing GDP growth. You may argue that the cost is too high, but if people are being educated, protected, and remain healthy, who's to say they're worse off? Not only has Cuba provided for its citizens, but it has also sent health workers all across the third world to train and treat the impoverished. It has also brought in people from across the world to train in its prestigious Havana University so that they may return home and use their acquired knowledge in their homeland. In fact, many young Americans have chosen to attend the university in what they believe is a unique educational experience. Many "journalists" have pointed out ways in which Cuba's educational or health care system is inferior (for example, there is only one place in Cuba to really receive this top-shelf medical care--Havana, where Moore goes, although anyone can go there and there are local doctors and pharmacies everywhere), but they neglect to mention that the U.S. is the richest country in the world, while Cuba is one of the poorest, with a GDP per capita of $2,000 and that for Cuba to have a system that in any way compares to the most powerful country on earth is laughable.

So, if Cuba isn't evil incarnate, why do we have such strict trade and visiting restrictions? Let's look at the history: in 1959, Castro overthrew a dictator supported by the United States named Batista. Batista was one in a long run of dictators in Cuba that had ruled pretty much none stop since the United States "freed" the island from Spanish tyranny during the Spanish-American War in 1898. When Castro took power, America was not sure what to think. They had never been confronted with a victorious political movement in Cuba that they had not directly sponsored. I'm no communist, and neither was Castro. Castro's main goal was to redistribute Cuba's oligopolized land, establish an educational and health care system, and end Cuba's economic dependence on American purchase of Cuban sugar. He made several diplomatic attempts to work with America in reforming his nation.

However, those feelers were rejected by America. Instead, the U.S. placed an embargo on Cuban sugar, crippling the economy. Castro then traveled to America to try to smooth things over to no avail. It was during this trip that the CIA first attempted to assassinate him. They failed, but Castro found out about it.

It was only after Castro's visit to the U.S. that he even contacted the Soviet Union. Why would he turn to the communists that he had worked so hard to purge from his movement during the revolution? Because the U.S. was trying to kill him! The U.S. was also trying to depose Castro using Cuban exiles in what would become the Bay of Pigs debacle.

Let's look at these Cuban exiles. These "exiles" came in three groups. The first were not exiles at all...they simply ran away. Mostly Batista collaborators and EXTREMELY wealthy sugar plantation owners/ Havana nightclub and casino owners with close links to the American mafia, they had fled because they feared their immense wealth would be ceased by the state and they hated anyone with a hint of leftism. The second group were exiled in the sense that if they didn't leave, they would have been jailed or killed. Again these were often extremely wealthy individuals who had been exploiting agricultural workers for immense financial gain. Albeit, conservatives (basically those that were in or were associated with the military) were also persecuted and fled. What is remarkable about this group was how 'white' these early exiles were. Cuba, then, was strictly divided between its white and "mixed" populations. For the most part, the whites owned all the land and the "mixed" did all the work. The whites were mostly old Spanish creole landowners with a scattering of former American families that fled the South after the Civil War. Fearing attacks from the people that had ruled over for decades, these whites fled to America and began organizing a way to overthrow Castro and his egalitarian message...this would become the Bay of Pigs.

I'll talk about the third group later, so let's go back to why Castro approached the Soviet Union. As I pointed out, the U.S. attempted to kill Castro and would launch an entire campaign throughout the 1960s dedicated to that purpose called Operation Mongoose (documents were completely declassified earlier this month, but they were already widely known), which used everything from poisoned food to exploding cigars. The U.S. was also threatening to invade the island or at least support a takeover attempt by Cuban exiles. Castro and Cuba did not have many resources. To protect itself from America it only had one option: the Soviet Bloc. The Soviets were more than happy to give Cuba everything it wanted if nothing else than to irk America. The Soviets gave Cuba arms, trade deals, and finally nuclear missiles (which gave us the Cuban missile crisis).

In response the United States placed a complete trade embargo on Cuba which included tourism and necessarily meant that Americans could not visit the island. It is this embargo that remains with us today. Until 6 years ago, Americans could not go to Cuba for any reason. Now, with special permission, you may visit the island for educational purposes (basically you have to be a med student or grad student studying Latin American politics or something.) This embargo has remained as the only absolute embargo on any country in the world by the United States despite the fall of communism in 1989 and despite the fact that we have most favored nation status with China, a country actually ran by a communist party.

So the question is, why do we hate Cuba so much? As the argument goes, Cuba is an oppressive regime and only a trade embargo will force Castro out of power. Anyone who believes this doesn't know what they're talking about. Firstly, simple trial and error of 50 years should tell us that the embargo will not force Castro from power. It obviously hasn't worked.

Secondly, I don't argue that Cuba is an oppressive country or that it's leader is a corrupt megalomaniac (some estimates put Castro as one of the 20 richest people in the world). Castro allows almost no political dissidence. He uses harsh methods including torture to punish his enemies. In all likelihood thousands of political prisoners have been killed by his regime.
But let's make an incomplete list of countries that the United States has only not placed embargoes upon but has supported and even allied with who were oppressive and used torture as official policy (some of these countries have since reformed, so I'll indicate what period I'm talking about in parentheses when appropriate):

China, Chile (Pinochet), Nicaragua (Somoza), Peru (63-80), Uruguay (73-85), Saudi Arabia, Iran (under the Sha), South Vietnam, Phillipines (Marcos), Indonesia (Suharto), Turkey, Spain (Franco), Portugal (Salazar), Greece (67-75), Argentina (2 military dictatorships), Bolivia (75-80), Brazil (64-85), Guatemala (54-91), El Salvador (32-83), Honduras (50s to 90), Uzbekistan, Romania, Yugoslavia (Tito).

Well, that's all I could think of. The point is that the U.S. since '59 has not had a problem supporting countries with human rights abuses comparable if not worse than those occurring (that occurred) in Cuba. The list includes mostly right-wing military dictatorships, but also includes some lefties like China, Uzbekistan (sorta), and Yugoslavia. In other words, there must be another reason.

So, what's the real reason? One of the real reasons is that the Cuban exiles form a very powerful block of voters and financial resources particularly in the swing state Florida that have forced presidential candidates to remain strictly opposed to Castro and committed to the embargo. Although the initial group of Cuban exiles was relatively small, during the late 1960s and 1970s a flood of Cubans arrived in Florida as refugees constituting the third group I mentioned earlier. Most were not running away from political persecution, although some were, but instead were running away from poverty, ironically caused by the American blockade. Met in Southern Florida by arch-conservative politically active Cubans from the initial fleeing, these "mixed" Cubans that now make up a large majority of the Cuban-American population are equally anti-Castro and have been convinced that the embargo is the best way to punish him. Unfortunately, these ex-Cubans are contributing to the crippling poverty that has struck the country since 1989 as the fall of the Soviet Union not only meant an end to subsidies, but also a viable trade partner (China, as we have learned, are not interested in American much less Cuban goods.)

Instead of blaming the ex-Cubans, we should be blaming the politicians that cowardly continue the ridiculous embargo. President Bush, who will not face another election, could push for an end to the embargo, but he won't because of the harm it will do to his party and possibly the next Bush presidential candidate Jeb Bush (former Gov. of Florida fully committed to making Cuba suffer). Clinton could have done it after 1996, but instead he used his last efforts to pardon ex-Cuban drug smugglers who just happened to reward their legal representatives (Hugh and Tony RODHAM...hmmm...) handsomely for their successful effort to get them clemency.

The embargo doesn't punish Castro, it punishes Cuba and Cubans. Prohibitions against travel to Cuba, with all its harking back to the glorious days of the Soviet Union's migration restrictions, hurts Americans (and Cubans), not Castro. In a post-Cold War world, the embargo is insane. What threat does Cuba give to America? Maybe someone doesn't want you to know about their health and educational system. Maybe someone doesn't want to admit that the Castro problem was an American made problem. Maybe someone is afraid that if they end it now, people will realize there was no reason to have it in the first place.

Michael Moore Movie Gets Two Thumbs Up

2007-07-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

I saw Sicko yesterday and it was very good. Most criticisms of the movie, like those of Fahrenheit 9/11, is that he uses factual inaccuracies. Admittedly, there are a few glaring ones that I immediately noticed, but these do not detract from his core message. Unfortunately, I don't think I learned a single thing from the movie and you could probably learn more from my post, "The Great Health Care Debate." With that said, the movie is well-done and a great wake-up call to all those that think we have decent health care.

A Boogie Man Made Up to Scare YOU

2007-06-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

There are a few myths, you could call them "boogie men," that have dominated how we think about the future and in doing so have altered how we understand our current political problems. In this post, I'll deal with the death of social security myth.

Particularly during the 2000 election, politicians, journalists, and analysts convinced us that social security was headed on its way to complete disaster. Politicians did this to push their political agenda, journalists did it because it was a great news story, and analysts...well there weren't too many and the only ones that were making noise either weren't being heard or weren't exactly sure what to make of all the commotion. The problem for analysts is that they had long sounded the alarm about social security: that it's basically a glorified pyramid scheme. So, when politicians started pointing to serious shortfalls in the system, they were at first excited that someone was finally listening to them, and then baffled when they realized that those politicians were just making problems up. Explaining why the talk of the death of social security was a myth was confusing and nobody had (or has) the guts to explain why. After Bush's victory, the issue became further confused as he proposed a privatization scheme. Instead of analysts explaining why this was even bigger nonsense, the scheme got shut down by Democrats scaring people into thinking that Bush was trying to ruin social security (which he was) without actually explaining how. Thus, we were left with the idea that social security was in trouble, but that fixing it would be siding with Bush. To sum up, social security was never fully explained to America and any debate surrounding it (from either the left or the right) has centered around the issue of fear. Since fear is powerful, politicians looked everywhere for fear and found it in a good line about how social security would soon be dead. Unfortunately, this is all nonsense.

Where to start? How about the beginning? All good diatribes start with history and this one won't be any different. The social security act was signed into law in 1935 under President Roosevelt during his so-called "Second New Deal." I won't go into the details of why it was created or why it's important, etc. Maybe I'll save that for another diatribe. The important point is that Roosevelt orchestrated the act and that he was a master politician that even Machiavelli would be jealous of. Roosevelt did three things to demonstrate how smart he was (despite the fact that he knew very little): he funded the program with payroll taxes, he separated social security from income taxes, etc., on employee checks, and he sold social security as a government-sponsored insurance system. Why was this so smart? I hoped you would ask:
1. between 1935 and 1952 when Eisenhower embraced the program, republicans/ conservatives put all their energy regarding social security into making it a program financed by the general fund [the general fund refers to all revenue collected by the government]. In other words, they wanted it to be financed like any other program. Why was this so important to them? Simple. By making it an appropriation of the federal government they could cut into it and eventually eliminate as they did with just about every liberal program when Reagan and Bush II took office. But, by placing the funds in a sealed program within the government, conservatives couldn't touch it.
2. By separating social security from other taxes, Roosevelt made sure that wage earners would know exactly where their payroll taxes were going. Thus, when we look at our checks we might think, "what is the government doing with all this money" for our state and federal income taxes, but when we look at the social security tax, we know exactly where the money is going. The gimmick paid off by giving the program a high degree of legitimacy and accountability.
3. by selling the program as a kind of old-age insurance, Roosevelt neglected to tell America that it was a quasi-pyramid scheme. To demonstrate, let me tell you the story of the first person to receive a social security check: Ida May Fuller, a Vermont resident, retired at the age of 66. She had paid $24.75 in payroll taxes when she retired, but like everyone after the program was created, she was entitled to full benefits. As it turned out, she lived to be 101 years old. That meant that she collected $22,888.92. One might ask, "where did all this money come from, if she only paid 24 dollars?" The odd scenario was created because social security payouts are not done through a locked account that you've been paying money into your whole life (as many people think) but out of current employee payrolls. This means that the continued success of the program depends on new entrants into the workforce; a.k.a. a pyramid scheme. Ms. Fuller played the part of the classic 1st entrant in the pyramid, receiving thousands of percents more value than she put it in, as did her entire generation.

As you may know, pyramid schemes get a bad rap. This is because they usually fall apart when there are no more new entrants. Such a scenario WILL someday happen (although it could be at the end of the world) when a whole generation of people who for their entire lives have paid into the system will not receive any benefits. This is the real fault of the social security system. Interestingly, it could happen anytime. It could happen tomorrow if Congress decided to end the program or it could end in 10,000 years. This is the insolvency of social security; it is also the only insolvency of social security...sort of.

But what about the whole end of social security thing? What about projections of a collapse in 2018 or 2041? What about the $11 trillion dollar deficit inherent in the system? Lies, lies, fibs, and half-truths (not in that order). All this talk about the end of social security as we know it began in 1982. In '82, budgetary analysts decided to finally address a major problem with social security: the baby boom generation. The baby-boom seriously upset how the system was financed and it meant that one day, when the baby-boom generation retired, there would not be enough funds to pay them benefits because they would be such a large percentage of the population. A commission headed by a young(er) Alan Greenspan came up with a solution: raise payroll taxes now on the baby-boom generation so that a surplus would be created to meet those demands in the future. And...the problem was solved. Let me say that again: the insolvency created by the baby boom generation has been solved...sort of.

So, why did we hear about it 20 years later as a big problem. For that we have Daniel Patrick Moynihan to thank. Moynhihan, who deserves his own diatribe, was a kind of half-intellectual, half-politician. By that I mean he wasn't a particularly good intellectual or a particularly good politician. In 1998, he headed a study that "discovered" a huge hole in the social security system that would explode in 2011 as the first baby boom generation began to retire. His reasoning was this: those payroll taxes collected for the last 20 years were collected in treasury bills. That means to redeem them, the SSA (social security administration) would have to go to the nation's revenue funds, get the money, and send it out to retirees. He then asked an interesting question, 'given our large deficit, where the hell are we going to get the money to pay the SSA?' hmm..sounds like a big problem...do you have any solutions?...I mean where could the SSA get this money?...it would be like if you put your money in the bank and then the bank used it for a whole bunch of loans...where would you go to get your money back???...

FROM THE B ANK!!!!!!! The only reason that social security is not funded by general funds is that Roosevelt worried it could lose legitimacy and be vulnerable, thus he gave it its own funds (overseen by the SSA). The SSA then collects extra money, turns them into treasury bills as the government pays off debt and then gets the money back because it's still money that belongs within the protected funds of the SSA. In fact, to question if the government should pay SSA is not only ludicrous, it is a serious (unintentional) assault on the entire legitimacy of social security. And legitimacy is important for social security because...well, it's a pyramid scheme. Not paying back the SSA would be not paying back all those retirees who have been paying extra money into the system for the last 20 years. In reality, the extra payroll tax was a brilliant ploy because it allowed the treasury to pay less interest on its deficits all those years. Unfortunately, it means that we have been having even BIGGER deficits the last 20 years than previously thought and it means we will have BIGGER deficits in the future as we pay back the SSA. But it is not because of SSA that we have those deficits, in fact, without the SSA our deficits would have been even BIGGER as we would have had more debt to pay interest on (translation: the Reagan deficits were even BIGGER than we were told and the Clinton surpluses really were about breaking even...which is why you never hear about this...neither party wants to tell you how badly they've been doing the last 20 years...)

Moynihan's report drew attention to an issue that didn't really need any. In response, politicians took advantage of the hysteria, apparently realized that Moynihan was crazy, and started scaring people with more problems that weren't problems. In 2000, Gore and Bush gave their solutions to a problem in social security that wouldn't become one until 2041 or 2048, depending on which analyst (called actuaries) you asked. According to the SSA actuaries, around 2048, the surplus built up between 1982 and 2011 will become exhausted. After that date, the SSA would not have enough funds to fully fund the benefits of retirees. This is the "sort of" problem I mentioned earlier with the baby boomers: in the 2040s the children of baby boomers will begin retiring. Coupled with the expected increased life expectancy of the baby boom generation, this will represent a drain on the system. It was a demographic feature not included in the 1982 solution. It is from this problem that Bush and Gore based their programs to save social security.

Before I go through why this is all nonsense, let's go through the Gore and Bush proposals of 7 years ago (remember that back then, before 9/11, there wasn't much to talk about except social security and tax cuts). Gore's solution was the oft-SNL parodied "lock-box." Gore said the way to solve the problem of the 2040s and any future accounting problems would be to create a kind of 'rainy-day' separate fund to rescue social security. He would do this by using the surplus accrued during the Clinton years and by not giving a huge tax break to the wealthy (as Bush would do).

Bush's plan, which he would finally attempt to pass in 2005 following his "presidential mandate" victory in '04, would be to establish private accounts. The whole plan was a bit complicated and even more slimy, so I'll try to go through it quickly. Look at it this way, social security would not be able to pay full benefits to retirees in 2048 from a lack of funds. Bush's solution would be to stop the collection of the surplus payroll taxes and instead allow current workers to use it for private investment in the stock market. He argued that investments in Wall Street would increase the value of those accounts sufficiently to pay for 2048 and afterwards. Sounds good? Well, here are a few things to consider:
- the plan calls for a kind of optimism in the stock market that...well requires a lot of the faith that Bush is always wearing on his sleeve. Revenues gained from investment would have to grow faster than treasury bill interest rates to have any effect. And of course, the stock market could crash and then...no more social security. How every working American would be able to manage these portfolios is also a mystery.
- the plan would halt the pyramid scheme: with private accounts you actually would be collecting your money at the end that you had been putting in while you were working. If we can get more out of the stock market than through the payroll taxes, why would you want social security around anyway? that is the question conservatives hoped you'd be asking. The entire plan is a way to convince America that social security is a lousy welfare program.
-with even optimistic projections, the best we could do would be to receive full benefits when 2048 comes around. Well, if that's the case, why don't we find another way to guarantee full benefits that wouldn't put the entire system at risk? It's a good question and there's a reason Bush and Cheney used a lot of gloom and doom talk when selling the private accounts program to convince people that social security had no future: it is easily fixed.

There are a variety of ways to fix the 2048 disaster. One, suggested by Gore is the lock-box. Another way could be the same used in 1982: raise the payroll taxes. Of course, when this was suggested by Kerry, republican attack dogs charged that he was trying to raise taxes. Well, if Reagan could do it, why can't we do it now? We could also raise the maximum income taxed for collection. I didn't mention it earlier, but as part of the compromise when the social security act was passed, Roosevelt agreed that there should a cap on the income that were subject to payroll taxes. For example, if you made $120,000 a year, you might only have to pay payroll taxes on $80,000. You then would receive benefits for a person who paid $80,000 a year (by the way, social security is slightly progressive in that those with larger salaries get slightly less retirement benefits as a percentage of what they pay than those with smaller salaries). Simply by raising the maximum limit by 15-20 thousand dollars we could solve the looming "disaster" in 2048. This isn't a big tax hike. Those that had more money subject to payroll taxes would receive MORE social security benefits when they retired to compensate. Still, the system would be solvent. In fact, there are all sorts of gimmicky ways to fix social security (raise retirement age, slightly decrease benefits, have a general fund tax) that won't risk completely ruining the system. Because of this flexibility, there really is NO PROBLEM. It's just a matter of how we decide to fix it.

What the Roberts Court Means for America

2007-06-28T13:07:00.000-07:00

I spent a lot of time on the Supreme Court in my last post. I even defended the dual free-speech cases decided on Monday. However, today, the Roberts court showed the new direction of the court and suggested what impact it will have on American society and economy.

As you may know, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stepped down from the court last year and with the simultaneous death of Chief Justice Rehnquist, Bush appointed two new conservative justices, Alito and Roberts. O'Connor long served as the moderate swing vote on the court. She was appointed to the court despite not having strong conservative credentials by Ronald Reagan because she was the best conservative woman Reagan could find after he promised to appoint a woman to the court in a 1980 campaign pledge. O'Connor, who leaned conservative in many of her decisions, would often side with her liberal colleagues in somewhat random cases (most famously those involving abortion and affirmative action). With O'Connor gone, Bush replaced her with more steadfast conservatives. I should mention that both Roberts and Alito are competent judges, unlike Thomas, and were reasonable choices, unlike Meyers, given that everyone knew that Bush was going to appoint conservatives. It is not that Bush picked bad judges, it's that he, as a conservative, chose conservative judges. Now we live in a country where our laws are interpreted by appointments of a political ideology, conservatism, that our nation voted for (sort of, when considering that the 2000 Florida recount was stopped by a 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court). The two cases decided today give us a glimpse to what conservativism at the last court in the land means for America.

In two joint cases, Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson, white parents sued their school district for using race to assign which schools students could attend. In Meredith, the child was unable to transfer to another school for kindergarten because only minority (in KY this means black) students were being allowed in since the school did not meet a district mandated 15% nonwhite student body. A similar complaint was brought in the Seattle case, which involved another district law that high schools could not drift more than 15 percentage points away from the district's overall makeup (60% of the students in the district are nonwhite.)

In today's decision, in a predictable 5-4 vote, the supreme court invalidated school assignment plans that take race into account. Ironically using Brown as precedence, the court decided that using race to place students in different schools was a violation of the 14th amendment. This means America will finally have racial equality, right?

Not quite. First, we must ask ourselves, why do districts have these placement systems in the first place? Brown ended the practice of official segregation of public schools. Previous to Brown, no matter what neighborhood a child lived in, or even if they lived across the street from the school, black kids went to black schools and white kids went to white schools. Brown forced districts across the country to end such practices. Since the decision, however, except in the big cities where groups were hyper-segregated, residential segregation has increased. This is largely a result of white flight to the suburbs away from the ghettoizing and darkening inner-cities. As America became more residentially segregated, its school system came to reflect it. Now instead of going across town to go to the black school, black students walk to their neighborhood dilapidated school while white students drive luxury cars to their suburban white school. I'm being hyperbolic, but this was the way America reacted to Brown. Of course, many people who left the city for the suburb with the intention of getting their kids into the "white" school did so not because they were racist, but because they wanted their kids to be in good schools and they wanted to leave a poorer neighborhood before it became run-down. This is something that every family wants, it's just that the white families had the resources to actually do it. The result was schools with incredible inequalities in the racial profile of the students and the school-funding not just in the same area, but within the same school district. Thus, in the late 1960s, federal courts began forcing districts to first deal with the vast inequality in school funding and then with the growth of highly segregated schools.
In one such decision in 1971, Serrano v. Priest, the supreme court ruled that districts had to equally distribute property tax funds (which were primarily used to fund public schools) across the whole district. Previously, property taxes were given to the school that served the neighborhood, resulting in richer neighborhoods having much wealthier schools. It shouldn't have come as a surprise when items like Proposition 13 sprung up to solve the problem by slashing property taxes (leaving school funding mostly to the state and "voluntary donations," which of course disproportionately came from richer neighborhoods and COULD be given to individual schools).

With such persistent inequalities in wealth within school districts came equally insistent inequities in student body make up. Within some districts, better schools were about 90% white, while worse schools were 90% minority. When such a district crossed some threshold and became what a federal court called 'segregated' they either took over the district or court ordered it to rectify the problem. Often the solution was forced busing. Ironically, forced busing placed students in a position they were before Brown--of being bused across town to a school far away when they may have lived across the street from a better school--except now it was done in the name of desegregation rather than segregation. Since the practice was so unpopular for a variety of reasons, school districts sought means to achieve the same ends that would be less unpopular with parents. One way, which was used in the high school I attended, was to start magnet programs in inner-city schools, thus putting more funds in poorer schools and attracting students of a different racial (and economic) make up into the school voluntarily. The other, which is what these supreme court decisions are all about, was preventing transfers to wealthier schools by white students and placing more white students in predominantly non-white schools if those schools were reasonably close by. For example, I live on the outskirts of my city and all four high schools are in the center of the city and in relatively close proximity. Imagine that the of the four schools in my district 2 of them were predominantly white and 2 were predominantly black, the district might send me to the predominantly black one for integration purposes because all of the schools are near each other and the busing difference would not be significant. Likewise, a black student living in the center of the city might be sent to a white school, because even though he's closer to the black school, he's still pretty close to both of them. It is these kinds of tweaking of school lines and limits on transfers that have allowed districts to push towards some type of desegregation.

With the decisions on today, schools will no longer be able to use race as a tool for preventing segregation as I described. The decision will have two effects. One, it calls into question the entire idea that schools should be desegregated. If race cannot not be taken account for school assignments, then how can a district do anything to desegregate itself. Secondly, it will force districts to find other means to solve problems of economic and racial inequality within their district. Possibly, schools could use family income rather than race to place students. Such a system has never been attempted and may simply cause richer residents (white or black) to leave the district.

The decision makes it much tougher for districts to desegregate and calls into question the stated goal of desegregation. Additionally, in its argument that to 'treat races fairly we need to treat races fairly' is the seed to undue affirmative action as a whole. I'll save it for another post, but I am actually opposed to affirmative action. I am opposed to for a few reasons, but one main one is that I believe that the need for affirmative action can be solved through public school desegregation. We live in a world of vast racial inequality. It is with the public school system that America has its only real hope for integration of people of diverse economic and racial backgrounds. The push for such desegregation has originated with federal courts. With this decision, this will less become the case. Rich, poor, black, and white students all benefit from a diverse student body. This is not to mention the benefit it affords to a democratic society. If we cannot come together in the public school system, where will we come together. Where will the fortunate get a glimpse of America's underlcass and where will the unfortunate raise themselves out of their situation? Where will America learn more about each other than Chappellistic stereotypes (yes, I just invented the word Chappellestic)? The decision signals an to the end of a battle for America to truly achieve a color-blind society that America has long been losing.

After that peppy diatribe, let's move on to the Supreme Court's second big decision. This one is a little more complicated. To describe it in simple terms is a little misleading, but to go into the details makes it lack some of its importance. I'll try somewhere in between.

In Leegin v. PSKS, the court decided, 5-4 again, to overturn a law made in 1911 that illegalized certain price floors. For those of you who never took economics (or fell asleep trying to) a price floor is a minimum price that a good can be sold for. Economics teachers drill into their students that price floors are bad, because, well, most economics teachers are neo-liberal arch-conservatives (more on this in another post) that don't know what they're talking about. But that aside, the issue here was not government enforced price floors, which economics teachers hate, but price floors agreed upon between companies, which economics teachers never talk about, because they've been illegal since 1911. The issue in this case was weather a discount retailer could sell a good less than its producer allowed. Producers don't want discounts to get to extreme in relation to their products because they fear it will upset their other sellers and it might cause a drop in their selling price. Thus, producers often make agreements with sellers that they cannot sell something for less than an advertised price. This is a notorious practice for guitar companies and is also why Ross does not usually advertise with the labels of their merchandise. Up until today, producers could not form agreements with sellers that would force them to not sell below a price floor at all. Now, this is permisible.

So, what's the big deal? For those of you who don't know your history, 1911 was the heyday of the progressive movement. One of the goals of the movement was to engage in "trust busting." Trusts were basically cartels, which are basically oligopolies. In those economics classes you might have heard all about supply and demand and the beauty of the free market and all that stuff. With all that pretty stuff they would always include a little disclaimer for every economic principle that sounded something like "in a perfectly competitive market...," which is the economics equivalent of physicists "in a vacuum..." While good for simplification of formulas and ideas, it also means that everything you learn in economics and beginning physics applies to phenomenon that are almost completely absent on earth. Additionally, as you add more air resistance the equations become less and less descriptive of what you're supposed to be describing (try dropping a baseball from a tower in a hurricane), and as you lessen competition, the laws of supply and demand begin to have less and less relevance.

In a perfectly competitive market, firms will seek to lower their prices to maximize sales. As a market turns moves towards monopoly, the system becomes less consumer friendly. In a monopoly, firms seek to raise prices to maximize profits. Simple game theory will tell you that two competing firms, if they can come to an agreement, would both benefit from not engaging in price competition. This is good for the companies, but bad for the consumers who end up paying more to increase the company's profit margins. This is why the progressives went after businesses for engaging in oligopolistic practices like price floor. If a seller and a producer are allowed to agree on a price floor, there's little reason for preventing companies from agreeing on price floors with each other. The result would be price gouging of consumers and big profits for businesses. Should we be surprised then that the decision was made by the court's 5 conservative members. There's a reason they're there.

So, how did we get from the progressivism of the Warren Court, to the moderate reaction of the Rehnquist Court, to the 5-4 conservatism of the Roberts Court? There's an easy answer. In between 1932 and 1968 (36 years), the years that the Warren Court was built, the Democrats held the presidency for 28 years. In between 1968 and 2008 (40 years) the Democrats have held the presidency for 12 years. It's simply probability as to when justices are forced to retire. Of course, justices usually like to step down when they think their replacement will agree with him/her, which is why Clinton was able to appoint 4 justices. Still, the dominance of Republicans at the executive level has allowed conservatives to turn the court in their favor away from the judicial philosophy of the Warren Court. The result has been and will be decisions like those announced today.

Free Speech

2007-06-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

Free speech and the first amendment have recently been in the news following some controversial supreme court decisions. Despite the fact that the decisions are considered to be conservative (basically because it was decided by the 5 conservative justices on the court: Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and the swing vote Kennedy) I actually agree with the decisions. Without going into details, I'll just say that today's conservative justices are actually more intellectually coherent on the issue of free speech. The following post, however, has little to do with the court's most recent opinions. Instead, I want to look at the history of law regarding free-speech and suggest the direction that future rulings on the subject should go.

A good beginning would be the actual text of the 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." As you can see, a lot of the 1st amendment deals with other issues besides free speech, namely freedom of religion (which will be covered in another post), freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of petition. Of course some of those other issues deal directly with freedom of speech (freedom of the press, in particular). If one is to isolate the words related to speech, the text becomes 'Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.' Notice that these laws limit themselves entirely to acts of Congress. In other words, there are no restrictions on the states or the executive. Legal practice soon came to broaden the bill of rights by applying it all laws restricting Congress to the executive branch where it was constitutionally appropriate to do so.This was the limit of the constitution in terms of free speech until the Civil War. After the Civil War, 3 amendments were passed that broadened some protections against citizens. Specifically, Section 1 of the 14th amendment states "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." It was initially unclear exactly what privileges and immunities were meant to be included as protections. Eventually, through legal theory developed by Hugo Black (who ironically was a former KKK member) and instituted via the Warren Court, the 14th amendment became interpreted to cover the bill of rights as 'protections and immunities' from states granted to citizens.' In other words, the 1st amendment, for example, became broadened to include actions not just by Congress, but by the states as well. To conclude, supreme court ruling precedence and new amendments have pushed the 1st amendment to include rights that cannot be abridged by any government (federal, state, or local).

However, the court has also placed limits on free-speech. Believing that absolute free-speech could cause insurrection and/or criminal activity, the supreme court has searched for a formula that would protect the right, but also limit the most egregious activities. It is from this desire that the court upheld Wilson's Espionage and Sedition Acts (to some degree) in Schenck v. U.S. by invoking the idea developed by Justice Holmes and Brandeis that free-speech should only be limited when it presented a "clear and present danger." The example that became adopted in the popular understanding of the phrase, of 'shouting fire in a crowded movie theater,' is a highly misleading analogy. Instead, the "danger" refers to the danger of people engaging in criminal activity or endangering the republic. Under this ruling free speech can be curtailed if and only if the government can demonstrate that the speech would encourage criminal activity or hinder the Congress from carrying out its basic duties. As you can see, the movie theater analogy has almost no application to the latter guideline. Rather than shouting fire in a movie theater, the "clear and present danger" test applies to telling a soldier that the war he is fighting in is an unjust one because this may cause him to desert (both a criminal act and a hindrance to Congress's ability to carry out a basic duty, that is, waging war).

Schneck was decided in 1919, but the Supreme Court was still unsure of what the ruling meant. The Schneck case had been applied to a wartime scenario, thus it was unclear what the limits of free-speech were in peacetime. So, in Dennis v. US, the Supreme Court broadened limits to free speech. In this case, the court upheld the Smith Act, which outlawed subversive (communist) activities that threatened to overthrow the government. Justice Vinson argued that Congress has the right to prevent speech that may advocate for the overthrow of the government. As he argued, using vitriolic language, "''[o]verthrow of the Government by force and violence is certainly a substantial enough interest for the Government to limit speech. And in combating that threat, the Government need not wait to act until the putsch is about to be executed and the plans are set for action." Instead of merely identifying a "clear and present danger" the government had to demonstrate that such an insurrection was at least somewhat realistic or possible. In other words, a drunkard in Kansas could not be convicted under the Smith Act for saying he wanted to be King of America, but a communist party organizer saying that capitalism needs to be overthrown could be.

Thus, in the age of McCarthy, protections against infringements of free speech were at their lowest. In 1969, however, the Warren Court overruled the Dennis decision with Brandenburg v. Ohio, which is still the law of the land. In the case involving a KKK rally, the court completely rid itself of "clear and present danger" and instead installed a new test that linked abstract speech to action by requiring that any infringement on speech that uses the advocacy of violence or criminal action for its basis must demonstrate that "such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action (stress added)." The key was now "imminent" danger rather than the unclear "clear and present danger" of a half century ago. The court did step back and add that such a strict defense could be reexamined in a condition of wartime (which was somewhat bizarre given that the nation was in the middle of the Vietnam war). Brandenburg serves as the test for free speech today.

However, I believe that the ruling is flawed. Firstly, as the history I have ran through demonstrates, freedom of speech protections have been more dependent on the composition of the supreme court rather than on an abstract principle. This is alarming because this is not at all how the Bill of Rights were intended, nor is it a good way of administering law (if one doesn't know what is illegal, how can one avoid breaking the law). Instead, we need an absolute right to free speech. Secondly, the ruling quite directly opens itself to overrule during wartime. This is highly alarming since it is in a state of wartime that free speech is most often infringed. Before I begin tearing down Brandenburg, I should acknowledge the achievement of the Warren Court. Frankly, I think is perhaps the second greatest thing to happen to this country (my top four would be the Declaration of Independence, the Warren Court, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt). The court dominated by Warren, Black, Frankfurter, Douglas, Fortas, and Brennan was bigger than any president and more drastic than any legislation. The Brandenburg case was a great step in the right direction and it successfully cast off the ridiculous rulings in Dennis and Schneck. With that said, the court missed a grand opportunity with Brandenburg. While better than its predecessors, the decision was seriously flawed. Part of the problem was the details of the case. Yet, the decision has remained the standard and now as the court turns more conservative there is little chance that it will be altered in the direction it should be.

The main fault with Brandenburg is that it failed to lay down a firm protection of political speech. Political speech in any circumstances, unless it particularly advocates violence, should be permissible in all circumstances. Additionally, acts that are done for political theater, unless there is a reasonable reason for the act to be illegalized, should be allowed (burning draft cards should be legal, although not reporting for duty can be punishable.)There need not be any other restriction. Unfortunately, Brandenburg sets down several limits. For one, it refers to advocacy of "lawless action". Under these criteria, a government need only to illegalize any kind of protest, etc. to limit the freedom of speech of someone trying to organize a rally or a petition, for example. By including "lawless action" the decision leaves itself open to easy loopholing.
Secondly, by not making a distinction between political speech and non-political speech, the ruling protects speech that doesn't need protecting.
Thirdly, the entire basis of limiting political speech, that people will be manipulated by demagoguery or pushed towards insurrection, is retained. Such a basis, (as the term DEMAgoguery might suggest) is essentially anti-democratic. It rests on the idea that people are easily manipulated and can't make their own decisions. If this is true, then a democracy cannot function. In fact, the whole reason the founding fathers installed a right of free-speech is because they felt that all political expressions should be able to compete in the marketplace of ideas. If an idea is a good one it should be listened to, if it isn't, then it won't be. It is not up to any person, government, or group to decide which ideas are good. It is up to the people. It is remarkable that such a basic fundamental principle of democracy is easily cast aside. No matter how radical, racist, revolutionary, or conservative a speaker may be, he/she should be entitled to express their political opinions. As I mentioned there should be some limits to this, but only two: it should not be obscene if it is in a public place and it should not advocate violence (because this could directly endanger the lives of other citizens). Beyond those restrictions, there shouldn't be any as long as the speech is political.

Fourthly, the decision does not solve the problem of speech in wartime. Every major war in American history has been accompanied by severe curtailment of political speech. Under Adams there were the Alien and Sedition Acts (and there wasn't even a war), under Lincoln there was his suspension of habeus corpus and his handling of C.L. Vallandigham (for my abridged history paper on this subject, go here), in World War I we had the Espionage Acts, in World War II we had Japanese internment, in the Cold War we had all sorts of restrictions including the Smith Act, Taft-Hartley, and HUAC, and today we have the Patriot Acts. In each case, speech was restricted needlessly and with each case (with the exception of the Patriot Act) historians have almost unanimously condemned those restrictions. They did so with reason. Governments have pushed for restrictions of on freedom of speech in wartime not because they needed to, but because they could. Since I'm talking purely about political speech (as opposed to revealing troop positions, for example), free speech has no military relevance. Realizing this, most governments claim that free speech hurts troop morale. Well, if troops are willing to die for freedom, perhaps they'd be willing to put up with it. The final rationale, that free speech decreases support for the war is nonsensical. Of course it decreases support for the war; that's exactly its intention. In case our leaders have forgotten, the United Stats has been involved in plenty of crazy unjust wars. It is the right and duty of citizens to challenge the moral righteousness of any war. The morality of war is decided by the people in how they express themselves and how they vote (and also by historians), not by the government. The former means freedom of expression, the latter can only be fairly accomplished with freedom of expression. Thus, absolute protection of political speech cannot be a side issue dealt with in the future, as it is in Brandenburg. If it is absolute, it must be that. It must not be open to negotiation during wartime, but most fully practiced during wartime. The insanity of our current war testifies to the need of citizens to speak their mind. After all, our ideas can't be any crazier than our present administration's.

The Great Health Care Debate

2007-06-23T21:08:00.000-07:00

Every 4 years health care pretends to be a big presidential campaign issue. This is despite the fact that nothing has been done with it since the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. However, because there are few real domestic issues to talk about and two major candidates (Edwards and Clinton) have made it "their" issue in the past and present, it has (re?)emerged as a major issue once again. Unfortunantly, much of the debate surrounding health care is muddled because of the number of interest groups, political opportunists, people who nothing about it, and people with unsubstantiated opinions. Hopefully, the following diatribe will help steer you through some of the confusion. As always, you have to start with history.

The first modern health insurance was given to Los Angeles workers on an irrigation project in 1908. As part of their wages, they were given access to doctors and medical treatments as a means to promote efficiency. Although often taken for granted, health insurance, from its beginning, was driven by employers who saw the benefit of a healthy work force. In 1929, as the depression hit, Baylor University Hospital offered a prepayment insurance plan to people in the surrounding area in order to avoid bankruptcy. The hospital joined with others in the area eventually evolving into Blue Cross. In 1939, the first true HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) was founded by Henry Kaiser to attract workers to work in his shipbuilding plants (as part of the preparedeness strategy for World War II) in Richmond, CA. (My grandfather was one of the first patients of the Richmond Kaiser hospital. After a crane operated by a drunkard smashed his leg, he awoke one day in his hospital bed to find Henry Kaiser willing to strike a deal with him: if he didn't sue, he'd give him lifetime employment. My grandfather didn't sue. He would later get a job with Pacific Bell.) In 1945, Harry Truman proposed a national health insurance scheme that would provide universal coverage based on payroll taxes (similar to social security and the model for medicare). However, the plan was struck down basically by the organizing of one interest group: the American Medical Association (AMA). The AMA is an association of doctors and is akin to what the bar association is for lawyers. The AMA had a few reasons to oppose Truman's plan, including that it would set how much they could charge for specific services and it would force doctors to deal with certain patients. Interestingly, the most prevalent and appealing rationale was that Truman was trying to "socialize" or "communalize" medicine. At the time, America was in the grip of anti-communist fervor and doctors tended to be very conservative. With hindsight, it was a bit of paranoia considering the rest of the industrialized world has adopted a similar plan and have not fell to the communist menace (yet?) and America has been able to survive despite "socializing" medicine for retired people and poor children (medicare and medicaid)

With the failure of the Truman's plan, medical insurance was thrown into limbo, basically to this day. Without a national plan, employers and employees found privatized health cooperativese (HMOs) to fulfill their medical needs. This of course left millions completely uninsured. In 1965, an attempt was made to solve some of the egregious results of privatized health care by using a social security surplus from the baby boom generation to help fund medicare and medicaid (more on social security in a later diatribe). The most recent health care proposal was made by Bill Clinton in 1993. Hillary was put in charge of the plan and she went to work: producing a massively complicated 1,000 page bill to congress. It was so complicated I can't really discuss it here, but basically the plan aimed to provide everyone with health care that they could reasonably manage on their own, cut health care costs, and cut down on bureuocracy and paperwork. Also, you'd get a health care card to carry around everywhere you went, which I think would be pretty cool. I'll save a full discussion of the Clinton plan for another post, but I'll just say this: it was an awesome plan. It was also the most confusing piece of public policy in American history and easily derided by interest groups who could simplify it into what it wasn't. It was another case of our news media completely failing us.

Fast forward to 2008, and we're faced with another "Great Health Care Debate." As I said, these kind of "debates" happen every four years. Basically, Democrats are waiting for health care costs to get so ridiculous, which they will, that people will have to turn to them. They've been waiting for a while (basically since 1945). Unfortunantly, a lot of people know there's something wrong with health care, they just don't know what. That's because there are four problems (actually, there are 5, but I'll get back to that later):

1. Lack of Universal Coverage: Every country in the industrialized world has universal health care except the United States. Why does everyone else have it? Because your gardener with measles is allowed into your gated community. In other words, even the rich have an interest in everyone around them being healthy. Currently about 20% of the country, 60 million people, don't have health care of any sort. Since hospitals have to help people with emergencies regardless of whether they have insurance or can pay for it, a lack of universal coverage costs hospitals a lot of money, by the way. So what? Who cares if the hospital has to spend money? The answer is that you do...or should. Public hospitals are funded by taxes (which means you pay for it) and private/HMO hospitals are forced to raise their hospital rates, which means you have to pay more to be at the hospital (which are now crowded because fewer are being built because too many people who can't pay are going to them because they're not insured) and they raise their insurance rates. Honestly, these costs are a drop in the bucket, but what isn't a drop in the bucket is all the money that is used to treat uninsured people for diseases and ailments that could have been prevented if they had regular access to a doctor if they had medical insurance. Lastly, because HMOs are driven by profit they have an inherent interest to maximize the costs for the consumer, assuming they can remain competitive. Of course, a privatized health care may cause costs to lower because of competition, since so few companies are actually involved in health care and there is significant economies of scale in the health care industry, there is actually relatively low price competition, and when it does occur, it is usually only for the short term. Contrasted with public and non-profit universal health care systems, private health care providers are less concerned with pushing down the costs to the consumer, although they may be more efficient. However, in a market where efficiency often translates to poorer services since there are few options, efficiency as it understood in this context may not actually be a good thing. In fact, because physicians have so many overlapping regulations from HMOs, hospitals, and the government, the private system may actually contribute to MORE bureaucracy and paper work. This just adds more and more costs.

2. Expensive Drugs: You've all heard about those old people going to Canada to get their medication, right? Why do they go to Canada? Because Canada has a national health plan that sets how much drug companies can charge for a certain drug. If the company refuses to sell it for that low...well, then they don't sell them to Canada. Presently, no drug company is boycotting Canada. Well, you might ask, if Medicare is great, why do the elderly have to go to Canada? It's an accident of history. When Johnson signed Medicare into law, the pharmeceutical industry was rather small and did not have the fancy drugs it has now. Johnson just assumed it wouldn't be a problem for people to pay for their own medicines. With some drug costs amounting to $20,000 a year, this has become a disaster.

3. Doctors, Hospitals, HMOs Can Charge Whatever They Want: Without government oversight and regulation in this area, the above mentioned groups can basically charge whatever they want for services. Of course, it's not that simple. Doctors if they're part of an HMO charge whatever the HMO says they can charge (apparently doctors like to be told what to do by a businessmen rather than a politician). A similar thing happens with hospitals and HMOs. HMOs then are limited by the laws of supply and demand and can only charge what people are willing to pay. Thus, everything's peachy pie and the free-market works, right? Well, sort of. There can be a large discrepancy in costs for certain procedures between different HMOs and the average consumer can't figure out what would be the cheapest way to get it. The bigger problem, though, is that a free-market only works when there is free-competition (in other words, never). There are only a limited amount of HMOs an employer or employee can choose from. HMOs have gotten good at carteling their prices to raise them to ever higher level and less good at using price-competition. Hospitals in particular have been hit by a deregulatory fervor left over from the 1980s that sold off most hospitals to large companies who are very intent on gouging their clients. The result has been increased costs for the consumer (a.k.a. you and your employer).

4. Lawsuits: Without government oversight, private doctors have become vulnerable to giant and ridiculous malpractice lawsuits. Surgery isn't easy, but if you as a doctor, who's spent a decade training for the profession, screw up, you could become bankrupt. Most doctors get equally outrageously expensive malpractice insurance plans. Of course, who ends up paying for the added costs for the doctors? If you guessed someone else...you're wrong.

All four of these problems have contributed to an immense increase in the cost of health care. So much so, that HMOs have had to raise their prices. This not only means that both employers and employees have to pay more for health care, but also that small businesses can no longer afford paying for employee health care.

The result has been even less people being covered by any kind of health insurance. Let's look at the numbers. The United States notoriously spends the most money per capita on healthcare in the world. For every man, woman, and child, the US spends about $5700. Comparatively, the UK and Canada spend about $2500. Honestly, comparisons to Britain are misleading because the British system is hyper-centralized, of poor quality because of lack of funding, and would never be used in the US for a variety of reasons. Comparisons with Canada are also questionable because the nation does so much free-riding off of American medical technologies. Additionally, France's system does not lend well to comparisons because it is so highly socialized and controlled by the central government. Instead, I like to use Japan and Germany for comparisons. In both cases, health care is extremely decentralized (which would lend itself well to American federal structure) and contains elements of privatization within a larger nationally run system (in other words, it's similar to what we could have, especially if Truman had won his battle against the AMA). Japan, by the way spends $2600 per capita and Germany $3200. Germany and Japan are interesting also in that their governments spend less on health care as a percentage of government spending than the United States. This is because both systems have been highly de-bureaucratized.

But just because a country spends less on health care, it doesn't make their system any better. A country could spend nothing on health care and...well, they wouldn't be very healthy. Thus, we need some measurement to compare the health value of certain systems. There are a number of different statistics to look at. One easy one is life expectancy. The U.S. life expectancy is 77.5 years compared with 80 in Germany, 82.5 in Japan, 80.5 in Canada, and 79.5 in the UK. Of course, there are a number of reasons why people might live longer that have nothing to do with health care spending (for example, pollution, working hours, age of retirement, etc.) A better statistic then could be infant mortality. Once again, the U.S. is behind: .6% of infants die in the U.S. during the first year of life, compared with .3% in Japan, .4% in Germany, and .5% in the UK and Canada. There are a variety of other statistics I could use to prove the same point: the US, despite spending almost twice as much on health care per person than other developed countries, has one of the lowest health benefits out of its system.

There are essentially two reasons for the inherent comparable inferiority of our system. One is that we, unlike everyone else, do not have universal health care. This has caused a lot of our statistics to become skewed: the early deaths and infant deaths are suffered disproportionately by uninsured people. Some might call this unfair skewing, others might call it indicative of the worst pieces of our health system. Essentially, about 20% of people in this country have health care that is comparable, if not worse, than that in 3rd world countries. Amazingly, a good chunk of our population could look at health care in Cuba, China, Nigeria, or Slovenia with envy. (speaking of which, in a 2000 world ranking of health care systems in the world by the WHO, the U.S. was listed as 37th, one spot ahead of Slovenia and two spots ahead of Cuba.) The other reason is the 5th reason why health care is so expensive that I foreshadowed earlier. If you remember those movies where some struggling father (who usually looks like Greg Kinnear) finds out that his daughter has leukemia or some other terminal disease and he promises to do everything he can to provide her with the best treatment money can buy as he works 7 jobs to find a cure, you'll have an idea where the fifth expense comes from. While it may sound heroic and it makes for a good movie, it is not the best strategy for managing health care. This is because while to that father no amount of money would be too much to his daughter, as a society the value of saving that child is severely diminished. After all, how much money would you give for treating a terminally ill child in Wisconsin? If it's a lot, I can give you some websites and phone numbers. For most people, of course, your wallet is limited and that money could probably be spent better somewhere else. It's sad, but true. However, unlike in every industrialized country in the world, the United States' health care system spends millions of dollars keeping alive terminally ill patients. It is estimated that about $1000 per capita could be saved by "streamlining" when hospitals send home patients and give up on treatments. It's cold but true. The British health system is notorious for such coldness, but most other systems have installed a variety of methods of cutting back on such costs. The U.S. even has its method: most HMOs only cover hospital bills for a month, then you're on your own. That means that if you suffer irreperable brain damage, but still can "live," you'll only be able to do so if you have a special health care package or very wealthy relatives. Given that, you may guess why U.S. health care costs are so statistically inflated: when the insurance runs out, Americans, because they want to be the guy in the movie and because compared to the rest of the world, they have the money to do it, are more likely to support terminally ill patients and patients with irreperable brain damage.

I separated the 5th reason from the rest because it has little to do with health care reform and more to do with economics and American temperament. As I mentioned, changing some rules could save as much as $1000 per capita, but the reason that HMOs don't is because Americans don't want to do this. Fair enough. There are other ways to cut back costs.

In fact, a variety of ways are being proposed during this election campaign. The proposals of the Democrats have driven the debate. In reality, the difference between the Obama, Clinton, and Edwards plans are negligible and trivial. Honestly, the only reason these candidates have a plan is to, one, establish themselves as viable candidates, and two, give the Democrats something to talk about in debates. It doesn't hurt that talking about health care helps the Democrats. You may have noticed that the candidates have not released their Iraq plan yet. All plans that have been proposed and will be proposed by the Democrats have the following characteristics:

1. they will mix private and public systems and include HMOs.

2. they will seek a cost cutting mechanism. Clinton has proposed a panel to analyze and regulate medical practice efficiency. More conservative candidates may focus on tort reform, just because they hate lawyers like John Edwards.

3. They will seek universal or near-universal health care. Because his plan is not compulsory, strictly speaking, Obama's plan is not a true universal health insurance coverage plan. This is more a technicality more than anything else. Look for all the other candidates to exploit this in debates.

4. They will maintain a patient's ability to choose a doctor and give them some flexibility in their preferences.

5. They will pretend their plan is simplistic when it is extremely complicated.

6. They will address drug costs.

7. They will be very confusing and boring.

The Republicans have been less willing to propose a health care plan because they know it's not an issue they're going to win with. In many ways, they will basically argue that the status quo is okay and all that is needed is a few minor tweeks. In 2004, Bush did just that with a half-assed drug plan and a highly conservative tort reform package that had no chance of passing in Congress (full of lawyers?).

One Republican that has broken the mold is Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani's proposal is so crazy it just might...be crazy. Giuliani's plan is to continue the conservative mantra of tax cuts and deregulation and apply it to health care. Essentially, Giuliani proposes to give every American a tax credit for having health care and let them choose their own health coverage. He uses the term PPO to refer to the new health organizations that will spring up in the new consumer directed health provider market, but he's just using something familiar to describe something foreign. As he talks about it, Giuliani would make health insurance similar to auto insurance. Now, there would be some benefits to this, namely that costs would be radically driven down as the Geicos of health care compete in the marketplace for those who want insurance in name only to get the tax credit. Unfortunately, health insurance is not auto insurance. As in auto insurance, consumers would be vulnerable to swindling. Currently, health care plans are screened by labor unions and employers and simplified for the buyer so that they aren't scammed. Without these intermediaries, such screening would be left to the consumer. There is also the problem of funding. Where would this tax credit come from? Will Giuliani raise taxes to pay for the tax break? Probably not. Certainly the plan, without new taxes, would be beneficial for the employer who would no longer have pay anything to have their employees in good health. Giving a tax break with the numbers Giuliani has been throwing around ($15,000 per family) would cost about 150 billion dollars. I do have to admit that the plan would insure more people and would probably approach universal coverage, accepting that the insurance would be completely voluntary. In some speeches he has suggested giving a further tax break (welfare?) to those who can't afford the few thousand dollars that would differ between the tax break and the cost of the health plan. But the biggest problem with the plan, the problem that makes it nonesensical, is that treating health insurance like auto insurance defies the whole purpose of health insurance. The basis of health insurance is that you don't know when you might get sick. Although some people are usually healthier than others, it's not comparable to people being better drivers than others. If you were struck by a sudden and expensive illness you would be forced to pay the monstrously high premiums you would have to pay for crashing into three school buses while drinking vodka and changing your baby. The reason people get health insurance is so that they are covered when something goes wrong, not for when they make a mistake. In this system, if you got sick, your premiums would raise and you would be a less sought after customer by health insurance providers. In fact, it is the pooling of clients without health problems with those that have health problems that makes health insurance a profitable undertaking for HMOs.

The health care debate is confusing, tedious, and easily convoluted. Hopefully, I've outlined what the problem is and given a foundation for making your own political decisions. Obviously, my own viewpoint is that we need a decentralized public system. However, I accept that this is politically impossible (thank you, AMA). I should end by giving you the following warnings:
1. No matter how much you study it, health care will always be confusing. It is sometimes impossible to get past the rhetoric and figure out what's actually being proposed.
2. If there's a simplistic campaign commercial that makes a plan seem ridiculously bad, it's probably misleading you.
3. If someone uses the term "socialized medicine" he/ she is probably a closet fascist.
4. If there's a lot of money behind a plan (from drug companies, hospital associations, or HMOs), it's probably a bad plan.
5. Just because it's complicated it doesn't mean it's bad. It just means that it'll never get passed.

An Undefined Term

2007-06-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

According to the President of the United States we are in a "war against terror." However, there is significant question as to what he's talking about. Not only is our supposed enemy elusive, but so is how we define who or what we're fighting. Some might argue that Bush is using a term defined as one thing to describe something else for the purpose of simplicity. Otherwise, the "War on Terror" would become a sentence or a paragraph rather than a slogan. That may be, but in the name of simplicity, Bush has also confused what the war is about with the specific intent of gaining more support for himself while simultaneously deflecting his critics into a position that they do not hold. In other words, it's bigger than semantics.

First, we must assume that Bush wants a "war on TERRORISM" rather than "TERROR." Terror just means fear, and it would be rather difficult to fight fear, especially with armed soldiers. Another definition of "terror" relates to a totalitarian state's use of fear to quell opposition (as how the term was used in the French and Russian revolution). Apparently, Bush is not fighting this either because very few states expressly use "terror," and those that do (Uzbekistan, North Korea, Burma) are not at war with us.

Thus, we need a definition of "terrorism." In fact there are several definitions (some linguists say as many as 100 separate definitions) that could be used. Here, I will rank 7 of them from the most accurate and general meaning of the word to how it's used more colloquially and specifically:

1. The systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion (Websters)

2. The use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes. (Dictionary.com)

3. peacetime equivalent of a war crime (Alex Schmid, terrorist "expert")

4. any act intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act (UN) (alsoe see US criminal code: …activities that involve violent… or life-threatening acts… that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State and… appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping).

5. the intended use of violence against civilians (news media)

6. acts perpetuated by groups that despise freedom and pursue totalitarian aims (paraphrasing Bush)

7. Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalists who use suicide and car bombs on American civilian and non-civilian targets. (colloquial)

As you can see there is quite a bit of discrepancy. Different definitions mean fighting different things. Interestingly, only the 7th applies to what we're actually doing.

Let's go through them. The first is the most broad, but it doesn't include its uses for politics and its relationship with casualties. Under this definition, a sibling or a parent could be considered a terrorist, thus it's not particularly useful.

The second definition brings in politics, an important step. However it doesn't include civilians. Thus, any war or even a legal system could be defined as terrorism. In other words, it's not particularly accurate.

The 3rd definition brings in the notion of war crimes, which has a whole literature of its own. I actually like this definition as a kind of shorthand. The only problem is that war crime laws are entirely based on the idea that you are fighting a declared enemy and so include things like misusing a flag of truce, etc. It would also include oppressive acts by states against their own citizens, which I do not consider terrorism. Of course, this is not what the "war on terrorism" is about because...well, we're at WAR with them.

The 4the definition, especially the UN part, is considered by most to be the best definition. There is a addendum to this definition written by Schmid here, which goes into even greater detail. For me, this is the best definition of the term available and the one I use. There are a few reasons why this is not what the "war on terrorism" is about. One, under the definition we might be guilty of terrorism, if nothing else than from our "shock and awe" campaign at the beginning of the Iraq occupation that killed many civilians. The only question is whether we "intended" to kill them. Also, our treatment of non-combatants, from Abu-Gahrib to torture facilities in Romania and Egypt (and possibly even at Guantanamo) would also put us in the terrorist camp. And of course, there is the whole issue of us being a regime of terror, given our somewhat recent history of using terrorism as defined in this way: in Chile in 1973, in Nicaragua in the 1980s, several acts against Castro and Cuba, and specific acts in Vietnam (like the My Lai massacre, for example) (this is not to mention the actions of Sherman in the Civil War or the the rebels of the American Revolution). Obviously, we can't be fighting ourselves, so this can't be what is meant by a "war on terrorism."

The sixth definition, provided by Bush when confronted with this question, would be cute if it wasn't so trite. Essentially, Bush is trying to make the "war on Terrorism" into the Cold War, Part II: Cruise Control. The definition he gives for terrorism is the same definition Cold Warriors gave to communism. Unfortunately for him, terrorism isn't communism and if he thinks it is, then we're in a lot of trouble. I'll spare you a long discussion of Cold War history and the theories of Marx, Lenin, Kennan, and Reagan, and just point out that a definition of communism does not stand up as a definition of terrorism. If we look at actions that are universally considered terroristic, like those perpetuated by the Mau-Maus, the FLN in Algeria, the Sturm Gang and Irgun in Israel, the PLO in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, you'll notice that they all were not that concerned with establishing 'totalitarianism' (although some did lean in that direction), and rather than disdain freedom, all of the above mentioned groups were trying to get independence from something. In fact, the only time terroristic acts would fit under this definition is when they were committed by communists, as in the Vietnam war. This is not the definition we actually use in our "war on terrorism" because, well, we're not trying to overthrow communist governments anymore (China's ok now because they sell us stuff) and we are actually allied with a number of groups that easily fall under this definition of "terrorism" (namely the Saudi royal family, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan, to name a few.)

This leaves us with the last definition, which happens to be exactly who we're fighting. Of course, the administration has pretended that terroristic groups across the world are being targeted, from FARQ in Columbia to ETA in Basque Spain, but in reality we haven't done much in these areas. We won't be invading Columbia any time soon. There are two issues that should be contemplated considering that this is the definition we are using for the "war on terrorism":
A. This is a terrible definition of terrorism historically and analytically.
B. Is this group worth targeting for a Cold War, Part II type of confrontation?

If you answered yes to part B you might just be a redneck...I mean a supporter of the "War on Terror" (sorry, bad joke). Now, if you think these groups need to be confronted everywhere for several generations, that's a perfectly valid viewpoint. Certainly, terrorism according to the 7th definition is a horrible phenomenon that can be directly blamed for the attacks on Sept. 11. Perhaps, then, you think the "war on terror" is a good idea being poorly implemented. Fair enough, I don't particularly disagree, although I question how a war will solve the problem (perhaps an honest glimpse of their grievances could be examined just for the sake of curiosity). At least now, though, you know what is meant by a "war on terror" and you won't be confused by what it isn't.

So, what isn't it? An overthrow of Saddam would fit nicely under this category. Well, Saddam was a Middle Easterner. However, he was not an Islamic fundamentalist (in fact he was a pretty stern secularist). He also never targeted the United States in any attack except during the Persian Gulf War and he did not have anything to do with Osama Bin Laden and the rest of those who planned/executed the attacks on Sept. 11. Well, then, perhaps the occupation of Iraq had nothing to do with the "war on terror," which it didn't. So, why does Bush keep bringing it up?

Bush uses the refrain of a "war on terrorism" for two reasons: One, he has made Iraq into a battleground for the war on terror with his disastrous overthrow of Saddam. Thus, it actually makes sense to use it NOW with Iraq. Second, by using the term Bush has taken credit for a war he has done almost nothing to fight. By this I mean not that he hasn't strapped on a machine gun, but that under Bush, the United States has done almost nothing effective to fight "terrorism" as defined above outside of invading and occupying Afghanistan. Ironically, then, Bush and his associates have called those that criticize his "war on terrorism" as being "soft on terrorists," when Bush has done nothing substantive to decrease the amount or power of "terrorists" in the middle east (quite the contrary). It's not because he doesn't want to (probably), it's because he's spent all his time and military on preventing Iraq from becoming the ultimate "terrorist" super state, a possibility he single-handedly created.With a ridiculous misnomer for his current policies, Bush has used the "war on terrorism" to protect himself from attacks of being "soft on terror," which he is. It's what George Orwell called doublespeak.

Diatribe the First: Why the Surge Won't Work and Its Consequences for the Occupation

2007-06-20T11:29:00.000-07:00

As you may know, the present military strategy in Iraq is to increase the troop levels for several months, stabilize the country, and then exit. The surge is ramping up and will be in full force by the beginning of July and will last until late September.

However wonderful the scenario sounds, it is complete fiction. The plan will not work. At best it will result in failure, at worst it will result in escalation, more troops in Iraq (which means more American deaths), and the only plausible course for success to be a military draft.

To understand why the plan will fail, we must first, as with everything, consider the history. Let's go back to the beginning of the problem: when the administration and the world realized that the invasion of Iraq was a complete disaster. It was actually a double disaster in that there were no WMDs, making the war meaningless and insane, and also we were not exactly greeted as liberators. The lack of WMDs made the war tragic, the insurgency made the war a quagmire. Despite their stupidity, the Bush administration finally, although belatedly, accepted that the insurgency was real, that they were unprepared to deal with it and the emergence of a sectional conflict, and that any occupation would be tough to enforce (and costly) and complicated to end. With this realization came a new plan from the Pentagon. Donald Rummsfeld, after discarding the whimsical notion of a quick occupation followed by a flowing democracy while Iraqi oil reserves paid the bill, developed the plan, with Gen. Casey, of "decreasing the footprint." The "footprint" refers to the area that U.S. forces would be supervising and placed in harms way. The idea of "footprint" is both geographical and institutional. Rummsfeld wanted to gradually move American forces out of safe spots and into the most needed trouble zones until, finally, the Iraqi security forces were able to handle the entire country. He also wanted to pass on authority from American military personnel to Iraqi civilians.

Unfortunately for everyone, the "decreased footprint" plan was as unsuccessful as it was ill-conceived. After about 3 years of implementation (from 2003 to Nov. 2006), the United States was no closer to exiting, the country was as dangerous as ever (if not more dangerous), and Iraqi forces were in no position to take over security responsibilities of any type. In reality, there was no secret as to why the plan had failed. 150,000 troops was wildly insufficient to quell a growing insurgency and train the Iraqis. If there weren't enough troops to stabilize the country and stop people from looting when it was relatively stable (immediately following the invasion), then how could there be enough to handle a growing civil war increasingly mobilizing more distraught people and being funded from international terrorist organizations (like Al Quada) and national governments (Syria and Iran)? I say it was no secret, because this is exactly what the military's top brass was telling everyone (everyone except Congress, that is). So why was it pursued for so long? Two reasons: One, Rummsfeld wanted to get out of Iraq as quickly and cheaply as realistically possible. The insurgency was an embarrassment to him and it was costing the pentagon a lot of money. All the while, he didn't want to admit that the invasion was a mistake, that the American army was unprepared to deal with an occupation, and that his generals had been correct in advising that a true occupation force would need about 500,000 troops (Vietnam?) Two, Bush (or to be more precise, Karl Rove), thought that by promising and maintaining a lighter "footprint" the war as a political issue would be avoided. Bush thought he could win on domestic issues combined with grand-standing about vague notions like "terrorism" while Iraq was left as a sideshow with little importance. He thought he'd be able to do this, because no one on the opposition had any realistic defined proposal beyond total, immediate withdrawal, which was politically unpalatable. And so he did in 2004.

We all know why the "decreased footprint" idea was abandoned. The day following the 2006 November midterm elections, Bush announced Rummsfeld's resignation and with him his strategy in Iraq. The election had been a disaster for Republicans and was largely seen as a reaction to Bush's strategy in Iraq. Those on the left just wanted out and those on the right just wanted to win. I remember Bush's press conference well: I was struck by the president's humility and encouraged that the election had forced Bush to fire Rummsfeld. However, I was a little apprehensive. I had always considered Rummsfeld as a scapegoat for everything with the Iraqi war, from Abu Gahrib to the actual invasion when the real blame should have been placed with Cheney and Bush. I figured that by removing Rummsfeld, Bush was losing a lightning rod more than anything. I just hoped that the decision wouldn't allow Bush to wash his hands of all the problems in Iraq.

As it turned out, my first surprise was justified: Bush was a little TOO humble during that news conference. He was putting on an act of being beaten; of being pushed by the electorate towards a new course. In reality, the election allowed Bush to distance himself from an old faulty policy and embark on a new one, which was something he was probably aching to do for almost a year. Ironically, the departure of Rummsfeld, an easy target for Democrats, represented a further commitment to Iraq and the end of a policy that included disengagement.

The new policy, as we heard in early January, would be a troop surge. There are two ways to look at the surge: believe that the president's plan is genuine or cynically believe that it is a planned babystep towards escalation. I'll leave it up to you decide which you believe. (more on that later)

In any case, the announcement of the surge was immediately met with consternation. Those on the left asked how more troops would help us find a way out while those on the right questioned if 30-40,000 more troops could really make a difference (and if so, why not 20 or 50 thousand?). The reason for its confusion is that it was badly explained by both the news media and the administration. The news media didn't explain it because they're incompetent and it doesn't lend itself to soundbytes beyond "Bush announces surge plan," etc. The administration made no effort to genuinely inform the public because they knew the plan would have little impact and was easily prone to obvious failure. The failure of the administration to adequately explain the proposal should set off red flags. Because they know it will probably fail, they will probably argue that the reason for the failure was not enough troops. The "exit strategy" will mean more troops, longer tours, and possibly even a military draft (if a conservative is elected in 2008 with a mandate for such a drastic measure).

At this point you might be asking, 'what is the plan?' Most summations of the strategy have been that the army will send in a bunch of troops to smash the insurgency, damper growing sectional conflict, and quickly come home, presumably by the end of the year. This is not the plan. The plan was born from past experiences and a change of military leadership. Although large areas of Iraq, especially those with mixed sunni/shia populations (like Baghdad), are in a state of proto-Civil War, some mixed areas have been stabilized. The success areas are those in which American security forces have been able to install martial law and remove/keep out the sectarian gangs. Also, because of a large presence in these areas, the American military has worked with the civilian population and gained their trust. The prototypical example is the now somewhat spectacular stability of Tal Afar. It is from Tal Afar that new commanding general in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus, has gathered his advisors. With the ousting of Rummsfeld came the ousting of Gen. Casey. In his place, Gen Patraeus, who holds a PhD. from Princeton, organized and pushed for the new surge strategy. It was his immediate subordinates who sold the surge plan to Bush in Nov. and Dec of 2006. The plan they proposed was to turn Baghdad into Tal Afar by concetrating a large American force (about 25 to 30,000 troops) in heavily disputed neighborhoods in the capital city. They hoped, or declared, that stability in the most highly charged areas of the city would spread out to the rest of the city. In turn, Baghdad would serve as a launching pad for the new Iraqi government to establish their authority and eventually quell the provinces if nothing else than by leading by example. To stabilize central Baghdad, the American military would need those extra 30,000 troops, which could only be found by manipulating the rotation system for active duty for a couple of months and selling the idea of a "surge" to congress.

To review, the surge is so small because it will apply to only a few neighborhoods in Baghdad. Its success can be judged in September. But analysts are quick to point out that the plan has serious problems. One, stabilizing a small area in Baghdad will not neccessarily halt sectarian violence in the rest of the city. Groups will probably move away from the "hot" zones in Baghdad to previously more stable areas and continue their violence there. Two, the idea that peace in one city will somehow spread to outlying areas is little more than a leap of faith. Such a scenario has proven itself several times in military history to never occur (most relevantly here, in Vietnam and Alfghanistan). Isurgents merely move to the countryside and continue their attacks there. Most planning of attacks, including gathering weapons and building bombs, already occurs in the hinterland of Baghdad. How would the surge put a stop to this. Three, once the surge ends, in the beginning of October, there is little guarantee that violence will not recommence. In fact, many groups may just hide out the few months that the Americans have a larger presence, especially in those areas of Baghdad. Additionally, it isn't clear how Iraqi forces are supposed to trained in these magical three months when there hasn't been success in that area for 4 years.

Now to the question of what the surge means for the larger occupation. In reality, it is difficult to analyze the long-term effects of the surge without some idea of Bush's thinking process (the genuine vs. cynic choice I mentioned earlier). Going with the assumption that the surge will fail in its larger goals, if not its small goals of pacifying a few neighborhoods in Iraq, there are two courses of action. One, assuming that Bush is embarking on this plan in a genuine effort to win the war, then Bush himself will be faced with two options: cut his losses and leave because to win the war would not really be worth it or fully commit the United States to the occupation of Iraq, which would require a military draft and an occupation force of about 500,000 (the same size of force that failed in Vietnam, by the way.) Two, assuming that Bush is using the surge to introduce the American people to the idea of sending more troops, Bush will continue to call on more troops, not unlike Johnson during Vietnam, and pass the problem on to the next president who will then be faced with either withdrawing or full-engagement. As you can see, the options are limited and it doesn't matter too much what Bush's rationale is. The results will probably be comparable.

I hope that all voters in the 2008 election consider the scenarios available. I know full well that packing up and leaving from Iraq would be a disaster. Undoubtedly, it would lead to a bloody civil war and possibly genocide. The nation would serve as a breeding ground and safe-haven for terrorist organizations. It would destabilize the entire region and put oil reserves in danger. It would also display American weakness.

With all of the above in mind, I believe it's time to come to terms with our...umm...redeployment away from Iraq. My first reaction was that we, as a nation, had a responsibility to "stay the course" and establish democracy in a nation we had invaded for that purpose. However, I could neither die or kill for such a purpose. As a man of my age it would be intellectually dishonest of me to push for continued occupation if I were unwilling to do the occupying. Aside from my personal ethics, there is the larger lesson of Vietnam. The United States could never realistically win in Vietnam, even with a fully mobilized military. We cannot win in Iraq without a fully mobilized military. Perhaps we can win with one, but is it worth taking the chance? In 1969, Richard Nixon took office and had the opportunity to end the war with the same terms he would sign 4 years later. In between, 25,000 Americans (half of the deaths in Vietnam) were killed in the Southeast Asian quagmire. Was it worth it? Will it be worth it to sacrifice more American lives for the same result just because we can't come to terms with the psychological effects of losing? One of the problems with getting out of Vietnam is that many families could not handle that their husbands/sons/fathers had died for no purpose. Luckily, we are at a stage when the military deaths are such a small percentage of our population that the impact of the war has not really affected most families (even those with members serving). We should take advantage of that situation and withdraw as quickly as possible before more families are destroyed. It is time to leave Iraq.

If you are looking for "The Greatest Thoughts Ever Contrived"...

2007-06-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

go to its new and improved address at:
http://thegreatestthoughtsevercontrived.blogspot.com/

This address is now the home of a new, much less entertaining blog in which I engage in serious (a.k.a. boring) discussions of a variety of topics, usually political.

Please adjust your bookmarks accordingly.