I'm feeling more affection for the Nationals by the minute.
I understand Megan's aversion to spending public money on sports stadiums (especially as most studies find that municipalities don't get much economic bang for the public buck), but this is almost as short-sighted and impractical as....voting for Ron Paul or something. First, the Nationals are themselves one of the worst offenders in recent years when it comes to extorting public money for their stadium - a city council revolt led DC to cap their outlays at "only" $611 million for the Nationals' new stadium. And it's not as if DC is that much more flush, or has fewer social problems, than NYC.
For better or worse, most new stadiums built over the past 20 years or so have been built whollly or mostly with public money (though the trend has been decreasing in recent years). By (very, very low) relative standards, New York has gotten off relatively easily with the new stadiums for the Yankees and Mets - neither project would crack any top-10 list of municipal stadium boondoggles.
And while the Nationals are on the way up, I still expect that New York will earn a better return on its investment than DC - at least on the field.
Why do political wives stand by their man? Why do they stoically stand next to their husbands at the podium as the dirtbags admit to sleeping with prostitutes and young men? Most women I know would morph into Loretta Bobbitt in a similar situation rather than Silda Spitzer.
Silda is urging Eliot to stay in office. At this point, I would be throwing his clothes out of the window of their 5th Avenue apartment and letting them rain down on the reporters below.
I can think of many reasons why Mrs. Spitzer would at least try to put up a brave front in public.
The first problem is, Laura is approaching this like a normal person. There is nothing normal about a political family. I just blogged about this. Let's quote Andrew Ferguson:
But does "super type-A personality" really describe the kind of person who runs for president nowadays? It's not pleasant to think of the life they lead, these Americans who would be president, from the first hints of dawn to well past midnight, this life of endless demands, this succession of superficial sociability, in which you smile and smile and pop your eyes wide open in delighted wonder at the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of faces and places that circles before you, and you haven't the time or leisure to settle on a single one. Charming countryside, pretty little towns, sprawling centers of commerce and industry fly by and you haven't a moment to enjoy them or learn their tales. You rush to meet hundreds of people a day and never have a meaningful exchange of words with any of them.
From the backseats of freezing cars and vans you're hustled into overheated coffee shops and those packed school gymnasiums with the stink rising to the rafters and then the oppressive hush of corporate meeting rooms, where your nose starts to run and a film of sweat forms under your wool pullover, and you press the outstretched hands that carry every bacterial pathogen known to epidemiology. You open your mouth and you release the same cloud of words you recited yesterday and the day before. And in the Q&A, when you stop to listen, you hear the same questions and complaints from yesterday, the same mewling and blame-shifting, all imploring you to do the impossible and through some undefined action make the lives of these unhappy citizens somehow edifying, uplifting, and worth living. And you always promise you will do that; you have no choice but to tell this kind of lie.
There's no rest, because there's not a moment to waste: The handful of minutes away from the kaleidoscope are spent chatting with the scorpions of the press, the ill-dressed, ill-mannered reporters from the prints and the pretty, preening peacocks of TV, each of them either a know-it-all or a cynic or a dope, take your pick, and each of whom, for professional and other reasons, will deploy all his energies and cleverness to the task of trapping you into a misstatement or ungenerous remark or expression of irritation so he can convey to his editors and the world that--at last!--you've made a gaffe; and if you won't make a gaffe then he will convey to his editors and the world how "scripted" and "over rehearsed" you sound; kind of slick, almost robotic, inauthentic.
When the scorps are dismissed, in the seconds before you pass from the freezing van to the overheated gym or boardroom, a sycophant whose name you can't remember hands you a cell phone that connects you to a rich man whose face you dimly recall from another boardroom last summer and you beg him to give you money, or more often--considering the grinding pressure you feel for cash, always for cash--you beg him to assemble a circle of other rich men that he can beg on your behalf, and when you sign off you don't have time to be grateful. There will be more calls before dinner and after dinner, and dinner is a cold thigh of chicken in a sump of clotted gravy served from a steam table in a freezing cinderblock banquet room at the Lions Club, and a hundred pairs of eyes fix themselves on you--a celebrity, someone they've seen on TV--as you dribble the gravy on your shirtfront. And after you release the same words and hear the same complaints you go to bed in a Hampton Suites for five hours of sleep on starchy sheets with dimly visible stains whose origins are impossible to discern, and from the corner the digital display on the microwave flashes 12:00 12:00 12:00 . . .
And you do all this so you can wake up the next morning and do it again. Because you like it.
The man or woman who seeks out such a life and enjoys its discomforts is not normal. Not crazy necessarily, but not normal, and probably, when the chips are down, not to be trusted, especially when the purpose of it all is to acquire power over other people (also called, in the delicate language of contemporary politics, "public service" or "getting things done on behalf of the American people").
This. Is. Not. Normal. And no candidate can long undertake this kind of effort with an unsupportive family - either the candidacy goes or the family does. A spouse that supports this kind of effort is buying into a pressurized lifestyle that outsiders can barely understand, much less relate to. (Michelle Cottle's profile of Michelle Obama in this week's TNR is also worth reading along these lines.) Remember Elizabeth Edwards' insistence that her husband redouble his campaign efforts in light of her cancer's recurrence? That type of commitment to the husband's political career is closely related to what drives a political wife to attend a press conference regarding that which any other couple would try with all their might to keep private. Dean Barnett, no friend to Democrats, understood this:
I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW BAD I FEEL FOR ELIZABETH AND JOHN EDWARDS. I'm familiar with the body-blow of a sudden diagnosis that turns your world upside down. It's incredible - you walk into a doctor's office and within a span of minutes you find out your life will never be the same. In the back of your mind you nourish the hopes of miracle cures or that you might be like that guy in Dubuque who got the same diagnosis but oddly enough lived forever, but the reality of the situation sits there in your mind. You can't shake it - it just won't leave.
But you try to carry on. I think I may know some of what the Edwards are feeling. They've been running for the White House for seven years now. And make no mistake - as Hugh points out in his book, running for president is a family affair. It's more than a dream and an ambition for them. It's a big part of what defines their lives.
So they walked out of that doctor's office refusing to let her disease take their lives away. Some people are calling their decision courageous; others find it puzzling. Having been in a situation analogous to theirs, I think I have some understanding and I know I have some sympathy. They're working through all of this. Their first instinct is not to surrender. That's good, and it's what you would have expected. People who seek the presidency aren't the types who give up or even compromise easily.
Whether high-level politics selects for people capable of this level of commitment or causes it - likely both - the end result is that families committed to politics at this level simply cannot, and do not, react in ways that would seem "normal" to outsiders. The pressure (which after a certain amount of habituation, becomes more internal than external) to keep up the public facade is overwhelming in a way that outsiders can barely imagine.
I still think this is one of the underrated reasons for the recent increase in political dynasties: they're the only ones who think of the lifestyle as normal, which confers a major competitive advantage in and of itself.
I don't really know any politicians, but some of my best friends are rabbis or rabbis' wives. For pulpit rabbis (and I am sure the same is true for other religions' clergy families), the pressure to be "on" and present the appropriate public face 24/7 to the community also can be pretty overwhelming, and the entire family is enlisted into this project by necessity. It is part of what you sign up for, if you're the wife - and the kids learn quickly that they have no choice (yes, many wonderful rebellions are inspired by this realization). If you think that political wives can be resentful (as shown by certain lines attributed to Mmes. Spitzer and Obama over the years), trust me on this one: you have NEVER had a candid conversation with a pulpit rabbi's wife.
Finally, there is one point that isn't restricted to political or rabbinic families. When everything is falling apart around you, it is natural to seize at any part of the situation that you can control. It wouldn't surprise me if women in Mrs. Spitzer's situation try to keep up an "appropriate" public facade purely as an attempt to control what they can, to hold the husband-induced chaos at bay in at least one way. I don't think anyone can criticize a woman for this reaction.
SINCE I HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO AT THIS HOUR THAN BLOG ITEMS THAT HAPPENED SEVERAL WEEKS AGO
Some time ago, Matt Yglesias drew up a list of substantive items that weren't getting enough attention in the Democratic primary. Two of his items caught my eye. First,
Federal Reserve: Are Clinton or Obama happy with the past 25 or so years of conservative Republican leadership at the Fed or would they like to take things in a new direction?
I had a couple of thoughts on this item:
1) I wonder - does Paul Volcker count as part of the "past 25 years or so of conservative Republican leadership?" Most Fed-watchers would draw a bright line between pre-and-post Volcker eras, and see primarily continuity between his reign and that of undisputed conservative Alan Greenspan. The wrinkle is that Volcker is a lifelong Democrat who recently endorsed Barack Obama.
2) More importantly, the one thing that has been made clear through the current economic turmoil and the Fed's current tough spot is that while there are debates about the role of the Fed at a given time, they don't usually break down easily along partisan lines. For example, if Paul Krugman (a born blogger whose day job is something to which he is far less suited) has disagreed with anything Ben Bernanke has done in the current crisis, I've missed it. A number of Republican economists, by contrast, have accused Bernanke of loosening credit too much too fast. And even Greenspan was far less dogmatic in his actions as Fed chairman than one would assume from his biography or reading his memoir. So it's far from evident that (a) the phrase "conservative Republican leadership at the Fed" is a meaningful description of what has happened at the Fed over the last 25 years, or (b) that a Democratic President who wanted to take things in a new direction at the Fed would succeed in doing so (unless he or she appoints some pure hack).
Second from Matt's list:
Judiciary: Assuming a Democratic Senate allows for relatively easy confirmations, do Clinton or Obama intend to continue appointing 1990s-style moderates, or would we see a return to the liberal jurisprudence of a Thurgood Marshall?
I also have two thoughts about this one:
1) When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, Bill Clinton called her the "Thurgood Marshall of gender equity law." Yet on the Court, she has been generally considered fairly moderate. So you never know, even if a judicial candidate is the closest thing to Marshall.
2) This deserves a post unto itself...but let's just come out and say it. When Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Court to fill Marshall's seat, most people scorned his chances of ever matching the record of Marshall. Well, Thomas has been a far, far superior Justice to Marshall, using any possible criterion (such as influence on the Court and the development of the law generally, skill of opinions, etc.) other than the crudest form of results-oriented judging I am quite confident (as confident as I can be without actually going to the trouble of asking anyone)that many, many respectably liberal legal academics would agree with that assessment (especially if they could do so off the record).
To clarify: this only refers to the two men's records as Justices of the Supreme Court and not their legal accomplishments as a whole; Marshall is surely a more important figure based on his civil rights record. But I view Marshall as a legal parallel to James Madison - a man of monumental impact whose least important role was his service as President.
Paterson, an avowed liberal, is an engaging man, willing to listen to people he disagrees with. I had dinner with him several times at B. Smith - and despite our policy differences, I found him easy to discuss matters with and willing to debate the issues.
A longtime minority member of the state Senate before becoming lieutenant governor, he'd bring to the governor's office the legislative perspective and understanding of how the capital works that Gov. Steamroller has so notably lacked.
He even gets along well with Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno; he just might be able to bring a welcome spirit of openness to Albany.
Not incidentally, he is the son of Basil Paterson - one of Harlem's famed Gang of Five, along with Rep. Charles Rangel, former Mayor David Dinkins, Assembly Ways & Means Chairman Denny Farrell and Harlem clubhouse boss Percy Sutton. The group has long run Harlem's political scene.
Basil was New York City's first black deputy mayor - as well as the first black candidate for statewide elected office (lieutenant governor) in New York, and under Gov. Hugh Carey the first black secretary of state. He once held the same state Senate seat his son would later in effect be given by the Harlem leadership after its then-occupant died in office.
But, while his father may have effectively anointed him a state senator, David has kept an arms-length over the years from the Gang of Five - repeatedly running for office even as his father endorsed opposing candidates, and taking some taboo positions, including prominent support for vouchers and school choice.
2) Laura wants to know more about the Emperor's Club. Slate complies.
3) Daniel Drezner recently postulated the existence of a "Noam Scheiber effect," based on his history of carefully reporting the dynamics of the Dean and Obama presidential campaigns immediately before said campaigns imploded encountered temporary difficulties.
Well, in 2005, Scheiber wrote a lengthy and positive profile of Elliot Spitzer for the NYT Magazine, speculating that his record as NY Attorney General prefigured a template that Democrats could use for recapturing national power. I think we can now chalk up another data point for the Scheiber effect.
Memo to Franklin Foer: Wouldn't Scheiber be the ideal candidate to write an in-depth profile of the Boston Red Sox in connection with the upcoming season?
It looks like we can talk about Elliot Spitzer's political career in the past tense, as he has been linked to a prostitution ring.
It's too bad his political fall wasn't linked to his performance as governor, not to mention his perfection of the shakedown artist act while he served as NY State's attorney general. But we'll take what we can get.
UPDATE: Speculation is that Spitzer will resign. Perhaps he can start a consulting firm with Jim McGreevey. Maybe Rudy will join as well.
FURTHER UPDATE: Assuming Spitzer resigns, this would make quite the trifecta for the tristate area, between him, McGreevey and Connecticut's John Rowland (albeit the latter went to jail for old-fashioned corruption rather than anything spicier). Is it something in the local water?
ONE MORE UPDATE: Slate's XX Factor blog is all over this one - just keep scrolling; too many good posts to link.
LAST UPDATE: This is the best headline of the whole story; almost believable. The pretend story is pretty good too:
Discovering that the exclusive international ring of prostitutes known as the "Emperor's Club" charged up to $5,500 an hour for their services, New York governor Eliot Spitzer vowed to put an end to this price gouging practice.
Four people alleged to have run the "Emperor's Club" were charged with conspiracy to violate federal prostitution statutes, while two of them were also charged with laundering more than $1 million in illegal proceeds.
"That kind of excessive compensation is simply outrageous. Prostitution is allegedly a victimless crime,” Spitzer said in a press conference that took place only in our imaginations. “But now we see that its customers can become its victims.”
Spitzer added it was especially shameful that one of the most trusted names in prostitution had engaged in this shocking betrayal and rank greed.
I REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME: This ABC News story (via TPM) has more details on what Spitzer could be charged with. I hadn't thought that merely being a "client" would get Spitzer indicted, and that is in fact not the case: he may be charged with "structuring" transactions so s to avoid mandatory bank reporting laws.
According to a friend who knows more about this area than I do, if Spitzer gets charged under the money laundering statutes, the end of his political career will be the least of his problems:
The Sentencing Guidelines on money laundering were unbelievably draconian last I checked, and that was before the Patriot Act. Like, 20 year sentence bad.
The most important takeaway from the ABC News story is that this isn't merely a bad break for Spitzer: he wasn't merely a name in an escort service's "black book" that leaked after the service got busted, as often happens in Hollywood. Apparently, his suspicious money transfers were what instigated the entire investigation:
The federal investigation of a New York prostitution ring was triggered by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's suspicious money transfers, initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials.
It was only months later that the IRS and the FBI determined that Spitzer wasn't hiding bribes but payments to a company called QAT, what prosecutors say is a prostitution operation operating under the name of the Emperors Club.
..."We had no interest at all in the prostitution ring until the thing with Spitzer led us to learn about it," said one Justice Department official.
Spitzer, who made his name by bringing high-profile cases against many of New York's financial giants, is likely to be prosecuted under a relatively obscure statute called "structuring," according to a Justice Department official.
It doesn't appear that this will end with Spitzer's resignation and disgrace. If this ever went to trial...the NY tabloids will have a field day.
MOVE OVER, PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, HELEN MIRREN, FOREST WHITAKER...
...Reihan Salam is breaking new ground in dramatizing roles based on real-life famous figures. His interpretation of Hillary Clinton is more subtle, evocative and true to life than any of the above actors' recent Oscar-winning performances:
I should have something substantive to say about the Democratic primary race and today's primaries, and may later today.
But for now, I listen to journalists and pundits complaining about the lengthier-than-expected primary season and respond: "More, please." Why hurry? November is a long way off.
Right now, I want to see the equivalent of a Game 7 of the World Series between two teams in which I have no rooting interest that goes deep into extra innings, in which rosters fall apart and players' assigned roles totally fall by the wayside - preferably one in which the preceding game also went into extra innings. (Closest real-life examples: Game 5 of the 2004 ALCS, Game 6 of the 1999 NLCS, Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS.) We can even speculate about a brokered convention, which is the equivalent of a position player coming in to pitch.
I'd like to believe that Megan is right and that McCain pandered out of a combination of ignorance and not wanting to tell a potential voter that her firmest beliefs about her child's autism are without basis. There may be more to it than that (or to the idea that McCain's science adviser is Don Imus). McCain does have a minor history with the mercury types: specifically, he has met with representatives of an organization dedicated to pushing the mercury connection (not that there's anything wrong with meeting with them) and sent a letter (together with Sen Lieberman) to Ted Kennedy (and the Republican ranking member) asking themto hold hearings on the topic.
(Note that this same organization sent letters to certain of the other Presidential candidates asking them to respond to various autism-related questions. The staffs of Senators Biden, Edwards and Obama (see the January 2, 2008 section) made sure that they didn't buy into the mercury/vaccine claims.)
That being said, McCain does not have much of a record on pushing the thimerosal issue (quite unlike the lunatic Dan Burton in the House). (Writing a letter to a fellow Senator is a reliable way of getting noisy constituents to shut up and keep the campaign contributions coming.) His campaign website has nothing on the topic (unlike Barack Obama's). Absent further developments, there is little reason to think that McCain would push the issue or that he really knows or cares much about it. But I do wish someone would set him straight.
UPDATE: Arthur Allen has more on how McCain is connected to the mercury militia. Allen also notes that "McCain isn't known to have any familiarity with vaccine safety issues."
March 02, 2008 WHAT DO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES, BASEBALL PLAYERS WHO TAKE STEROIDS, AND AMY WINEHOUSE HAVE IN COMMON?
Don't tell the children.
A longer version of that sentence below the fold:
I was recently (at the end of December) talking politics with a DC-based acquaintance. In the course of the conversation, he asked me who I was supporting in the upcoming Presidential race. I told him that I was still undecided, because - as my own personal strike against the continuous election cycle - I wasn't going to pay close attention to the candidates and their policy proposals until the calendar year in which the election would be held.
Well, it really is an election year, and I am still having trouble paying enough attention.
Basically, I'm not sure I really want to know "what it takes" to win the White House. I know that any semi-close analysis will reveal any candidate, regardless of party, doing and saying all sorts of things that range from the offensive to the ridiculous. A one-word, thoroughly bipartisan example: ethanol.
And I know the candidates have no choice, regardless of whether they are smarter than the drivel they spout. From what I've recently read and heard, the one candidate in this election cycle with whom I might have been more impressed if I'd been paying closer attention, rather than less, was Fred Thompson. (Which is not to say that I would've voted for him.) And it was not coincidental that Thompson's candidacy never caught enough fire to flame out. As expertly detailed by Andrew Ferguson, the modern presidential campaign requires a level of both substantive pandering and personal exertion as to screen out virtually any normal human being. I think we should replace the "anyone can grow up to be President" mantra with "Mom, don't let your kids grow up to be a Presidential candidate." (This may be an underrated factor in the increase of political dynasties - they're the only ones who think of the lifestyle as normal.)
Similarly, not enough has been said about the extent to which steroid use in baseball is different in degree, but not in kind, from much of what else goes into a career as a top-flight career as a professional athlete. "What about the children?" is a mantra uttered by cretinous sportswriters and Congressmen alike bemoaning the health risks of steroid use. Well, how many sports fans level with their children about the ghoulish injury rates among young pitchers, or the need to schedule knee replacements in advance for catchers? (Megan had this right a while ago.) And baseball is spa-like compared to what football does to its participants. (I leave boxing out of this discussion, which is a world unto itself. And let's not get into women's gymnastics.) These health risks are, if anything, more demonstrable than those of professional athletes' use of PEDs (especially the HGH that has so captivated Washington and the sports media lately, which has virtually no effect on healthy athletes (unless it's "stacked" with steroids)). We sports fans who like to occasionally call ourselves "grownups" have to reconcile ourselves to the reality that the objects of our passion are harming themselves for our sakes. Denial, or refusal to tell the children, doesn't make it any less true.
And this is also true with respect to music: we might not be so quick to tell our children that virtually all of the good music of the last several decades has been created by people who were strung out on drugs and/or alcohol. As Mickey Kaus said in his pre-Slate days (scroll down to the 5/7 entry), whenever you hear a musician say that he or she is clean, sober and feeling better than ever, the next album is guaranteed to suck. The most prominent recent example is, of course, multiple Grammyist Amy Winehouse. After listening to her music for a total of ten minutes, I can confidently say that: (a) she is a transcendent talent, and (b) her music wouldn't be close to as good if she wasn't quite so self-destructive. (Proof of both counts is at the end of this post.) Unless we want to forswear any good music, this is another truth we have to recognize, even if we finess telling the children.
This article seems uniquely inappropriate for the point it is making as to the importance and uses of Presidential charisma. Not that its assessments of FDR or Obama necessarily are wrong, but the main anecdote seems to make precisely the opposite points.
Specifically, bank runs (as shown in It's a Wonderful Life) are indeed a self-perpetuating crisis of confidence, and can stop as suddenly as they start once confidence is restored that claims on the bank will be honored. A great Presidential speech, such as the one given by FDR, can be useful in creating such confidence. But it helps even more if it can be conclusively demonstrated that such claims would, in fact, be honored. And that is exactly what Congress did prior to FDR's speech, in creating federal deposit insurance [UPDATE - I erred here, see below].
The article doesn't deny that the Congressional action helped, but it gives most of the credit (via the Robert Caro quote) to FDR's speech and then uses that assignment of credit to build an argument as to the uses and limits of Presidential charisma generally. That seems strange to me, given that the specific problem of bank runs (a) is more susceptible to matters of confidence than most other issues (does anyone think that more confidence in our health care system would solve its problems?) and (b) were solved by a legislative action that did more to guarantee the necessary confidence than any Presidential speech possibly could.
Maybe it was a "you had to be there" moment. But those of us who weren't there often have a leg up in analyzing such moments, for that very reason.
UPDATE: It also would have helped to get the facts straight. The "legislation securing the banks" cited by the article's author was not the creation of federal deposit insurance, as I erroneously stated, but the Emergency Banking Act, which infused enough capital into the banking system to avert the crisis. I think the general points remain true, namely that (a) FDR's famous speech only came after legislation fixing the problem (albeit not in as permanent a fashion as the FDIC) and thus may be given more credit than it deserves, and (b) bank panics are more susceptible to these type of fixes, making them of limited utility for assessing the usefulness of Presidential charisma. But I did err, and thanks to commenter Spencer for pointing it out.
Various must-reads on the (hopefully ending) NYC transit strike:
- Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel in TNR, detailing how state and city governments (and more importantly, their tax bases) have become little more than funding vehicles for public-sector unions:
...During the past 30 years, public-employee unions have largely won the battle for urban political power by default. Other traditional power centers--neighborhood associations, small business organizations, reform groups--have over time receded from urban politics. Businesses, after all, can always go elsewhere, either to the suburbs or overseas; frustrated individuals often get worn down, electing to move on or give up. Public sector unions, by contrast, have remained powerful, withstanding occasional assaults by reformist mayors of both parties.
Democrats are usually seen as the beneficiaries of this situation, since they often receive cash and organizational backing from unions. But there is a downside to this support, which the current strike illustrates. City councils in New York, Los Angeles, and most other major cities are dominated by Democrats. Most council elections in New York, for example, are determined in the Democratic primary, which consistently sees low voter turnout. (In 2003, turnout in the city council primaries was 11 percent.) This magnifies the power of unions--since a handful of highly organized voters can easily sway an election--and makes Democratic politicians more or less beholden to the wishes of public employees. New York, where several prominent council members have already expressed support for the transit workers' union, may be the most obvious example of this problem; but it is hardly the only city afflicted.
- Noah Millman, simultaneously embracing Reaganism and Leninism (while willing to put much of his money where his blog is):
...I wish Mayor Bloomberg would fire every single transit worker and break the union. But (a) I don't think he (nor, I suspect, anyone else) has the clear authority to do so, and (b) he'd never do it if he did have the authority; he's a cautious, centrist, consensus managerial type. That's still a whole lot better than Pataki; Bloomberg has done much less to actually sell out the city's economic interests that Pataki has the state's. But he's no Ronald Reagan.
...I am normally highly resistant to Leninist "the worser the better" logic, but in this case we really do need to highten the contradictions. The sooner NYC and our other major cities and blue states realize that their contracts with public sector unions are absolutely unsustainable, the better for everyone. For that reason, I would say that the Bush Administration tax proposal I most strongly favor is also the proposal that would most hurt New Yorkers, and would cost me personally a great deal of money every year: eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes.
- Ryan Sager on the class war being waged in NYC right now - by the transit union against workers who make less than the average TWU member, who (probably) are more likely to live in the outer boros than in Manhattan or suburbia and thus have the most difficulty bypassing the strike by walking or taking Metro-North or the LIRR:
...[T]here is a class confrontation of a kind going on but it's not between rich and poor. It's between the working class and what might be called the government-worker class.
The gap between the two groups has been growing for a while.
The private sector has been groaning under rising health and pension costs for years. Retired coal miners have lost company-paid health insurance in bankruptcy proceedings. Companies like General Motors have had to lay off tens of thousands of workers because of crushing pension costs.
Yet the benefits for public-sector workers keep getting fatter and fatter.
The reason is fairly simple. While only 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized these days, some 40 percent of public-sector workers are unionized. And while the rigors of the free market forced private companies to become more efficient, the government faces no such constraints.
Instead, pliant politicians simply give the unions whatever they want, driving up health and pension costs and sticking taxpayers (the ones trudging over the Brooklyn Bridge this week) with the bill.
It's no wonder average working New Yorkers are ticked.
Transit workers can retire at 55. Not many private-sector workers can do that.
Transit workers don't pay a single cent toward their health-insurance premiums. Not too many private-sector workers get that deal, either.
As one commenter wrote in to the TWU: "Get with reality . . . 90+% of people in this area will never be able to retire by 55 . . . pensions across America are going to default. Sad state of America, yes, but unfortunately the rest of us are in the same boat."
When todays TWU leaders fight the MTA, theyre still carrying the banner for a whole anti-capitalist philosophy. Members see any concession not as a necessary compromise but as an unforgivable sellout to a sworn enemy. As the New York Times reported after the 2002 contract settlement, some workers had wanted to strike just to tell their children and grandchildren that they fought the good fight, as did many transit workers who walked out in 1966 and 1980. Of course, under New York law, it is illegal for public-service employees to strike. But that doesnt stop the TWU from periodically forcing Gothams taxpayers and private-sector businesses to incur millions of dollars in emergency-planning costs when the TWU threatens to break the law and strike anyway, as it threatened three years ago.
Sound familiar?
Ms. Gelinas also has been promulgating the pro-privatization-and-competition line here (advocating that, in the event of a strike, the city and state take actions far tougher than they actually have), here (advocating privatization of the buses) and here (advocating using other buses to break the strike).
One recent thought about the NYC transit strike, that came to me while standing on a Metro-North train with several thousand fellow New Yorkers (and we were certainly the lucky ones). Caution: rampant, unverified and uncredentialed speculation ahead:
Don't defined-benefit pension plans and stock options, each as they were formerly ladled out, have something fundamental in common? In each case, companies and/or governments handed them out relatively freely, in part because of various accounting and/or regulatory reasons that enabled the grantor to underestimate the benefit's true cost - stock options weren't required to be expensed until recently, and various regulations make it easy for companies to underfund their pension plans. (True, the cost of pension plans also has been heavily affected by the same demographic forces bankrupting Social Security: increasing life expectancy and the massive slowdown in the increase of workers relative to the Baby Boom generation.)
And as we're finding out with respect to pensions, reflecting the true cost of the benefit make it that much less likely that any such benefits will be offered in the future, absent massive changes in the costs - something that understandably does not make workers happy. It is too soon to gauge the impact of the new rules requiring the expensing of stock options, but it will probably (and justifiably so) make it that much harder for companies to hand options out like candy, as opposed to the practice in the 90s.
Anyone else have any thoughts or actual knowledge of those issues, as opposed to the above random speculation?
Comes from John Derbyshire, about the role of the judiciary (though it could be applied to any number of questions):
Do I want big decisions about the shape of society made by a bunch of self-important lefty law-school grads, their brains all addled with 1960s-ish flapdoodle about rights and penumbras? Or would I prefer to have it done by a crew of not-very-successful, not-very-bright small-town lawyers whose pockets are stuffed with cash from teachers unions, chicken-processing magnates, Saudi princes, and Mexican drug lords?
For literally centuries, New Yorkers have complained about the effects of extreme wealth on the city. Many would, of course, prefer an egalitarian paradise where the working man has a window on Central Park, too. But such utopian notions obscure what is, in fact, a very successful aspect of New York. The historical record clearly shows that when the very rich lose interest in living in a city, the dominoes tumble. Look at Philadelphia or Cleveland.
Part of what sustained New York through the crisis of the seventies was that Fifth Avenue never stopped being Fifth Avenueapartment prices surely dipped and Central Park did get a bit woolly, but no landlords ever started torching those buildings and running away, as they did in the Bronx. The fancy sections of New York endured to an extent that many solid middle-class neighborhoods did not. The majority of cities in America would die to have this problem, says Edward Glaeser of Harvard. If a city is doing well, then people are willing to pay a lot to be there. Some are also willing to pay a lot to rule over the city, like our mayor and State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
...So love them or hate themwed better learn to live with the rich. Theyre not going away. If 9/11 couldnt scare them off, one has to wonder what will. The very rich may be carving out more space for themselves. But in this highly uncertain economy, thats something of a blessing, not an unmitigated curse. The ultimate definition of a citys health is the ability to attract people, companies, and industries that can choose to be anywhere in the world. You can argue about the dangers of having an economy at the beck and call of the very rich, says economist Ken Goldstein. But it basically comes down to this: Its better than the alternative.
No time for anything thoughtful tonight, so chew on this outstanding piece about the NYC subways. This should be a mandatory part of the platform of any successful candidate for Mayor or Governor. I'm sure it won't be.
April 04, 2005 AN INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSE, ALL IN ONE BLOG POST
Please do read this extraordinary piece by Megan McArdle. It's ostensibly about the policy implications of gay marriage, but it is really about different ways of looking at and understanding the world. It defies excerpts; just go read it (even at the cost of - gasp - printing it out ) consider and ponder accordingly.
I've been thinking about the implications in light of what's been written in the blog referenced in the immediately prior post, and I don't like the results. And that's all I'm going to say for now.
I've been working around the clock for the last few weeks, coupled with assorted holiday preparations and family issues - so there's been no blogging. But this calls for a break in the silence.
The NYT has been conspicuously absent from the front lines of this story, but they've more than made up for it with this headline. Click on it before the editors come to their senses.
Sorry for the not-unexpected lag in blogging - I've been working around the clock so everyone else can take off for Labor Day (er, and because I'll be off a lot soon for the upcoming Jewish holidays).
A few quick hits.
1) I turned the TV on thinking that the President's acceptance speech would be ending. Instead, he had just started talking about the war. Another great speech. I don't have time to ruminate on substance, so here's a stylistic point. President Clinton was and is, by all accounts, one of the great extemporaneous speakers of our time, and Bush is...not. Yet (except for a famous speech he gave in a Baptist church early in his presidency), Clinton's prepared speeches were almost uniformly pedestrian, while Bush has delivered a surprising number of outstanding speeches (even after adjusting for the "soft bigotry of low expectations" of which Bush takes such great advantage). And it's not just a consequence of 9/11; Bush's 2000 acceptance speech and his inauguration address compare very favorably with any of Clinton's parallels. Why the difference? I have an idea, but it'll wait for now.
2) I still think that Bush would have done well to steal some lines from Noah Millman's draft (that he prepared for free!). Had Bush used the "nuanced" line, it would've brought down the house and made the pundits swoon even more than they did, despite their best efforts. His staff almost certainly raided some blogs for the excerpt from the 1946 NYT editorial.
3) Best wishes to President Clinton and his family for a speedy recovery. If this report is true, the people who booed should be ashamed of themselves. [UPDATE: the AP report in question seems to have been retracted.]
4) I have a serious moral opposition to horse-race blogging, for reasons that I'll explain later. But let's do it just this once. A new TIME poll is out showing Bush opening up an 11-point lead over Kerry. The poll was conducted from 8/30-9/2; it doesn't specify whether any of the respondents were polled after Bush's speech last night.
P.S. I think this piece is subscription-only, but please do check out Noam Scheiber's piece in this week's TNR about the Bush campaign's outreach to Orthodox Jews. Here are some excerpts:
The political benefit of an event targeted at haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, Jews in New York is not immediately obvious. After all, New York is a blue state, and winning every Brooklyn Orthodox vote isn't going to dent the Democratic tally here. But Jeff Ballabon, a 41-year-old Orthodox Jew and Bush Pioneer who helped organize the Brooklyn trip and the earlier briefing, argues that the events will resonate outside New York because haredim in different parts of the country are tightly connected. "They all read the same national papers," says Ballabon. "And ninety-five percent of them are published in New York. ... The Orthodox press for many is the primary source of news." The logic applies to non-haredi, modern Orthodox Jews as well. At the Bush campaign press briefing earlier in the day, Tevi Troy, an Orthodox Jewish campaign official, emphasizes that the assembled leaders, a mixture of haredi and modern Orthodox Jews, are "plugged into other cities"--"you know, people in Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Cleveland." He encourages them to "talk to your friends in other cities and tell them what the president is about."
And what's the main message?
The underbelly of the Bush campaign's pitch to these voters is the idea that, even if John Kerry, who gets a stellar rating from AIPAC, is a reliable supporter of Israel, and even if he says he'd prosecute the war on terrorism aggressively, there are structural forces within the Democratic Party that make a Kerry administration dangerous. At just about every Jewish-themed event I attended this week--and there were multiple events each day--someone has drawn attention to the rise of the antiwar, anti-Israel left within the Democratic Party. Usually, the conversation begins with Michael Moore, who has left a long trail of anti-Israel comments, continues on to MoveOn.org and former supporters of Howard Dean, and ends with the observation that, in recent years, it has been the far left of the Democratic Party, not the far right of the Republican Party, that has been awol on votes in Congress regarding Israel. "That's going to be a major theme going into the stretch run," says one Republican strategist. "The point is, who do you surround yourself with? ... [With the Kerry] campaign, the focus is on Michael Moore, Jimmy Carter." One Jewish Republican close to the White House, who occasionally serves as a Bush campaign surrogate, told me he makes this pitch explicitly. "Even if Kerry means everything he says about Israel," he tells Jewish audiences, "the question is whether his constituency--today's Democratic Party--would really let him go there."
This is a trenchant argument. I've seen no evidence that Kerry, while in the Senate, showed any sign of independent thought on matters relating to Israel. And in his case, that was a good thing: he went along with the pro-Israel bipartisan consensus of Northeastern members of both houses. But as President, he might be subject to different pressures - not just from the Michael Moore wing of the party, but perhaps more importantly from many allies with whom he's ostensibly trying to mend fences (most notably, an unnamed country whose name has more than four letters and begins with "F") and whose policies and preferences can be characterized, on a good day, as "throw Israel to the wolves." Love him or hate him, who wouldn't agree that Bush is capable of (for Bush fans) resisting pressure to change course / (for Bush haters) prone to refusing to change his mind? Kerry, to put it mildly, does not give the same impression.
Teachers say that the interactivity of blogs allowed them to give students feedback much more quickly than before.
"I used to have this stack of hard-copy journals on my desk waiting to be read," said Catherine Poling, an assistant principal at Kemptown Elementary School, also in Frederick County, Md., who ran a blog last year when she taught third grade at a nearby school. "Now I can react to what they say immediately, and students can respond to each other."
In one blog entry, for instance, Ms. Poling asked her students what qualities they looked for when rating books for a statewide award. When several students responded that a book has to be creative and grab their attention, she posted a follow-up question asking them if they used the same criteria for both fiction and nonfiction books.
...Sometimes, the long reach of the Web has turned bloggers into modern-day pen pals, allowing students to collaborate easily with their peers in other classes or even other countries. Some social studies classes at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, for instance, are using a blog to study the Holocaust with high school students in Krakow, Poland.
I get very uncomfortable whenever I'm around too many people who agree with me. The only way I know to dispel the discomfort is to play devil's advocate. Put me in a room full of Bush supporters, and I'll be making the case for Kerry in no time.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I finally had an epiphany about that tendency. It's not any praiseworthy instinct towards critical thinking or even a healthy contrarianism. (Contrarianism is generally overrated, as it leads too easily to mindlessness of its own.) Rather, it's a misguided superiority complex, manifesting itself as a disrespect for other's views and beliefs.
I'll try to do better. So from now on, if people want to try to make the case for Bush, I won't stop them.
Here's a terribly dispiriting piece (registration required) by James Pinkerton about the prospects for further progress - specifically, the lack of such - in the fight against AIDS. The factors he cites are ones I hadn't thought of before, but they unfortunately seem accurate:
Activists say the drug companies have underfunded R&D. But the truth is that the drug makers have spent tens of billions of dollars on fighting AIDS. Now, however, they are quietly pulling back. Why? Because they no longer see profits ahead. The drug companies are being pressured into basically giving away their existing anti-AIDS meds in Third World countries, home to 95% of the 38 million people infected with the virus.
Even so, they are routinely vilified; the chief of Pfizer, Hank McKinnell, was booed off the stage in Bangkok. If a pharmaceutical company were to come up with an AIDS-smiting "silver bullet," Magic Johnson would gladly pay the sticker price, while everyone else would demand it free. If you're Pfizer, it's hard to make money that way.
...But now there's a new twist: The creation of a permanent, self-perpetuating AIDS bureaucracy that has a vested interest in maintaining the disease but little interest in curing it. For every case of AIDS today, somebody usually a middleman of the type well represented in Bangkok gets money.
The world now spends about $4.7 billion a year on AIDS. About two-thirds of that comes from the U.S. And both governments and nongovernmental organizations have figured out that if they make enough noise, they can get even more for AIDS treatment. President Bush has pledged to spend an additional $15 billion over five years, and John Kerry has pledged to double that.
And of course, any number of big-name foundations Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Elton John are writing checks too. Thus has "Big AIDS" the network of caregivers, consciousness-raisers and, of course, condom distributors become a big business. Five million people contracted HIV last year and as for the next 5 million, they're worth billions too, according to a grim dollars-for-dying formula.
In this new environment, when funding streams correlate with victim streams, the vision of a cure as a goal yields instead to perpetuation as a goal.
Read the whole thing, and weep. (Thanks to Mickey Kaus for the pointer.)
Newly-housed Laura, formerly a resident of Apartment 11D in the Heights, asks a question from her new suburban location (say hello to my grandmother in said location):
What makes for a good weblog? Is it sharp, witty political commentary or insightful life stories?
Truly, this is a Mars-Venus question, where the answer is wholly dictated by your mindset.
One type of reader (let's call them, for no particular reason, "men") looks to blogs for useful commentary and links on specific issues. (Let's call those preferred blogs "political blogs.") These readers aren't opposed to the revelation of the blogger's personal details per se, but wouldn't really see the point unless such details are relevant in some way to the issue at hand.
Another type of reader (let's call them...I don't know..."women") might look to blogs to, in Allison Kaplan Sommer's felicitous description (quoted by Laura), "really get a feel for what it is like to be someone else, living a different life and opening ourselves to their experience." (Let's call those blogs "personal blogs.")
Of course, most people probably partake of both mindsets at some points, but I think it's safe to say that many people probably gravitate towards one kind more than the other. But there's no reason to say that personal blogs are necessarily better than political blogs at fulfilling their professed aim, or at meeting their customers' wishes. Allison's statement that personal blogs are "the very best blogs" is nothing more than a value judgment, based on a pre-existing mindset. To those of us [blessed/cursed] with a different mindset, Allison's mindset - the notion that "really get[ting] a feel for what it is like to be someone else" is preferable to the most thought-provoking and informative commentary on a given issue - is close to incomprehensible.
I respect the ability of those who can write the best personal blogs; I know how difficult it can be to render feelings as words. But at the same time, can't you argue that our ability to "really get a feel for what it is like to be someone else" is necessarily limited, in a way that intellectual comprehension of arguments or commentary is not? Communication of feelings and empathy are necessary components of interpersonal relationships, but does blogging have to partake of those elements to be successful? Answering "yes" tells you more about the assumptions you bring to the computer than about the nature of blogging.
March 15, 2004 ONE WAY TO AVOID REGULATORY CAPTURE: OUTSOURCING
Mindles H. Dreck has a very important post on recent trends in corporate regulation spawned by the last few year's scandals. Go read the whole thing, and also follow the links in the post - especially these posts on regulatory capture, and this gem about the ways professional service firms and securities firms try to play "pass-the-liability."
Though I'm an interested party (as an attorney), I believe that Mindles is incorrect when he predicts the imminent death of attorney-client privilege, for reasons he implies in his post: while the confidentiality of attorney-client communications are threatened by court decisions threatening privilige in certain situations, a more fundamental problem is the potential adversarial relationship contemplated by the attorney conduct rules under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. While legal academics such as Eugene Volokh or Glenn Reynolds (it's too late for me to find the link, but I remember they were in favor of the idea. Or at least one of them was. Maybe.) or non-lawyers think it sounds self-evident, they ignore the realities of practice: once a new risk is introduced, it takes a while for the players to allocate the risks amongst themselves (as Mindles says, it's a game of pass-the-parcel) and communication is hampered while the players try to protect their own interests. These types of calculations are exactly the opposite of what is supposed to characterize the attorney-client relationship. The rules threaten to undermine the representation that lawyers are supposed to provide on a normal basis. And I don't think that will stand as a matter of practice. (And while beleagured clients might want to go after the trial bar, they will also want to retain the protected services of their own counsel - and it's pretty hard to subvert one side's privilege without harming the other's.)
Alternatively, it's possible that the attorney conduct regulations will have little effect, as a widely-held opinion of the NY securities bar (from my tiny corner of it) is that the SEC does not have the jurisdiction to regulate the attorney-client relationship. But if the best defense of a regulation is that it will be ignored, that's not much of a compliment.
I'm not a huge fan of Adam Gopnik, but in his most recent New Yorker piece (a review of a book on Times Square) he makes some very important points:
There are, of course, people who miss the old Times Square, its picturesque squalor and violence and misery and exploitation. ... Which just proves, as with the old maxim about belief, that people who refuse to be sentimental about the normal things don’t end up being sentimental about nothing; they end up being sentimental about anything, shedding tears about muggings and the shards of crack vials glittering like diamonds in the gutter.
One of my pet peeves in the media - bloggers included - are those who wax nostalgic for the "old Times Square," a stand-in for the pre-Giuliani city -sometimes otherwise phrased as "when the city had character," or "vitality," or some other intangible quality that ignores the massive amount of crime, breakdown and despair that were part of the "character" or "vitality" for anyone who actually lived in the city at the time. Even normally sensible people like Apt. 11D's Laura sometimes fall victim to this syndrome of inappropriate nostalgia. (And she's a Washington Heights resident - some areas of which, as I know from my sojourns to the inconveniently situated Yeshiva University, could still use a second helping of the Giuliani treatment.) Yes, gentrifying neighborhoods mean out-of-sight real estate prices, with the discomforting turnover. But it beats the hell out of landlords inviting drug dealers and arsonists to their properties to force out rent-controlled tenants, as was common in the 1970s. And blackouts from that era weren't nearly as fun as last summer's.
Nostalgia is often advertised as a sign of maturity and perspective. As often as not, it's exactly the opposite.
March 12, 2004 EEK! THERE'S A MALL IN MY TAX CODE!
Check out an unsurprisingly good piece from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about the development of the bete noire of good urbanites everywhere - shopping malls.
It's a wide-ranging piece, but the most interesting element is Gladwell's focus on the tax code as the unsung hero or villain of the spread of malls: apparently the accelerated depreciation schedule put into the code in the 1950s made it efficient to overbuild malls. Everything old is new again, as similar incentives in the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s contributed to overbuilding of office towers.
The story is further evidence of how small changes in, or features of, the tax code have monumental impact. Pick your favorite example: the role of the mortgage deduction in inflating the price of housing (and while I haven't seen any studies of the issue, it wouldn't shock me if the Clinton doubling of the amount of tax-free gain from the sale of a home has played a role in the housing bubble we may be facing), the quirk that exempts the donor of appreciated property from capital gains taxes, or the historical accident of exempting employers' health-insurance premiums that has helped produce (probably more than anything else) the wonderful state of health care in this country. The first example is probably the mos timportant, as it illustrates both the distortions of such tax-code changes and the diffculty of getting such quirks out once they've been absorbed into the economy (let's have a show of hands for who wants to destroy the real estate sector!). If there's a moral to the story, it's "don't go down that road." But it's a little late for that advice, so the second-best advice is probably to go to the drugstore at your friendly neighborhood mall and buy some aspirin.
I've griped a bit about the self-absorption of the baby boomer generation, but I'd never go so far as to start a blog devoted to the topic. But fortunately, not everyone has such scruples.
I hereby bring you...Boomer Deathwatch (whose tag line is "Because one day, they'll all be dead.")
If Mom & Dad are reading this: I'd never look at such a terrible, terrible site. Not too often, anyway.
I have noticed that, on this topic and others, essays that support the position I have already taken are consistently more cogently argued, and better supported by the facts, than essays opposing that position. What more evidence could one want that I was right in the first place?
Many good arguments are made by all, but I was flabbergasted by the following statement by Christopher Orr. In arguing against the editorial decision to ascribe great weight to Lieberman's stances on the Iraq war and free trade, the unfortunate Mr. Orr asked:
How exactly is it that support for the Iraq war and free trade are now seen as TNR litmus tests but opposition to corporate malfeasance and irresponsible tax breaks for the rich aren't?
Let's try to explain this clearly:
A candidate's attitude towards the Iraq war* is (at least in the minds of many, many voters, and not without good reason) a good proxy for that candidate's attitude towards the war on terrorism and more generally towards matters of national security. And preventing Americans from being murdered in large numbers by murderous fanatics just might be - work with me on this! - more important than "opposition to corporate malfeasance and irresponsible tax breaks for the rich."
* (This is also the case regarding free trade, albeit to a much, much lesser extent - so I won't contest the point.)
Now, it is certainly debatable whether one's views on the Iraq war should truly be taken as a valid proxy for the war on terrorism, or even national security more generally. The TNR editorial in question understood that and argued in favor of that correlation (well, in my opinion - but more on that in another post). The point is that if you assume the correlation (or even any relationship between the two), Orr's question is as fatuous as I made it sound in the prior paragraph. And even if you don't agree that there is any relationship between the two positions (as Jonathan Chait argued earlier in the same debate), Orr's question is nonsensical on its face ("How exactly" did the Iraq war become a litmus test? Read the editorial - it tells you how!).
And finally, even if you opposed the Iraq war, shouldn't that be close to a litmus test in and of itself, per Howard Dean's fans - isn't an unnecessary war a very important thing to oppose? Or is Orr's attitude that Democrats should let bygones be bygones over a war, but supporting capital-gains tax cuts should be unforgiveable? What does that tell you about the priority of national security? (In this respect, Howard Dean takes national-security matters far more seriously than many of his rivals.)
In any event, Orr's question could barely be a more perfect illustration of the difficulties Democrats face in November. The biggest divide in American politics now isn't between Republicans and Democrats. It's between those who believe that the current environment forces matters of national security to the top of any list of priorities, and those who do not. And if you don't, that fact will come across.
And based on current polls, any Democratic candidate who does not agree with the primary position of national security will face a nearly insurmountable obstacle in November - which makes it all the more amusing that Orr would argue against TNR's selection of Lieberman based in part on concerns of electoral viability (and not just in the primary).
Jonathan Chait and Peter Beinart clearly understand all of this: perhaps they need to sit Mr. Orr down for an intervention.
Check out the text of this lecture from Michael Crichton. It's more substantive than any of his novels:
Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?
But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS… None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't know what you are talking about.
Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.
I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergoe famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn't ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure.
The virtues of procrastination have been revealed again: I was about to write a post about how I thought the lack of activity with the Valerie Plame story since its revelation, along with certain other revelations, had persuaded me that there was probably less to the story than the Bush-haters would have liked.
I still find it hard to believe that the administration would combine such high levels of illegality and incompetence. But if everything in the Washington Post story is true (and that still is a big "if"), then I agree with every word of this Daniel Drezner post. In fact, I might take some precautions and make a donation to the Lieberman campaign (not that it will make a difference), just in case.
For more, follow the links in the Drezner post.
I still have a lot of trouble believing that the worst-case (or best-case, depending on your orientation) is true; wouldn't it have been easier, and less traceable, to hire a plane to sky-write Plame's status above Capitol Hill? But a year ago, it would've seemed even less likely that Saddam Hussein would've destroyed his chemical or biological weapons without telling anyone about it. So who knows?
September 22, 2003 DEATH, TAXES AND PROCRASTINATION
A while ago, I was writing a long post about Social Security and the payroll tax that funds it, and why a) the Republicans had success pushing for giving individuals the power to direct their Social Security contriubtions and b) why the intermittent calls to remove the cap on SS payroll taxes are invariably a confession of ignorance as to how SS works. But my computer crashed midway through the post and I never got back to it.
If the payroll tax is just a tax, not something special like an insurance premium or forced savings-- that is, if it ought to be counted in a way that is detached from Social Security payouts at the other end-- then the tax system is barely progressive, and could be tipped into being regressive overall. If the payroll tax is not just a tax but something special that should be counted alongside the ostensible benefits it ostensibly purchases, then this is not true. The payroll tax is the largest share of the tax burden for (I believe this is right) most Americans. It is proportional-- but only on earned income, and only up to a certain income cap. So it makes a big difference in the overall calculations-- and how we count it makes a big difference.
I think that the payroll tax is just a tax, and that Social Security is just a spending program. But that's not the official position; and it's not ordinarily the position of those who support a continued state system of Social Security. Hence the desire to take Social Security off-budget, to treat its surplus as different from other state funds, and so on. Hence the unwillingness to means-test Social Security-- in order to preserve the illusion of social insurance "bought" with one's "premiums." Hence the unwillingness to lift the income cap on the payroll tax-- because then we'd either have to allow benefits paid to the richest retirees to skyrocket, or we'd have to admit that one's taxes don't really purchase one's own benefits. In other words, I want to concede that the payroll tax is just a tax, making the tax system as a whole borderline-regressive-- and then to insist on the consequences that follow from that. But I dislike any attempt to have it both ways-- to treat the payroll tax as just a tax for purposes of calculating regressivity, but to treat it as something quite different when it comes to discussing Social Security as a program.
(Emphases added.)
I can't count the number of editorials and opinion pieces over the years bemoaning the regressivity of SS taxes and advocating either cuts in the taxes paid or doing away with the income caps. Those pieces never (as far as I've seen) even address the ostensible relationship between tax contributions and future benefits that is at the heart of the way Social Security is sold to the population. The problem is exactly as Levy discusses: assuming the caps are raised or abolished, what "return" should the taxpayers get on contributions made into the system at the new income levels? If it is anything above zero, then a) you haven't helped the long-term sustainability of the system at all and b) eventual SS payouts will then be accordingly tilted in favor fo those who have made such large contributions - i.e., in favor of the "rich." Currently, the distribution of SS payouts is pretty progressive, and that is due to the income caps on contributions; abolishing those caps will make the distribution of SS payouts track the distribution of income and taxes paid in the country - i.e., not progressive at all.
On the other hand, if the "return" on such elevated contributions is zero, then you've just officially abandoned the "illusion of social insurance 'bought' with one's 'premiums.'", in Levy's words. In that case, SS is nothing but a (very effective) redistributive program - why not go about it more efficiently and means-test? Most liberals are horrified at the thought, as it goes counter to one of the main tenents of what Jonathan Cohn and Ed Haislmaier recently called the "Unreformed Church of Social Insurance of the Strict Observance." As Cohn described the rationale for that stricture in connection with a proposed prescription drug benefit:
In the real world, universal programs thrive while means-tested programs barely survive, if at all. As a case study, simply look at Medicare and Medicaid, enacted at the same time. Because Medicaid benefits only the poor, it lacks a constituency with sufficient political clout to protect it from cuts whenever Washington or the states start trimming budgets. Those cuts inevitably leave people on Medicaid without medical access, either because it doesn't cover particular populations--leaving them uninsured--or pays such atrociously low fees that many medical providers refuse it--leaving those with coverage without doctors to see.
You can't say that about Medicare. It has its bureaucratic problems, yes, but fees have never gotten so low that the elderly had the sorts of problems finding doctors that people on Medicaid have. And while there's still no prescription drug coverage in Medicare, the program's masters act pretty quickly to cover other treatments. The reason for this is that every senior citizen has a stake in Medicare; they let their congressmen know when they don't like what's happening to it. As a result, the congressmen keep the program strong by giving it enough money and watching over it carefully through oversight hearings.
So I guess you can count me as a member of the Church. I indeed think a Medicare drug benefit should be universal, because I fear anything else won't survive long politically.
The argument is professed with even greater devotion with respect to Social Security.
So if you're wondering why you read so many pieces bemoaning the inequality of capping the income subject to Social Security taxes and never hear of anything done about it, it's because - not for the first time! - there is a fundamental disconnect between the popular description of the problem and the underlying facts of the matter.
"My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every, of people from every planet, of every country on earth," he said.
(Emphasis added.)
Now, this may be a simple slip of the tongue or confirmation of California's... unique characteristics. I think it's something entirely different - the answer to a difficult problem with our economic statistics.
In its current survey of the world economy, the Economist describes America's burgeoning current-account deficit, but also notes a problem with its calculation (subscription required):
Some of the recent rise may be a statistical quirk. According to official numbers, the world as a whole runs a current-account deficit with itself, and one that has risen sharply since 1997. Since the world does not, as yet, trade with Mars, the numbers must be wrong, so some of America's current-account deficit may be more apparent than real. But not all of the recent rise, or even most of it, can be explained this way.
(Emphasis added.)
Are they really sure that there is no extraterrestrial trade? Perhaps the Economist's correspondent should've stopped in Sacramento while researching the survey. And the hopefully-soon-to-be-former Governor Davis may be bucking for a job as Commerce Secretary in a Dean Administration (though the extraterrestrial trade expertise may be more relevant for a Kucinich Administration).
There's really only one way to read the panel's decision from Monday. It's a sauce-for-the-gander exercise in payback. Pure and simple. The panel not only refused to accept the Supremes' admonition that the nation would not be fooled again; it refused even to address it. Applying Bush v. Gore again and again in the unanimous opinion, the judges told the high court that it has no power to declare a case a one-ride ticket and defied the court to step in again to tell them otherwise. (The court isn't likely to step in, as many have now noted, because they cannot win if they do. By getting involved, they risk either looking corrupt and partisan if they reverse the decision or permitting the courts to legislate things like the distances between polling places and the pant-length for elections workers for all eternity.)
You can't read the 9th Circuit panel's decision without recognizing that it is neither brilliant nor subtle. The court did not need to halt the whole election to achieve electoral fairness. It could have enjoined punch cards, demanded all paper ballots, recommended more polling places, or punted back to the California secretary of state to suggest something other than the existing disparate systems. But the court went so much farther. They shocked the whole country by halting the entire recall. Why? Reading the opinion, it's hard to escape the fact that the court seems to take pleasure in applying the broad and indefensible legal principle laid out in Bush v. Gore even more broadly and indefensibly. This wasn't just a liberal panel trying to prop up an embattled Democrat. The 9th Circuit isn't necessarily political, even where it's ideological. No, the more likely explanation for the panel's decision is that the court, which has been ridiculed, reversed, and unanimously shot down by the Supremes at rates that exceed (although not by much) any other court of appeals, just wanted this one sweet shot at revenge. This time, said the panel, it's personal.
Reading the opinion, you can almost hear the panel saying: "Hey, let's not just halt this recall, let's have a little fun with the thing!" The opinion includes a fond historical nod to voting with fava beans and the wry observation that punch cards are "intractably afflicted with technologic dyscalculia." It's tough to count the number of times the judges gleefully point out that the secretary of state is barred from defending the punch-card machines because he is already subject to a consent decree holding that they suck.
Last week, Megan McArdle had some intriguing thoughts on the working mother/ child-care conundrum.
I have some not-particularly-related points on the matter. There is some argument that the tax and regulatory regime re: child care favors institutional arragements (i.e. day care) over individual ones (i.e. in-home care) - and not just in requiring a social security number to ward off illegal immigrants.
Speaking from personal experience, if you want to have a nanny and do everything above-board, you have to do an awful lot of things that most individuals aren't used to doing. The SS tax withholding is the famous (Zoe Baird) one, and one of the easier ones to do (though you have to remember to file parallel forms with the Social Security Administration, not just the IRS - and the IRS' current publication on the matter mentions if you look hard enough).
Actually, even that isn't as easy as it sounds, because you have a choice of (a) persuading the nanny to take less up-front than she would get in cash (because you're withholding at least your half of Social Security, and let's say that many prospectivee nannies aren't always interested in taking less upfront for the sake of a future Social Security benefit) or (b) paying her that much more to make up the difference.
And less publicized but more difficult are the things you have to do on the state level - aside from whatever tax requirements there are, you need (in NY State at least) to register as an employer, pay into workman's comp, take out disability insurance and some other things I'm forgetting. And in doing those things, you have to puzzle through forms not really drafted for individuals and deal with the occasional bureaucrat who can't understand why an individual is actually bothering to comply with these requirements.
With day care, all you need to do is write a check.
You see why a massively high percentage of people who hire nannies end up paying them in cash.
It's not as if I have a good answer for the issue - I'm not interested in arguing that household employees should have no protections or rights, and I wouldn't believe it even if I felt like arguing the point. But some simplification is probably in order.
September 09, 2003 FAMOUS LAST WORDS - OR, "COLUMNIST IN PARADISE"
Congratulations to David Brooks on his first day as a columnist for the New York Times.
This occasion deserves a toast. So I'm heading out to meet someone at Brooks' beloved Starbucks for a few minutes (really) while mulling over these words a wise author wrote some time ago:
If our intellectual is successful, she will be offered a column. This seems like the pinnacle, but while a dozen people get riches and fame from column writing, thousands do it in wretched slavery - compelled like circus animals to be entertaining once or twice a week. The ones who succeed in that line of work have a superb knowledge of one thing: their own minds. They know what they think and they have immense confidence in their own judgments. This is not as simple as it sounds, for most people don't become aware of their own opinions until someone else has put them into words. But a columnist can read an article on brain surgery for 20 minutes and then go off and give a lecture to a conference of brain surgeons on what is wrong with their profession.
Let's wish Brooks all the self-confidence he needs. (And can you imagine a group therapy session with all the NYT columnists complaining about their "wretched slavery?" I'd love to hear Paul Krugman's complaints; imagine what he'd be like when he really gets upset...)
The Atlantic Monthly has not yet lost quality in the wake of Michael Kelly's resignation and subsequent death. Two outstanding pieces from this month's issue are available online.
First, check out James Fallows' assessment of Rupert Murdoch and his business empire. While the piece is long and meanders a bit, it is a very sober assessment of the scope and ramifications of the Murdoch phenomenon:
The political component in Murdoch's media operation is larger than people inside the company admitand perhaps larger than they believe. But it is smaller than most people who dread Murdoch's influence assume. He is principally a businessman, of conventional business-conservative views, who vents those views when possible but not when they interfere with any important corporate goal....The main political significance of a Murdoch era is that more of the press will become more openly partisan than it has been in many years.
Which big-time blogger authored this piece in the Economist about the U.S.' budget deficit?
And as long as we're on the subject, check out this Paul Samuelson piece about future spending ahead:
Growing older will alert baby boomers to other inconvenient government policies that they may well try to alter. Consider:
• Nursing homes: By 2020 the 85-and-over population is expected to rise 54 percent to 6.8 million. Nursing home spending will explode. At present, the government covers only about 60 percent of the costs, mostly through Medicaid -- a program that requires that people become virtually impoverished before qualifying. Will there be a push for more generous coverage? Seems likely.
• Retirement savings: In 2001 workers had an estimated $2.3 trillion in individual retirement accounts and $2.1 trillion in 401(k)-type pensions. On withdrawal, most of this money faces ordinary tax rates. Will baby boomers clamor for preferential tax rates? Seems likely.
Who will pay for all this generosity? Our children, and their children. Under present policies, Social Security and Medicare spending will rise about 75 percent by 2030, projects the Congressional Budget Office. Our children will pay higher taxes, face higher budget deficits or receive fewer other government services. New retiree benefits or tax preferences increase the burden. There are questions of generational justice; high taxes or deficits may also hurt economic growth.
What we have needed -- and have not gotten -- is a rewriting of the generational compact, reflecting new social realities (longer life expectancies, more retirees, more private retirement savings). No president has addressed the issues candidly and risked the resulting unpopularity. We ought to be discussing how much people should pay for their retirement and what the public safety net should cover. But there's been no demand, especially among baby boomers, for candor.
The press amplifies the indifference. Somehow the mainstream press -- led by baby boomers -- regards new retirement benefits as "progressive" and dissociates them from higher future taxes or deficits. Coverage of the drug benefit has virtually ignored the issue of long-term costs. Experts at the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute have strongly criticized the congressional plans. Their views have received scant attention. Press skepticism focuses on the stinginess of the new benefit. Reflecting journalistic conformity, The Post and the New York Times both ran front-page stories on June 26 in which retirees complained that the yet-to-be-passed drug benefit was inadequate.
