WAG

The only reason I still care about politics: thoughts on the 2010 midterms

2010-11-03T01:10:00.004-04:00

A couple thoughts on the midterm elections.

1. The system works just the way the founders wanted it to: the volatile House switches parties to reflect the fickle passions of the masses, while the Senate holds those passions in check. For the last two years, we Democrats have complained about the dysfunctional Senate and its progress-killing filibuster rule - and yet in the end, the Senate's built-in conservatism turns out to be the liberals' levy against a tide of un-reason. Or as James Madison put it, a buffer against the tendency of a more democratic body to "yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions." While I can't understand how the electorate can change its mind so quickly on who to vote for, the Founders anticipated this and built in safeguards against the will of the people. And in November 2010, at least, the Senate did its job.

2. But there's one problem beyond the founders' foresight, and that problem is global climate disruption. In general, I'm fine with the government staying out of things and letting people go about their business; the Founders did a great thing by setting up government to check itself. That was especially true when the chief problem they were trying to solve was that of tyranny.

But they largely solved that problem; tyranny, though a major problem in the 18th century, just isn't something we need to worry about anymore. When free health care is the worst thing the government can do to you, you know things are pretty good. The chief problem of THIS century, global climate disruption, is not one of too little freedom, but one of too much license to live irresponsibly. It's the one problem that's both big enough--truly big enough--to matter, and requires government to solve it. And for members of government to sell out God's earth to protect money-making (or ignorance) is an abomination of Biblical import.

Honestly, if it weren't for this issue, I probably wouldn't care about politics. Because the truth is, Republican or Democrat, life goes on. The economy will eventually get back on track. People will still fall in love. Babies will still be born, and kids will still play football. And all the while, asphyxiating carbon dioxide will still build up in the atmosphere, with potentially unimaginable consequences. And that's why I still care.

3. Apparently the only part of the American economy that's generating jobs is the CNN political newsroom. The funniest moment of the night (for me) was the first time I saw CNN's camera pan away from one panel of 8 political "experts" onto a second table of about 6 different "experts." Maybe if you get enough people who have no idea what they're talking about all shouting at the same time, you can confuse the audience into not fast-forwarding their DVR through the commercials.

4. The second funniest moment: on a break to commercial, the voice says "'Election Night in America' brought to you by Exxon Mobil." Seems to explain everything...

Build S***

2010-10-11T15:17:00.000-04:00

You know what the trouble is? We used to make s*** in this country, build s***. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.
- Frank Sobotka

Not much is more blue-collar and un-disagreeable-with than infrastructure. Roads, bridges, rail, water pipes, ports, smart grid – real stuff built by real Americans. It’s both the foundation on which the private economy rests, and the oil that allows it to run smoothly—and with most of it decades to centuries old, it’s time to upgrade. Ezra Klein has a great post on why it’s more important now than ever to invest in infrastructure:

The Council of Economic Advisers has a report (pdf) out today making the case for more infrastructure investment…

Lots of stimulus programs can create jobs. But infrastructure investment creates the right jobs, for the right people, doing the right things -- and at the right time. Or, to say it more clearly, infrastructure investment creates middle-class jobs for workers in a sector with high unemployment and it puts them to work doing something that we actually need done at a moment when doing it is cheaper than it ever will be again.

[…]

And then there are all the other arguments you've heard me make. Raw materials are cheap. Labor -- due to the high unemployment rate -- is cheap. Borrowing money is cheaper than at any time since the 1950s. And this is one sector where the normal deficit objections simply don't apply. "You run a deficit both when you borrow money and when you defer maintenance that needs to be done," Larry Summers told me. "Either way, you're imposing a cost on future generations." Not spending a dollar on infrastructure repairs today means we'll have to spend it tomorrow -- and by that time, it will cost more than a dollar. More so than anything else I can think of in the economy, infrastructure investment is win-win-win-win, and I'm not certain I've tacked enough "wins" on there.

That last point is especially important, because it neutralizes the typical “deficits bad” argument: we HAVE to repair our crumbling infrastructure at some point, so why not get it out of the way now when interest rates are low and borrowing is cheap? In fact, this is exactly what the private sector is doing, with companies like Microsoft issuing billions of dollars of debt at low interest rates even though they haven’t figured out what to spend it on yet besides share buybacks. That’s why deficit hawks would make terrible businessmen: because they’d never be willing to issue debt to finance investments.

I’ll add one more point of my own – this is the stuff that is unquestionably the role of government. No matter what you think about OTHER government interventions in the economy, even the most hard-nosed libertarian would never argue that natural monopolies like roads or utility lines should be wholly privatized.

So the arguments typically leveled against OTHER government spending, whether “government power bad” or “deficits bad,” simply do not apply to infrastructure spending. Like energy efficiency, it’s not just a win-win—it’s a win-win-win-win.

I’m sure extremists will still dream up ways to argue that the government should not spend money building roads and bridges, but for most of us, it’s the sort of no-brainer that everyone should be for.

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Free Market Firemen Watch as Home Burns to Ground

2010-10-04T15:11:00.001-04:00

Taxes sure suck… until your house catches on fire and you need taxpayer-funded firemen to put it out.

That’s the lesson an Obion County, TN family learned last week—whose house burned down as firefighters stood watching because the family hadn’t paid their $75 fire department fee:

Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won’t respond, then watches it burn. That’s exactly what happened to a local family tonight. A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning. Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay. The mayor said if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck. This fire went on for hours because garden hoses just wouldn't put it out.

It wasn't until that fire spread to a neighbor's property, that anyone would respond. Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.

"I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong," said Gene Cranick. [...]

We asked the mayor of South Fulton if the chief could have made an exception. “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t,” Mayor David Crocker said.

And you know what? I almost agree with the mayor. The Cranicks took an irresponsible gamble that they could free ride off other people’s fire department fees… and they lost. If you don’t want to pay your taxes, don’t blame me when you get burned.

Almost. The only problem with this way of thinking is that fires don’t exactly stay put, and they don’t just harm the irresponsible people who don’t pay for fire protection. Check out the bold text above. The next door neighbor was responsible, paid his $75 fee so he’d be protected from fire… and yet saw his house catch fire anyway because his neighbors exercised their “freedom” to not pay a fire protection fee.

It’s a lesson on the limits of rugged individualism: you’re free to do whatever you want on your property, until the effects of whatever you’re doing spread onto my property (or into a commons like the atmosphere or ocean). And in today’s interconnected world, where we find ourselves increasingly at the mercy of actions taken by people we’ve never met, we’ve all got a bit more say in the risks others take, whether with fires, finance, or fossil fuels.

It’s why bailouts were necessary—not because we want to save an irresponsible few from the consequences of their actions, but because the actions of those few could have brought down the entire system. You wouldn’t let a boat sink to punish the captain for hitting an iceberg. Likewise, innocent businesses shouldn’t suffer to punish a few irresponsible financiers.

There’s also a global warming lesson here for Joe Romm. Because like fires, pollution doesn’t stay put—and like a fire spreading from your house to mine, as soon as the pollution leaves your property, I have every right to tell you to stop.

If my neighbor’s house catches fire, it could spread to mine—meaning I have a right to make that neighbor to pay for fire protection. If an Arkansas farmer dumps his farm waste into the Mississippi River, it travels down to the Gulf where it fertilizes algae and starves fish of oxygen—meaning that those fishermen have a say in what the farmer does with his waste (or else they must be compensated). And if a utility decides to burn coal to save money, the CO2 gets into the atmosphere and wreaks havoc on the climate other people depend on—meaning that we have a say in the utility’s choice of fuel.

I’m basically a libertarian: do what you want, as long as you only hurt yourself. I would be fine with other people’s right to burn coal and drive Hummers if they were the only ones who had to live with the consequences of global warming. But that’s not the world we live in. No matter how energy conscious I am, no matter whether I live close to work and don’t drive, my responsible choices can’t protect me or my children from the pollution-intensive lifestyles of others.

Like it or not, we’re all in this together. As the Cranick family found out, we now live in such close connection to others that one person’s rugged individualism can set his neighbor’s house on fire, mortgage loans in California can bring down banks in New York, and Hummer-driving soccer moms in Kansas can affect monsoon seasons in Bangladesh. And as soon as the CO2 exits someone else’s tailpipe and enters my atmosphere, it absolutely becomes my business.

Calvin & Hobbes on how to make it in the world with no real skills: be a pundit!

2010-10-01T13:18:00.002-04:00

Deficit hawks would make terrible businessmen: a simple explanation of how the stimulus package works to boost the economy

2010-09-20T12:22:00.002-04:00

For anyone running a business, living within your means is overrated. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money—even when the money’s not there. The metaphor of a family balancing its budget around the kitchen table simply doesn’t apply to a business, because businesses (1) can borrow money at low cost, and (2) can use that borrowed money to make more money.

Think about it this way. If a family borrows money to buy a flat screen TV or granite countertops, it will eventually have to curtail consumption elsewhere to pay back the loan (as long as its income remains constant). After all, the money has to come from somewhere. There are a few exceptions—for example, borrowing money to pay for education, or borrowing money to insulate your house and cut your utility bills, both will provide a future cash flow with which to pay back the loan. But those are investments, not costs. And unless you’re using borrowed money to make more money, you’ll eventually have to cut back. (This is why home equity loans are a scam, as mortgage industry veterans I’ve spoken with readily admit—unless you sell your house, you won’t actually have the cash to pay back the loan.)

Unlike a family at the kitchen table, businesses—especially large ones—do not operate under these constraints, because businesses have access to credit. When a business wants to expand, it can borrow money from a bank or issue debt on the capital markets (e.g. sell bonds). Unlike granite countertops, business debt generates future cash flows (either by increasing revenues or reducing costs) out of which to pay off the debt—and hopefully leave some leftover for the business. For example, a business might issue bonds to finance new plant equipment that will produce more products, or to buy automation software that will reduce its operating costs. Even though the business's debt increases, both investments generate cash that can be used to pay back the debt. A CEO who looked out at his market and said, “well, there are a ton of customers out there waiting to buy our product, but I can’t hire salespeople to reach them because I don’t have the money” would be justly fired for failing to take advantage of his credit access (assuming he did indeed have access to credit).

In other words, if everyone lived within their means, the economy would never grow.

The federal government is more like a business than a family around the kitchen table, because the federal government can borrow money at exceptionally low interest rates, and use it to make investments that grow the economy—or at least prevent it from shrinking—and pay back the loans out of the increased tax revenue.

That’s the logic behind stimulus. In the days following Lehman, the economy was in danger of entering a self-fulfilling death spiral. Banks stopped lending, meaning that businesses couldn’t borrow cash to pay their workers or keep the lights on. Laid off workers—or workers in fear of future layoffs—stopped spending money, reducing businesses’ revenues and forcing them to lay off more workers, further reducing business’ revenues: a positive feedback loop. As incomes fell, the federal government would have taken in less in tax revenue, increasing the deficit. And if the recession turned into a multi-year depression, trillions of dollars in expected government revenues would have simply vanished—meaning that as high as the deficit is now, it would have been even bigger without stimulus.

So like any good businessman, Presidents Bush and Obama borrowed money to stop the economy from collapsing. They injected capital into banks to ensure lending could continue and companies could meet payroll. They bought products from companies who would have otherwise had to lay off workers. They sent unemployment checks to workers so they could continue buying food and basic necessities. And in doing so, they preserved government revenues which otherwise would not have been available to pay off debt. In other words, stimulus is not government spending—it is government investment.

Don’t believe me? Ask the market: 10-year Treasury bond yields are down below 2.75%, which means that the market believes there is a very low risk that the federal government will not pay them back. So free marketers are left in a very tight double bind: either government stimulus works, or the Market is wrong. Either way, the orthodoxy dies.

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Mike Huckabee inadvertently makes the case for health care reform

2010-09-17T15:10:00.000-04:00

Mike Huckabee makes the case that health care reform is bad because covering people with pre-existing conditions is expensive for insurance companies:

"And a lot of this, it sounds so good, and it's such a warm message to say we're not gonna deny anyone from a preexisting condition. Look, I think that sounds terrific, but I want to ask you something from a common sense perspective. Suppose we applied that principle that you can just come along with whatever condition you have and we're gonna cover you at the same cost we're covering everybody else 'cause we wanna be fair. Okay, fine. Then let's do that with our property insurance. And you can call your insurance agent and say, 'I'd like to buy some insurance for my house.' He'd say, 'Tell me about your house.' 'Well sir, it burned down yesterday, but I'd like to insure it today.' And he'll say 'I'm sorry, but we can't insure it after it's already burned.' Well, no preexisting conditions.

"How would you like to be able to call your insurance agent for your car and say 'I want you to insure my car.' 'Well tell me about your car.' 'Well it was a pretty nice vehicle until my sixteen year-old boy wrecked it yesterday. [He] totaled the thing out but I'd like to get it insurance so we can get it replaced.' Now how much would a policy cost if it covered everything? About as much as it's gonna cost for health care in this country."

Actually, these analogies prove the case FOR health care reform. In the first place, this is exactly the reason the health reform bill contains the unpopular “individual mandate,” which requires every American to buy health insurance: if people are allowed to wait until after they get sick to buy insurance, of course everyone will do so, and the insurance industry will collapse. In other words, the health care reform bill already solves exactly the problem that Huckabee brings up.

But more fundamentally, Huckabee’s examples show why private insurance is not necessarily the best way to pay for health care in the first place. Just like home insurances companies don’t want to insure hurricane-prone houses in Florida because they are likely money losers, health insurance companies don’t like to insure people who are likely to need health care—because the insurer will have to pay for it. And do you really want to trust your health care to someone who has a profit motive to not give it to you?

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Mike Castle's loss: When what's good for the Democrats is bad for the country

2010-09-16T16:25:00.000-04:00

By now you’ve heard that Mike Castle, the moderate Republican running in his party’s Senate primary in Delaware, was shockingly defeated by Tea Party radical Christine O’Donnell. The consensus in the Beltway is that this is great news for Democrats, as they now get to face off against a tax-evading lunatic instead of a two-time governor. Even Karl Rove was disappointed.

As a Democrat, you’d think I’d be thrilled. But I’m not. Because in this case, what’s good for Democrats is bad for the country. What this country needs isn’t more liberal Democrats—we need more moderate Republicans.

The problem is that as a smaller Republican Party becomes dominated by an increasing percentage of right-wing zealots, those zealots gain increasing power to pressure the few remaining moderates to toe the line on orthodoxy. Just look at John McCain, who as recently as 2008 supported cap-and-trade in his official campaign platform, and now calls it “cap-and-tax.” No Republican can work with Democrats in this climate, even on issues they AGREE on, because they’re afraid of being singled out for extermination.

As the Republican leadership pulls further rightward, it pulls rank-and-file voters with it, as voters change their views on the issues to align with the dominant views of the party they want to vote for. Decades of political science research shows that party identification is by far the number one driver of voting behavior — not issue positions or even liberal-conservative ideology. So as the party becomes more radical, some voters do indeed abandon ship, but the vast majority find themselves voting for more radical candidates, hence radicalizing their own views ex post facto to align with the choices they’ve found themselves making. (Which, incidentally, is why it’s absurd for politicians to change their views willy-nilly to match whatever they think voters want).

The media is no watchdog either, because it too views politics through the lens of party horserace and not ideology. If Republicans don’t support the President’s policies, the media automatically interprets this as a lack of bipartisanship on his part instead of his opponents’ radicalism. So when the Republican leadership opposes bread and butter measures like improvements to roads and bridges, these become “controversial government spending” instead of “common sense investments.” Heck, in this climate, if the President proposed giving little American flags to war widows, it would quickly become controversial.

But if just a few more moderate Republicans could slip in the door, they could form a critical mass that would give others the political cover to work with Democrats on common sense measures to move the country forward. If ten Republicans got together on cap-and-trade, it would no longer be a Democratic proposal—it would be a bipartisan one. But that’s just not possible with so few lonely moderates left.

Who knows, if the chance arose, I might vote for a moderate Republican over a liberal Democrat… if DC residents had a vote, that is.

Strict constructionist ref denies Detroit Lions a victory, makes case for referee activism on Calvin Johnson call

2010-09-16T10:49:00.001-04:00

I’m a big believer that rules should be allowed to bend as common sense dictates. Case in point: in Sunday’s Bears-Lions game, receiver Calvin Johnson’s would-be game-winning touchdown catch that was ruled a drop by the ref.

Of course, the catch (pun intended) is that technically, the call was correct. The NFL rule states:

If a player goes to the ground in the act of catching a pass (with or without contact by an opponent), he must maintain control of the ball after he touches the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone. If he loses control of the ball, and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete. If he regains control prior to the ball touching the ground, the pass is complete.

But even if the call was correct, it still wasn’t right. Anybody who watched the play knew that Calvin Johnson caught that ball. Even if the letter of the law said it was a drop, common sense tells us it was a catch. We just know it.

I wonder what Antonin Scalia would have thought? Should the refs be strict constructionists and call the game by the letter of the law? Should the NFL add even more caveats and conditions to specify exactly what a catch looks like? Or should the rules be simplified and refs given the freedom to make judgment calls when common sense dictates?

I think we need a little referee activism.

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Accountants join the climate conspiracy

2010-08-27T10:18:00.001-04:00

After “climategate” exposed the massive conspiracy by scientists, politicians, economists, the summer heat, and plants and animals to fabricate global warming, we deniers thought we’d finally been vindicated. It was a total coup.

More confirmation of the conspiracy came as investigation after investigation after investigation after investigation cleared the scientists of any wrong-doing and reaffirmed support for the science of global warming. If so many independent investigations found no wrongdoing, the logical conclusion is not that there was in fact no wrongdoing, but that all these investigators are colluding to cover up the facts. So convinced are we of this that we’re launching an investigation of the investigations—this one by one of our own to make sure it says what we want!

But if the lack of any evidence of a conspiracy isn’t enough proof that there is one, we now have the clearest evidence yet: noted socialist behemoth KPMG has just completed an audit of the IPCC chief’s finances—and surprise surprise, it cleared him of any wrongdoing.

As a result, the newspaper that had published the original smear against the IPCC retracted its story and apologized to the IPCC chief.

So even accounting firms are in on the global warming conspiracy? At this point, the only thing that could prove to me that there is no conspiracy to make up global warming is for scientists to say that it isn't happening. Only then could we trust them.

Clearly, the possibility that global warming is, in fact, real is far too simple an explanation.

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Riddle me this: who's the king climate conspirator?

2010-08-24T08:23:00.001-04:00

Imagine you're an FDA regulator, and a pharmaceutical company is trying to get your approval for a new drug that they think will generate $4 billion in sales annually for 10 years. But you've only got two scientific studies to go by. The first is a university study, and concludes that the drug has dangerous side effects that will cause brain damage or death in 5% of people who use it. The second study is industry-sponsored - and it concludes that links between the drug and health problems are "inconclusive."

Who you gonna believe? I thought so.

Now, here's a second riddle for you. Which one of the following is the most likely scenario:

1. There's a vast conspiracy among the world's scientists to fabricate massive amounts of evidence about the functioning of the earth's climate so they can impose socialist world government on all of humanity.

2. There's a vast conspiracy by a multi-trillion dollar industry to cover up science that threatens its profits.

Any takers?

Of course, I guess there's a third option: that the vast majority of the world's scientists have been simultaneously and spectacularly wrong, wrong in the same direction, and getting more wrong over the last 40 years. But really, pretending that we're smarter than scientists isn't quite as fun as pretending they're conspiring against us.

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"Emboldening the terrorists"

2010-08-23T11:54:00.000-04:00

Last week I argued that "the right of Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero is the very essence of what America means and is." Similarly, I argued that the mosque would actually be a strong signal against the power of terrorism to change us, rather than a sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists:

True weakness isn't giving in to Muslims who want to build a mosque, but in giving into our basest tribal fears of outsiders - the very fears that give "terrorism" its name. After the two towers came down, I said, "Build them back!" Far from a memorial, I wanted to tell the terrorists, "we won't be defined by this tragedy - you knock these towers down, we build them right back up." Similarly, a mosque at Ground Zero of the terrorists' handiwork is not a sign that they've won, but a monument to how little their handiwork has changed us - proof that their best efforts to sow fear has not shaken our commitment to freedom... for ALL Americans.

As usual, I've been proven right. From the Wall Street Journal (!), evidence that opposition to the mosque not only undermines American values of religious freedom, but directly aids terrorists in drumming up anger towards America and inspiring new recruits:

Islamic radicals are seizing on protests against a planned Islamic community center near Manhattan's Ground Zero and anti-Muslim rhetoric elsewhere as a propaganda opportunity and are stepping up anti-U.S. chatter and threats on their websites.

One jihadist site vowed to conduct suicide bombings in Florida to avenge a threatened Koran burning, while others predicted an increase in terrorist recruits as a result of such actions.

"By Allah, the wars are heated and you Americans are the ones who…enflamed it," says one such posting. "By Allah you will be the first to taste its flames."[...]

Jarret Brachman, director of Cronus Global, a security consulting firm, and author of the book Global Jihadism, said al Qaeda and other groups have long used imagery from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to recruit new members. But the U.S. position has been that those wars are not against Islam and that the U.S. has Muslim allies in the fight.

Anti-Muslim rhetoric in the U.S is different, since jihadists can use Americans' words to make the case that the U.S. is indeed at war with Islam. The violent postings are not just on al Qaeda-linked websites but on prominent, mainstream Muslim chat forums, Mr. Brachman said.

"We are handing al Qaeda a propaganda coup, an absolute propaganda coup," with the Islamic-center controversy, said Evan Kohlmann, an independent terrorism consultant at Flashpoint Partners who monitors jihadist websites.

You read that correctly. Even the News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal recognizes the truth on this one: every protest against the mosque directly increases the chances that another terrorist attack will happen. It's an irony that's true from schoolyards to street corners to international conflagrations: many conflicts stem not from rational defense of self-interest, but from the emotional overreaction to an affront which in turn escalates an imagined threat to a real one.

As even more evidence that it's not just bleeding-heart liberals who support religious freedom, both the NYPD and FDNY have strongly condemned ads by NY gubenatorial candidate Rick Lazio opposing the mosque:

Unions representing the city’s firefighters and police officers immediately demanded that Mr. Lazio pull his most recent ad, calling it an affront. Ed Mullins, the head of the city’s police sergeants’ union, called the ads “as irresponsible as they are reprehensible.”

Tea Party protesters and New York City fire fighters clearly have different opinions over whether a mosque at Ground Zero is insensitive. I think I know who to side with in this affair.

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A pox on shock jocks who talk to block mosques: the case for building the mosque at Ground Zero

Enough ado about hockey sticks: the worst is yet to come

2010-08-17T01:21:00.001-04:00

Global warming deniers are making another attempt at discrediting the famed "hockey stick" graph, based on a paper (McShane and Wyner 2010) that purports to show mistakes in its statistical methods. While I don't have the statistical chops to assess the validity of either party's math, I did want to make two observations.

First, as others have noted, even if you assume that the new paper is the "correct" version, it doesn't look much different from other hockey stick graphs - if anything, the hockey stick shape in the new study is more pronounced.

More importantly, the hockey stick graph ultimately matters very little for what we should do about CO2, since it only measures past temperatures up to around the year 2000. What we really care about isn't the past temperature increase we've already observed, but rather the much larger future increase that's still to come assuming we do nothing about CO2. And that isn't accounted for in any existing hockey stick graph. I've taken the liberty of (unscientifically) adding this onto the McShane and Wyner hockey stick graph, using a simple average of the IPCC's low-end (1.1 degrees C) and high-end estimates (6.4 degrees C) for 21st century temperature increase:

Looks more like a hockey skate! Despite deniers' strange obsession with the past and lack of concern for the future (perhaps by virtue of their conservatism), the bottom line is this: the reliability of past temperature reconstructions matter very little compared to what we have in store... and it's about to get a whole lot hotter.

If this looks familiar, here's why:

A pox on shock jocks who talk to block mosques: the case for building the mosque at Ground Zero

2010-08-16T23:52:00.004-04:00

When I was 18 and stranded in JFK airport for 7 1/2 hours on a high school trip to Europe, my English teacher Mr. Parris Bushong pointed to a group of three people--a dark-bearded Hasidic Jew, a suit-wearing white woman, and a paraplegic black man--all in a circle talking and laughing quietly together. "That, right there, is America," he said.

When I think of America, I don't just think of waving corn fields and dusty roads with pickup trucks: I also picture immigrants getting off the boat in New York City under the shadow of skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty, opening Italian delis and Irish churches and Jewish textile shops, grimy beret-wearing kids carousing in the city streets shouting "youze guys wanna play some stickball?" - all in search of opportunity and freedom in the bubbling cultural milieu that is America.

So when a group of Muslims wants to build a mosque near Ground Zero, I say let them! - not because I begrudgingly accept their freedom to do something I disagree with, but because the right of Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero is the very essence of what America means and is. My image of America, of people coming together from all parts of the world to live and prosper together, is undermined less by the terrorists who flew planes into that great melting pot of a city than by the crazed hoards who now descend upon it, demanding that the very freedoms they say the terrorists want to destroy be revoked.

How are we even having this debate? What is the argument against the mosque - that it would be "insensitive" of people who share the same religion as the terrorists to build a mosque close to the site of the tragedy? But wouldn't that sort of depend on most Muslims being terrorists? Let me put it a different way: if you do not believe that most Muslims are terrorists, is it still possible to make a logical case for being offended by a mosque? Timothy McVeigh grew up Catholic and was both a Republican and NRA member - must cathedrals, elephant statues, and NRA ranges keep their distance from Oklahoma City?

In any case, whether or not I'm offended is kindof a moot point, as the Bill of Rights doesn't contain a right to not be offended. The freedom of religion, on the other hand, is protected not just by the First Amendment, but by the first words of the First Amendment. If we think it's fine to throw that away just because a religious building hurts our feelings, how can we even call ourselves Americans?

True weakness isn't giving in to Muslims who want to build a mosque, but in giving into our basest tribal fears of outsiders - the very fears that give "terrorism" its name. After the two towers came down, I said, "Build them back!" Far from a memorial, I wanted to tell the terrorists, "we won't be defined by this tragedy - you knock these towers down, we build them right back up." Similarly, a mosque at Ground Zero of the terrorists' handiwork is not a sign that they've won, but a monument to how little their handiwork has changed us - proof that their best efforts to sow fear have not shaken our commitment to freedom... for ALL Americans.

Opponents of the mosque say they are protecting "our way of life," but in America, that very phrase is a contradiction - for the American way of life (such that it exists) is defined by there not being a singly-defined American way of life. Whether someone wants to burn a flag or pledge allegiance to it, to build a mosque or a church or an organic garden, our freedom to do those things--not our opinions on their appropriateness--is what defines us as Americans.

Which is why when Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich and the swarming masses, pulsating and waving signs with grotesque energy like some stepped-on ant colony, say that Muslims don't have a right to build a mosque at Ground Zero, they aren't just wrong: they stab at the heart of what it means to be an American. Restricting the right of a group of citizens to build a mosque in the name of protecting freedom is literally bringing Orwell's cryptic words to fruition: that all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

The freedom of religion has always been America's first freedom, and a few raggedy terrorists hiding in caves aren't going to change that - that can only be done by those whose reptilian brains the terrorists whip into a fight-or-flight hysteria against outsiders.

The greatest Onion article ever

2010-08-15T19:05:00.001-04:00

The article speaks for itself:

"Millions Of Barrels Of Oil Safely Reach Port In Major Environmental Catastrophe"

PORT FOURCHON, LA—In what may be the greatest environmental disaster in the nation's history, the supertanker TI Oceania docked without incident at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port Monday and successfully unloaded 3.1 million barrels of dangerous crude oil into the United States.

According to witnesses, the catastrophe began shortly after the tanker, which sailed unimpeded across the Gulf of Mexico, stopped safely at the harbor and made contact with oil company workers on the shore. Soon after, vast amounts of the black, toxic petroleum in the ship's hold were unloaded at an alarming rate into special storage containers on the mainland.

From there, experts confirmed, the oil will likely spread across the entire country's infrastructure and commit unforetold damage to its lakes, streams, and air.

"We're looking at a crisis of cataclysmic proportions," said Charles Hartsell, an environmental scientist at Tufts University. "In a matter of days, this oil may be refined into a lighter substance that, when burned as fuel in vehicles, homes, and businesses, will poison the earth's atmosphere on a terrifying scale."

"Time is of the essence," Hartsell added. "If this is allowed to continue, the health of every American could be put at risk."

...

"Our fear is that we'll start seeing this stuff in tanker trucks headed to gas stations all over America," Environmental Protection Agency official Ralph Linney said. "And once they start pumping it into individual cars for combustion, it's all over."

"How can we possibly contain this after it's spread to 250 million vehicles, each one going in a different direction?" he added.

Experts are saying the oil tanker safely reaching port could lead to dire ecological consequences on multiple levels, including rising temperatures, disappearing shorelines, the eradication of countless species, extreme weather events, complete economic collapse, droughts that surpass the Dust Bowl, disease, wildfires, widespread human starvation, and endless, bloody wars fought over increasingly scarce resources.

...

Noting that they have acted in strict accordance with U.S. laws and complied with the orders of federal regulators, representatives from ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Chevron have all denied responsibility for the disaster.

Nice to see at least The Onion is covering the impacts of global warming.

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There's hope for the world

2010-08-11T23:02:00.001-04:00

Nickelback may have been the top selling band of the Bush era, but the world isn't quite over yet. The Arcade Fire's transcendent third album, The Suburbs, just hit #1:

They did it, folks-- more people bought Arcade Fire's third album, The Suburbs, than any other album in the United States last week. The news comes courtesy of their label, Merge, and label mates Spoon, who Tweeted, "Let the record reflect that Merge Records is the NUMBER ONE LABEL IN THE USA! Here's to Arcade Fire and Merge: #1 -- 156k copies sold." This comes after news of the group triumphing over the UK album charts this week as well, according to Billboard.

This is the band's first chart-topping album in the U.S. Their last LP, Neon Bible, debuted at number two. Independent rock music is pretty popular now, apparently!

For a little while at least, everything is just in the music world.

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Marceaux-Palin 2012

2010-08-09T13:40:00.000-04:00

The hardest thing about writing that headline was figuring out who to put at the top of the ticket.

A shocking moment of honesty from Big Oil: ConocoPhillips CEO says offshore oil isn’t economical without big government support, demands bailout

2010-08-08T23:39:00.002-04:00

One of the complaints free marketeers frequently level against renewable energy is that it can’t survive without government support, whereas dirty fuels are economical in their own right. So when a major oil company CEO admits that offshore oil is only economical because of government support, that should cause any so-called libertarian to reconsider his beliefs.

We already knew that fossil fuels hardly compete solely on their own merits. Far from it: subsidies for dirty fuels dwarf those for clean energy. From 2002-08, the US spent about seven times as much subsidizing dirty energy than it did renewables. And an analysis by Bloomberg found that worldwide, governments spend twelve times more subsidizing dirty energy: $557 billion per year for fossil fuels vs. only $43-$46 billion for renewables. Government-dependent indeed.

But those are just the explicit subsidies: cash directly given to companies, or requirements to use specific fuels. The true shocker here is how heavily offshore oil development depends on anti-market protection from liability in order to be profitable. At least, that’s what ConocoPhillips CEO Jim Mulva unwittingly declared the other day. In an article entitled, “Unlimited liability for Gulf oil spills would kill development,” the Financial Times reports:

Jim Mulva, ConocoPhillips’ chief executive, says that the unlimited liability some are proposing in Congress to punish operators for further spills in the Gulf of Mexico is inappropriate. That would raise the question of how many of the smaller companies operating in the Gulf could afford to get back out there to work following the lifting of the moratorium and even whether the risk reward equation would favor going out into the waters again for the biggest of companies. He said to analysts:

We will not develop the resources if we have that situation.

It may have sounded like a threat, but it is also a realistic assessment of the situation.It is true that an increasing number of companies have been looking to the Gulf for prospects, given that it has been a good source of oil and natural gas over the years and new technology has made it even more so. But they will not risk their entire futures to get at the resources.

Mulva’s intent, of course, was to argue against imposing unlimited liability for oil spills. But assuming his statement was more than bluster, his implicit admission is that the risks of oil spills are so great that in a free market, the costs of paying for spill damages would outweigh the benefits of developing the resources.

Of course, the situation in the Gulf is hardly a free market, and neither oil companies nor Congressional Republicans have any interest in creating one (corporate welfare is good for the shareholders). Liability for damages from oil spills is capped at $75 million, which means that oil companies do not have to account for the full costs of oil production in their resource planning. It’s an implicit subsidy (or more accurately, a bailout): no matter how bad the damages to the tourism industry, the fishing industry, and the intrinsic value of the coastal ecology, oil companies will only ever have to pay $75 million to compensate them. Either the taxpayer picks up the tab, or the non-oil industries are just left with losses, while Big Oil gets bailed out.

In other words, when Jim Mulva or coastal congressmen say, “lifting the liability cap will hurt production and kill jobs,” what they’re actually saying is, “offshore production only occurs because of market-distorting protections that insulate companies from the consequences of their decisions and lead to overproduction of a resource.” Would making oil companies responsible for damages they cause reduce oil production and oil jobs? Probably. But jobs and money are not reasons to subsidize irresponsibility. There’s no constitutional right to drill for oil: if paying for the full cost of oil spills would make offshore drilling unprofitable, then offshore drilling probably shouldn’t be happening, and it’s not the government’s job to make it profitable.

And let’s not forget that for every offshore driller who’s hard at work, there’s also a fisherman whose fishing grounds are ruined by oil, and a hotel worker whose rooms are empty of tourists. If oil companies are insulated from liability, it means that drilling is necessarily happening in an economically inefficient manner, which likely means that the jobs destroyed by oil are greater than the jobs created by it.

If companies have rights just like people, then they also have responsibilities. Personal responsibility is not just for individuals.

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The politics of Calvin & Hobbes: On blaming President Obama for the mess we're in

2010-08-06T11:32:00.000-04:00

I can almost hear John Boehner now: "Where are the jobs?" Maybe he ought to look in his own closet.

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Could Paul Ryan’s plan to abolish Medicare actually make sense?

2010-08-04T17:46:00.002-04:00

Rep. Paul Ryan wants to get rid of Medicare and Medicaid, and replace them with vouchers to buy health insurance. In conservative circles, the idea is quietly ignored because it could be unpopular. In media circles, the idea has christened him as the intellectual leader of the Right (not because it’s a good idea, but because it’s an idea—a rare sight amount today’s Right). And in liberal circles, the idea has been lambasted as one which would gradually result in poor people unable to afford health care.

People poo poo the Ryan plan because his vouchers would increase more slowly than health care expenses currently are. So it stands to reason that over time, the voucher would buy less and less health care.

Of course, the key assumption here is that health care costs would continue rising at the same rate after Ryan’s plan were passed. But that’s not necessarily a safe assumption, because our willingness to pay a lot for health care isn’t just a result of high health care costs—it is also a cause.

Part of the problem with Medicare is that because it pays for unlimited health care, providers and medical technology manufacturers have little incentive to control costs. If the trough of health care dollars is ever expanding, just line right up and drink.

But if instead of unlimited insurance dollars, people were given a fixed voucher, health care providers would have to compete for a limited pool of health care dollars. Patients would be more hesitant to consume health care, and when they did consume it, they would be more likely to shop around for lower costs (assuming information on quality and costs were available to them). This would give providers a strong incentive to keep costs down. In this sense, it’s possible that the Ryan plan could bring down the rate of increase in health care spending so it’s more in line with the money available to pay for it.

Moreover, experience in developing countries suggests that lack of money to pay for health care doesn’t discourage innovation—it simply shifts innovation And in poor countries where people DON’T have unlimited Medicare money to spend on health care, companies like GE are innovating low-cost medical technologies that deliver 50% of the benefit for 10% of the cost of similar technologies in the West. From a previous post:

Check out what GE Healthcare is doing in India. Conventional wisdom holds that with a per capital GDP only 5% that of the United States', India would be a poor market for a company that makes million-dollar imaging machines, but that's exactly where GE Healthcare decided to invest. And the risk paid off. The need to serve people without much money to spend on health care has produced a $1,000 electrocardiogram device and a $15,000 PC-based ultrasound machine - roughly 15% the price of the top-end devices sold in the US. And costs keep falling. In fact, today GE is finding markets in the United States for these "50% solutions at 15% prices":

Consider GE’s health-care business in the United States. It used to make most of its money on premium computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging machines. But to succeed in the era of broader access and reduced reimbursement that President Obama hopes to bring about, the business will probably need to increase by 50% the number of products it offers at lower price points. And that doesn’t mean just cheaper versions of high-tech products like imaging machines. The company also must create more offerings like the heated bassinet it developed for India, which has great potential in US inner cities, where infant deaths related to the cold remain high. And let’s not forget that technology often can be improved until it satisfies more demanding customers. The compact ultrasound, which can now handle imaging applications that previously required a conventional machine, is one example.

Anticipating the effects of health care reform, GE recently announced a plan to invest $3 billion to invent 100 more low-cost medical solutions in the US. Reading the article, I can scarcely contain my optimism over companies' abilities to innovate if given the right carrots (or sticks).

In other words, we don’t have to accept the current rate of health care cost increase as a given. If it is true that the availability of health care dollars is a cause of the increase in health care costs, reducing those dollars would bring down the costs as well, making health care more affordable than many liberals anticipate.

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Cap-and-trade opponents sound like 6-year old Calvin complaining about cleaning his room

2010-08-04T11:27:00.000-04:00

If businesses affected by global warming legislation would shut up, stop whining, and get to work cleaning up their act, they'd probably find that it wasn't as bad or expensive as they thought.

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I actually agree with Rand Paul... sort of

2010-08-02T18:02:00.000-04:00

Extremist Senate candidate Rand Paul is back in the headlines again, asserting that just because a mine explosion killed 29 miners the other month—a mine run by anti-government fanatic Don Blankenship—nonetheless doesn’t mean that government has any business regulating the mining business. According to The Hill:

Reform-minded lawmakers in both the House and Senate are pushing legislation to bolster the work-safety protections for miners working underground. But don't try to convince Rand Paul.

The Republican running to replace outgoing Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) in the coal-mining hub of Kentucky said recently that Washington has no business formulating mine safety rules.

"The bottom line is: I'm not an expert, so don't give me the power in Washington to be making rules," Paul said at a recent campaign stop in response to questions about April's deadly mining explosion in West Virginia, according to a profile in Details magazine. "You live here, and you have to work in the mines. You'd try to make good rules to protect your people here. If you don't, I'm thinking that no one will apply for those jobs."

"I know that doesn't sound ... I want to be compassionate, and I'm sorry for what happened, but I wonder: Was it just an accident?"

And you know what? Contrary to blogger Steve Benen, I agree with Paul… to a point. Elected officials AREN'T qualified to decide which technologies a business should implement. But that doesn't mean that government shouldn't be involved at all. The solution is simply to impose enormous liability for accidents on the mining companies, giving them an incentive to invest in better safety equipment to reduce the risk of massive lawsuits. That is, rather than require that specific accident-preventing methods be used, government should simply raise the cost of accidents and let business figure out the best methods to prevent them.

Incidentally, this is also why cap-and-trade should really be called capitalism-and-trade. In contrast to a regulatory approach that mandates specific carbon-reducing technologies, cap-and-trade is a market-based approach that gives businesses a target for carbon reductions and then allows them to figure out how to get there. A regulatory approach is uniform, costly, and sometimes hampers innovation, while a market-based approach is flexible, cheap, and spurs innovation.

The broader point speaks to the proper role of government: while government shouldn’t prescribe specific methods which business must adopt to achieve goals, it certainly has a role in determining which goals are necessary to achieve—whether a safer workplace, healthier communities, or reduced carbon emissions.

New study regulates on free market alarmists, finds no downside to pricing carbon pollution

2010-07-20T02:00:00.000-04:00

Cap-and-trade will have no impact on the US economy, a new report by the Energy Information Administration concluded yesterday. Chalk it up in the “yet another study shows no downside to reducing carbon pollution” column: it's yet another blow to the free market alarmists whose tarot card prophesies of economic doom continue to be proven so consistently wrong.

Ok, so the EIA didn’t say “zero” impact, but it might as well have. According to the brand new, authoritative analysis, the Senate climate bill would reduce US GDP by only a CUMULATIVE $452 billion between 2013 and 2035, or 0.2%.

Now $452 billion sounds like a big number, but it’s in fact infinitesimally small. How infinitesimal? Over 23 years, that’s roughly $19.7 billion per year. That’s less money than is currently possessed by 18 individuals. In fact, the richest 17 people in the world could pay off the whole $452 billion and still be billionaires.

Hardly the picture of economic doom painted by the free market alarmists.

Of course, as anyone familiar with climate policy knows, it’s not just the “most likely scenario” that matters: worst-case scenarios, though unlikely, can still happen, so it’s important to consider those as well. But again, the data here will leave the fossil fuel pharisees disappointed. In 5 of the 6 scenarios, economic costs ranged from 0.1% to 0.4% of GDP, and the worst case scenario predicts a puny 1% GDP loss. Over 23 years, that’s 0.04% per year. That’s what the free market alarmists are so worked up about?

In other words, while there may be economic costs associated with making polluters pay, those costs are a fraction of tiny, and more importantly they are predictable. In general, we know pretty well what happens when, for example, we tax a good. To the extent that some uncertainty remains, the range of possibilities is finite and manageable--a 0.04% decline in GDP may sting, but we can live with it. And that doesn’t even include the benefits of action, which are likely to be orders of magnitude higher than the cost.

On the other hand, the range of possible outcomes from human interference with the climate is unpredictable and varies widely, and the worst-case scenarios are the stuff of nightmares. The consequences of messing with markets are a lot more manageable than those of messing with Nature.

Moreover, historical evidence suggests that whenever we’ve been wrong in predicting the cost of environmental regulations, we’ve nearly always overestimated the downside. Why? Because markets work: if government policy increases the price of energy, smart businesses will invent new technologies that reduce the cost of compliance and spawn entire new industries. In other words, if you think cap-and-trade will hurt the economy, it can only be because you don’t believe in markets.

On the other hand, if we’re wrong about the consequences of climate change, we’re likely underestimating them. With each new positive feedback that’s discovered, it becomes more and more likely that catastrophic climate change is in the cards for continued fossil fuel burning. In fact, a study found that “New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is ‘worse than previously expected,’ rather than "not as bad as previously expected.” Now, you can either read this as evidence that the dangers of global warming are becoming more clear as we learn more, or that the majority of the world’s scientists are engaged in a massive conspiracy to cover up the truth and establish an eco-communist new world order. But you’re a reasonable person. And do reasonable people believe in conspiracy theories about Nazi scientists?

So there you have it. The risks of pricing carbon are tiny, likely overblown (even as small as they are), and no matter how big will always fall within the manageable realm of human experience. On the other hand, climate risks are huge, likely dangerously underestimated, and could destroy civilization as we know it if the worst-case comes true. The decision is SO EASY.

And that’s the most heart-stoppingly infuriating, rip-your-hair-out mind-numbing, part about the whole “climate debate”: that the skeptics are willing to risk so much for so little, to bet the future of civilization--OUR civilization--on something so infinitesimally unimportant and devoid of value. Even if the skeptics are right, even if the scientists are wrong and there is absolutely zero reason to reduce CO2 emissions, the costs of doing so are so low that there's no harm in trying. Following the advice of a climate skeptic is like playing Russian Roulette for a quarter, like making a $1 million investment for a $100 return, like giving Barry Zito a $126 million contract. The fact that people with such warped notions of risk-reward think of themselves as stewards of our nation’s businesses is almost as terrifying as their influence on our climate policy. We don't want to do anything about CO2, because we might lose 0.04% of annual GDP.

When the worst case scenario for cap-and-trade is 0.04% of GDP per year, you need to be 99.96% certain that 97% of the world’s climate scientists are 100% wrong in their study of the climate. You’re a reasonable person. Care to take that bet?

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2010-07-06T11:03:00.000-04:00

Or for that matter, libertarian climate skeptics who can't be bothered about their CO2 emissions:

(Hey, the warming's not stopping!)

Relax and smell the gun smoke: Supreme Court rules that NRA was way too paranoid about Obama after all

2010-06-28T14:44:00.001-04:00

The Supreme Court dealt a blow to the NRA today, striking down Chicago’s handgun ban while preserving the right of states and localities to enact “reasonable” gun control laws—and proving once and for all that the anti-gun boogeyman from which the organization derives its focus is a mirage.

Remember back in 2008 when gun sales spiked due to irrational fears that President Obama would soon ban guns? If the year-and-a-half of continuing gun-ownership and zero presidential rhetoric on the matter had not allayed such paranoia already, this decision should dispel any last fears of lurking liberals hell-bent on taking away people’s guns. For pragmatic liberals like the President, even if we’d like stricter gun laws, they’re simply not a priority; you can keep your guns as long as I can cap your carbon. And even if the President did have an agenda to ban guns, this decision is a reminder that he wouldn’t be able to.

Personally, I’m ambivalent on the whole matter. I’m inclined to agree with Justice Alito that the Second Amendment “limits (but by no means eliminates) [states and municipalities’] ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values,” and that “[s]tate and local experimentation with reasonable firearms regulations will continue under the Second Amendment.” However, I’m skeptical that a ban on handguns is the best way to solve the social problem of urban violence. I’ve not seen any evidence that banning handguns actually keeps them out of the hands of the gangsters and thugs we worry about using them. In fact, it seems the ultimate example of going after the symptoms of the disease rather than causes. Better for liberals to focus our energy on alleviating the incentives to engage in violence (poverty, gangsta culture, and money to be earned from the drug trade) than the tools used to commit it.

So if you’ve been stocking up on guns and ammo since ’08, relax and save your money. We liberals aren’t trying to take your guns away, and even if we were, there are other branches of government to stop us.

UPDATE (6/29/10): A friend pointed out something I'd glossed over, which is that while the Court ultimately ruled against handgun restrictions, President Obama's nomination to the Court, Justice Sotomayor, ruled in favor of the ban, so it would be fair to assume that if the President had his way, handguns would be banned. Moreover, he argued, the President was for the handgun ban before he was against it, changing his mind after the Heller decision struck down D.C.'s handgun ban.

It's a fair point. While Obama himself would have a hard time restricting gun ownership, his Supreme Court nominations could certainly reduce the types of guns we're allowed to own (or at least they could have before this ruling).

That said, if it's true that the President changed his position on handgun bans, it indicates that pushing forward to tighten gun control isn't a policy priority for him. In other words, even if he believes in stricter gun control in an ideal world, it's not something he's willing to spend political capital pushing, given all the other priorities on his plate. Moreover, even if he were to push forward with a ban on handguns, that's a far cry from banning ALL guns. The rush to buy guns before they were "banned" is, and always was, based on unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

And in any case, the Supreme Court has now largely settled the issue, so even if the President did want to push hard for a handgun ban, or replaces conservative with pro-gun control Justices, the precedent has already been set. And the Supreme Court rarely overturns precedent.

What happens when we delve too greedily and too deep - maybe Gandalf can stop the gusher

2010-06-25T23:19:00.005-04:00

"Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear."
- Gloin, The Fellowship of the Ring

The Dwarves of Khazad-Dum perished not because their analysts failed to plan for Balrog attack, but because their reckless lust to mine, control, and profit from the earth's natural wealth led them into places they should not have been, unleashing forces they could not control.

Maybe we do owe BP boss Tony Hayward an apology - not for getting BP to pay for the clean up (seriously Republicans, don't you remember the concept of personal responsibility?), but for the way he's been demonized by the media and liberal activists. As if BP isn't doing everything it can to stop the gusher.

We also owe the President and his officials an apology for the ridiculous assertions that the failure to stop the oil from flowing is somehow their fault. As if regulators and politicians can just invent technology to seal the leak.

Such misguided criticism spans the political spectrum. Climate blogger Joe Romm shrieks "Why oh why hasn’t Hayward been fired yet???" Sarah "half-term" Palin accuses the administration of not putting enough effort into stopping the oil leak - and gets called out by Bill O'Reilly. Frank Rich criticizes the President's "impotence," melodramatically portending, "What’s also being tarred daily by the gushing oil is the very notion that government can accomplish anything." The CEO of Anadarko Petroleum - BP's partner on the Deepwater Horizon well - stabs his onetime ally in the back to save his own skin, alleging that "this tragedy was preventable and the direct result of BP’s reckless decisions and actions." For an industry built on ash and flame, oil is a cold cold business.

The truth is, the President isn't Aquaman, and firing Tony Hayward will not seal the hole in the seafloor. If anything, a post-firing leadership vacuum would frustrate efforts to stop the gusher. As bad as we want a villain to blame and whose head to roll, there is no bad guy here. Accidents just happen: while any single accident may be preventable in hindsight, the laws of probability make eventual tragedy inevitable in any risky endeavor - especially 5,000 feet under the sea. If not BP, then Exxon or Shell; if not in 2010, then 2012 or 2020. The oil spill doesn't mean Tony Hayward is incompetent - it just means he is imperfect, because he is human, using imperfect technology invented by humans. "Blaming" BP makes about as much sense as "blaming" NASA engineers for the Challenger disaster.

Not that I'm shedding tears for BP. Hurt feelings are not the greatest harm in castigating CEOs and politicians for not staunching the oil, but rather the way in which such criticism paints the disaster as a technical slip-up rather than a philosophical quandary - a problem resulting from insufficient planning and engineering rather than the inevitable consequence of messing with forces we don't understand. Much of the natural world is still a mystery to us, and failing to respect that mystery, placing too much faith in our engineering expertise, will end in tears.

The doom of Icarus was not that his wings were poorly constructed but that his technology carried him too close to the sun. In The Lord of the Rings, the Dwarves of Khazad-Dum perished not because their analysts failed to plan for Balrog attack, but because their reckless lust to mine, control, and profit from the earth's natural wealth led them into places they should not have been, unleashing forces they could not control.

And that's the lesson in the Gulf: the reason we can't blame BP for the uncontrollable gusher is that the oil is not something humans can always control. BP's disaster was indeed caused by recklessness, but not that of an individual company ignoring technical warning signs - rather, like the Dwarves, it was the collective recklessness of the human race in our wild thirst for comfort and wealth subduing Man and Nature with vain rigor, not for truth or love or basic need but to fuel our production of all that is unnecessary for happiness. We pricked the earth and unleashed a fury we were powerless to undo.

The critics' creeping technocracy, which assumes any problem can be broken into its component parts and methodically solved, casts Nature as something that can be subdued and controlled if only we throw enough money and smart people at it. If the disaster was merely a problem of BP's "recklessness," of not properly anticipating and fixing technical risks, then there's nothing inherently dangerous with the activity of offshore drilling itself - and the great human project to conquer Nature and engineer her to our image of the mathematically perfect world marches on.

This is not to say that we should never take risks or venture into the unknown. But when we take such ventures, the prize must be a higher purpose than profit, and the harm of any inevitable disaster confined mostly to the venturers themselves.

The unknown unknown of what would happen if a deepwater rig failed is tragically being answered before our eyes: 15 times worse than we ever thought possible. This local spill, of course, offers a grim preview of the looming, great Unknown Unknown of the 21st Century which we've just begun to taste: global climate change. Skeptics claim that uncertainty in the science means we can continue recklessly pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, when in reality the uncertainty is exactly why we must stop. Just as early estimates of the oil spill turned out to be woefully low, we have no idea what the worst consequences of climate change could be - and I don't want to find out what they are. The longer we mess with Nature, the likelier we are to get burned - and not every fire that's started can be easily put out.

The story of the BP spill is not about an overlooked technical fix that could have prevented a disaster, but about what happens when we pry into forces of Nature we don't understand and certainly can't control. The tragedy of Moria was not that the Dwarves didn't predict the location of the Balrog which would have enabled them to continue digging safely, but that the greed of their digging itself made disaster inevitable. Eventually, they would have run out of safe places to dig.

In The Lord of the Rings, it took a wizard to defeat the menace awoken by delving too greedily and too deep. Unfortunately there's no such magic in the real world, and neither President Obama nor Tony Hayward are wizards. Not all that is done can be undone; not every problem can be prevented.

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Bill O'Reilly (!) mocks Sarah Palin

2010-06-17T13:07:00.002-04:00

You know how far the GOP has moved to the right when Bill O'Reilly starts to sound reasonable - even rational. My first post in a while was going to recap a trip to Costa Rica from which I returned Tuesday, but this exchange between the Fox host and a half-term Alaska governor is too priceless:

This snippet about halfway through is especially hilarious (slightly edited):

O'Reilly: "So what is your solution here, Governor? What would you do tonight? Tell the nation tonight what you would have said your main point in that speech."

Palin: "Stop, stopping the gusher."

O'Reilly: "But nobody knows how to do it."

Palin: "We haven't had the assurance by the President that that has been his top priority..."

O'Reilly: "If that happens, there's going to be an outcry. But are you telling me that you don't think the President's top priority is stopping that leak? Is that what you're telling me?"

Palin: "What - what I'm - what... blah blah blah"

People often accuse the President of speaking in generalities and shirking the specifics, but a proposal for how to stop the oil spill doesn't get more general than "stopping the gusher."

Tellingly, Palin's proposal to stop the oil spill by stopping the oil spill is strikingly similar to the GOP's proposal to lower health care premiums by lowering health care premiums:

What everyone needs to get through their heads is that it's pointless to demand that somebody, whether President Obama or BP, "do more" to stop the oil spill - as if the President and BP have no incentive to do so and aren't doing everything they can to stop it. Short of the President or Tony Hayward "scuba diving to the bottom of the Gulf, placing large amounts of silly putty in the hole, then performing a miracle by bringing back all the dead wildlife to life and declaring, 'I am the Chocolate Jesus!'" (as one reader suggested), I'm not sure what more pundits could want. Sadly, even if President Obama did this, conservatives would still hate him (and liberals would still hate BP).

Palin, Boehner, et al aren't just the party of "no" - they're the party of "no clue."

Why I'm not even mad at BP

2010-06-04T13:27:00.001-04:00

The most absurd spectacle of the oil spill is the gusher of accusations over “who’s to blame.” Liberals accuse BP of recklessly ignoring safety measures that could have prevented the disaster. Conservatives are somehow blaming President Obama for “not doing enough” (although it’s beyond me how someone who subscribes to “small government” can in good faith accuse the president of not regulating oil companies enough).

But you know who’s really to blame? No one.

Accidents happen. We act in a world of incomplete information. Not every risk is foreseeable, those we foresee are not always preventable, and those we fail to prevent are not always solvable, even with the best brains and expertise working on them. Could BP have done more to prevent the disaster? Maybe. Could they do more to stop it now? Doubtful. In hindsight it’s easy to point out all the flaws BP “should” have spotted and prevented, but in practice it’s simply impossible to predict every possible risk in advance. That’s just the way life works.

This is especially true when pioneering into the unknown. BP’s deepwater platform was literally testing uncharted waters, drilling oil at depths rarely done before, using cutting edge technologies invented for that purpose. Many of the solutions BP has tried have never been attempted before, so there has been no way to tell in advance whether they’d work. To say the disaster is BP’s or President Obama’s “fault” is a little like blaming Lewis and Clark’s “recklessness” for the deaths in the wilderness of fellow explorers, or blaming NASA engineers for the Apollo 13 or Columbia disasters.

To wait until all risks are known and until there is zero chance of failure would destroy all progress and innovation. You can always do more for safety, but at some point doing more means not doing. If Lewis and Clark cared about safety, they never would have found Oregon. If astronauts weren’t willing to risk their lives, we’d have never landed men on the moon. Exploring hostile, unknown environments, whether uncharted forests, outer space, or 5,000 feet beneath the sea, is an inherently dangerous activity, and disasters are inevitable. That’s the nature of the beast.

So the proper question is not “how angry should we be at BP,” or “how should BP have prevented the disaster,” or even “how do we prevent future oil spills.” Rather, we should ask, “given the inevitability of disaster, are the benefits of an inherently dangerous endeavor great enough to justify the costs of a worst-case disaster when it eventually happens?” Is it worthwhile to put ourselves in a position where catastrophic accidents are bound to happen--and which we may not be able to get ourselves out of?

In this case, the answer is pretty obvious: the scale of the BP disaster shows that there really is no reason to pursue deepwater drilling. It’s already the largest oil spill in US history, and we haven’t even seen the worst possible impacts. Plumes of oil could cause a collapse of the Gulf of Mexico food chain. A hurricane storm surge would bring the oil miles inland, destroying even more habitat than anticipated. And for what? For slightly cheaper oil? So some people can make money? When we have alternatives readily available in the form of smaller cars and driving less?

It’s a similar lesson for climate change. Sure, we don’t know for certain how devastating the impacts of global warming will be, but they could be unthinkably huge—and the worst ones we probably haven’t even imagined yet. Do we really want to risk destroying the planet, all for the sake of saving a few dollars off our utility bills and buying cheap goods that don’t actually bring us happiness?

The bottom line: humans simply don’t have the capacity to understand all the risks before taking action. When those risks are potentially catastrophic, we need to take a long, hard look at the benefits of action before moving forward.

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Rudy Giuliani (sort of) advocates government takeover of BP

2010-06-03T16:48:00.000-04:00

Last night, Fox News was on at the gym, and I heard Rudy Giuliani drop this whopper:

[The President’s leadership on the oil spill] couldn’t be worse… What we should have done is the president of the United States should have immediately taken control; should have gone there; should have been there a lot more than twice; should have been leading the charge from the front, not this "oh you know I'm not going to touch it."

And BP — for the longest time Gibbs was saying BP was in charge. The president announced a week ago that he was actually in charge….

So [it] wouldn't be just in the hands of BP. And he wouldn't put the entire responsibility just on them.

Wait, WHAAATTT??? For the past year and a half, the GOP has done nothing but accuse President Obama of “socialist” policies that increase government control over business. But now Giuliani says the President should have done more to “take control” of a private company’s handling of a problem it caused? Cognitive dissonance is a nasty thing, but this is ridiculous.

And whatever happened to “personal responsibility”? The core of conservative philosophy since the ‘60s has been the notion that each individual is solely responsible for his own welfare, and that therefore no one has any obligation to help anybody else. Conservatives have blasted welfare for compelling “responsible, hardworking” Americans to subsidize “lazy, irresponsible” Americans. Similarly, they decried bailouts as an abdication of personal responsibility on the part of companies who ran themselves into the ground (e.g. AIG and GM). "You cause the problem, you pay the consequences" has been the mantra.

But now Giuliani doesn’t think that a disaster caused by BP and Transocean’s drilling should be those companies’ “entire responsibility”? If a company causes an oil spill, it’s not just in their hands—the government is there to bail you out.

Quite simply, anyone who repeats the meme that President Obama should have done more to prevent/clean up the oil spill belies their own lack of conservative principles—at least as defined by the modern conservative movement. Once you criticize the President for not doing enough, you’re acknowledging that government has a legitimate role in regulating private industry. If on the other hand you truly believe that government should not interfere with the market, then you must also believe that the mess is BP’s to clean up.

Of course, that position doesn't allow a politician to score political points against the President.

So I can see how small government conservatives must be frustrated with the Republican Party establishment. When a party’s presidential candidates are this cognitively dissonant, you have to wonder, what does the GOP actually stand for these days? We’ve already seen GOP Senators filibuster a pay-as-you-go bill prohibiting the federal government from spending money it doesn't have, betraying their commitment to fiscal discipline. They’ve filibustered funding for the troops in Afghanistan, betraying their commitment to the troops. Now they’re saying that the federal government should “take control” of private oil companies, and that companies’ problems aren’t their “entire responsibility.” When Republicans oppose policies they support, and support policies they oppose, the party can no longer be considered “conservative”—it becomes purely a machine dedicated to winning elections.

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Government is the problem until you need a solution: some belated thoughts on the BP-Transocean oil catastrophe

Calvin & Hobbes on Miranda rights

2010-05-24T12:22:00.002-04:00

Maybe old John McCain has a point after all?

Using a marketing perspective to predict LeBron’s next destination

2010-05-21T14:33:00.002-04:00

To figure out where LeBron is going to play in 2010-11, you need only look at this picture of him:

Disregard all the non-Bill Simmons sports analysts you’ve been reading. The picture above shows that LeBron will indeed be returning to Cleveland next year. And in fact, I’m going to predict that he signs with Cleveland for less money so they can build a better team.

Seeing LeBron in his sweater-and-hipster-glasses get-up--and I mean this in a good way--it makes me think he's trying to craft an image for a specific variety of American--specifically, members of the hip 18-35 middle class who have the disposable income to buy his stuff. If we know two things about LeBron James's personality, it's that he wants to be loved, and he's a good marketer. Bron Bron has already cultivated a likable, clean, and decidedly un-gangster image that has endeared him to mainstream America. And what better way to cement that image than to stick with Cleveland and be known as the guy who turned down more money in order to bring a championship to his hometown team? It brands him the ultimate good guy in basketball.

Some have argued that if LeBron wants the spotlight, he’ll head to the big city lights of New York or New Jersey. But they’re forgetting one thing: he’s LeBron James. As one of the most famous athletes on the planet, the marginal increase in his celebrity from moving out of slow-paced Cleveland to a media circus like New York is essentially zero. In other words, when you're an international celebrity, the size of the local media market is pretty irrelevant.

So with apologies to the Knicks, Nets, Heat, Clips, Bulls, Mavs (personally, I’d like to see LeBron put his Mavericks jersey on), and all the other monosyllabic teams vying for him: my bet is that LeBron opts to brand himself as “the good guy who refused to abandon his hometown team. LeBron is sticking with the Cavs, for better or for worse. Unless he comes to the Wizards to hang out with other hipster glasses on U Street.

Economic insanity at the grocery store

2010-05-20T21:28:00.001-04:00

Today I walked into the Giant grocery store across the street from my apartment to buy some strawberries. But something struck me as strange: while one pound of strawberries cost $2.99, the two pound package cost a whopping $6.99—more than twice as much!

Never in my life have I seen a business charging you MORE to buy more of its product. Either Giant has stumbled upon some economic law (or magic) that can somehow justify a volume markup (in which case it’s time to buy up Giant’s stock), or Giant's shoppers are extraordinarily bad at math—and the store is only too happy to part them from their cash.

UPDATE- A friend alerted me to a third possibility: this could make an excellent arbitrage opportunity. Find a bunch of empty two pound baskets, buy up all the one-pounders, load the strawberries into the two-pound baskets, and return them to the store, enjoying the $1 per basket profit. Of course, the obvious issues here are (1) Giant doesn't take returns of fresh fruit, and (2) they'd see the one-pound packages on the receipt and know what I was up to. Nevertheless, it's a good quality to have: a nose trained to sniff out arbitrage opportunities will lead one day to riches.

Please somebody ban the phrase "judicial activism"

2010-05-13T01:05:00.000-04:00

Nothing bores me quite like a Supreme Court nomination. The opposition party questions the nominee's credentials. The credentials come out to be impeccable. Pro-lifers or pro-choicers wave their arms around. After some formalities, the nominee eventually gets confirmed. *YAWN*

That said, there is a phrase that gets me to no end in these debates, and that's "judicial activism."

Opponents of activism typically say something like "it's the judge's job to interpret the law, not to make the law." Conservatives accuse liberal justices of "legislating from the bench." Liberals counter with statistics showing that actually, conservative justices overturn more laws.

The truth is, "judicial activism" is one of those topics where everyone is wrong (except me), because the phrase itself is a meaningless term. The idea that there is a single, True meaning of a law has no basis in reality, because ultimately, the meaning of any text is up to some human's interpretation. How do you interpret a law's meaning without making some kind of value judgment? What is the "true" meaning of a term like "cruel and unusual punishment"? Answer: it's up to someone's interpretation.

Simply put, there is no logical way to claim that one judge is more activist than another, because any time you interpret something, you are committing an interpretive act. The phrase "judicial activism" is a tautology, and I could follow judicial nominations happily if it were dropped from political discourse.

Love that dirty water: Time to invest in infrastructure

2010-05-04T11:33:00.000-04:00

The other day I was talking to someone who works for an advocacy group dedicated to ramping up infrastructure investment. He said that the major reason efforts have been slow so far is because infrastructure just isn't "sexy."

Well there's not much less sexy than untreated pond water coming out of your faucet. Amazingly, thanks to a catastrophically burst water line, that's the situation 2 million Bostonians find themselves in:

Nearly 2 million residents of Greater Boston lost their supply of clean drinking water when a huge pipe abruptly burst yesterday, prompting authorities to declare a state of emergency and to impose a sweeping order for homeowners and businesses to boil the untreated water now flowing from their taps.

Governor Deval Patrick said residents in Boston and 29 other communities east of Weston should boil water for at least a minute before drinking it to avoid the risk of getting sick. He also asked bottled water companies and the National Guard to help make clean water available to residents in the affected communities.

The crisis began around 10 a.m. [Saturday] when a 10-foot-wide pipe in Weston sprang a leak, which worsened throughout the afternoon and eventually cut off Greater Boston from the Quabbin Reservoir, where most of its water supply is stored.

Maybe this will bring some public attention to America's infrastructure crisis.

The other interesting angle on this story is from a friend of mine in the area:

What amazes me is that people are fighting each other for bottled water and waiting in 2 mile car lines for 3+ hours to get water, when you can just boil a few gallons in about 10 mins and be all set for a couple of days. I shudder at the thought of how people would behave in an actual emergency.

Score one for the bottled water marketers.

Of course the real crisis is that Dunkin Donuts was unable to serve coffee. Panic!

Government is the problem until you need a solution: some belated thoughts on the BP-Transocean oil catastrophe

2010-05-04T00:49:00.001-04:00

As black oil oozes toward Louisiana's coast, it's worth remembering what the state's governor said a year ago deriding the federal government's role in disaster relief:

Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us.

Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina -- we have our doubts...

The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and the enterprising spirit of our citizens. We are grateful for the support we have received from across the nation for the ongoing recovery efforts. This spirit got Louisiana through the hurricanes and this spirit will get our nation through the storms we face today...

Democratic leaders in Washington -- they place their hope in the federal government. We place our hope in you, the American people. In the end, it comes down to an honest and fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government. We oppose the National Democratic view that says the way to strengthen our country is to increase dependence on government. We believe the way to strengthen our country is to restrain spending in Washington, to empower individuals and small businesses to grow our economy and to create jobs.

Today, not only has government rescued us from the economic storm, but another disaster--this one caused by very large businesses that were empowered to grow their earnings from the ocean deep--has put Louisiana's coasts in its cross-hairs, forcing Governor Jindal to beg the federal government for help:

Governor Jindal today met with DHS Sec. Napolitano, Dept. of Interior Sec. Salazar, EPA Administrator Jackson, White House Energy Dir. Browner, Coast Guard's Admiral Landry, and BP officials at the Shell Robert Training & Conference Center in Robert, LA. The Governor received an update on the efforts to respond to the oil spilling into the Gulf and stressed the need for federal support resources that have already been requested by the state from federal agencies.

Governor Jindal said, “I appreciate Secretary Salazar, Secretary Napolitano and Secretary Jackson for coming down to Louisiana and seeing first-hand the response efforts. As I told the President yesterday, we’re urging the federal government and BP to deploy more resources to help mitigate the impact of the oil spill that is threatening the coast of our state...

“I do have concerns that BP’s current resources are not adequate to meet the three challenges we face and I have urged them to seek more help.”

Well well well, look who's come crawling back.

Okay, that's too snarky for a serious situation. Truth be told, I applaud Governor Jindal's change of heart--and I mean that. The reason is that Governor Jindal has learned a key lesson the hard way--a lesson that's so far eluded his tea party compatriots. The lesson, simply put, is that for some problems, government is the only viable solution.

It's not that government can solve all our problems. It can't. I agree with the Governor that in most cases, the strength of our nation is found in our people and businesses rather than our government. But there are some problems that are too big for compassionate individuals--and too unprofitable for enterprising businesses--to address. In other cases problems result from a failure of collective action, in which behaviors beneficial to individuals cause collective harm to the group. And it's in these situations that government has to step in.

Hurricane Katrina was the epitome of such disasters: an act of Nature brought on by no fault or laziness of the people it devastated, and which wrought destruction on a scale beyond the capacity of individuals and businesses to cope.

Similarly, the BP-Transocean oil volcano seems likely to outstrip the resources of even the world's 4th largest company, threatening unmitigated disaster to the innocent inhabitants of the Gulf Coast--human and otherwise. And unfortunately, as Governor Jindal is finding out, it seems the federal government will have to play a larger role in cleaning up BP's mess than any of us would like it to in an ideal world.

(Of course, disaster mitigation isn't the government's only tool for preventing oil spills from reaching the shore--a far easier solution is preventing such drilling in the first place. Then again, prevention's a tough strategy when then-Representative Jindal was busy sponsoring the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act of 2006 (H.R. 4761)to open even more ocean to drilling. Maybe that's one he wants to reconsider as well).

The bottom line: None of us wants a bailout (at least those of us who are not publicly-traded investment banks), and no one enjoys having the government tell them what to do. No one wants to beg the government for help, and few find life on the dole fulfilling. But sometimes there's no other way to solve a problem than government action--when disaster strikes, it's just a little more obvious.

Is it not the fundamental role of government to protect its citizens from external threats, whether imposed by a foreign army, a profit-seeking company, or Nature herself? If Tea Partiers decry the role of the government in responding to disasters like Katrina and BP-Transocean (Rush Limbaugh, for instance, said that the oil spill should be "left alone and left out there"), then what exactly do they think government should do? Besides torture, tap phones, and harass Hispanics, of course.

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Schlumberger CEO on climate change

2010-04-26T13:08:00.001-04:00

I liked this quote (from an interview with the McKinsey Quarterly because it aligns well with what I've said before:

And then on climate change, our opinion—and it’s my opinion, this is a very personal thing—is that there is sufficient evidence of an increase in the level of emissions in the atmosphere to be concerned about the effect that it may have on the climate. But the science of climatology is by no means complete, and it is going to take a long time before we really know what the effect of these emissions is going to be. In the meantime, it is prudent and reasonable to try to reduce those emissions as much as we can.

Remember, that's not a hemp-wearing hippie talking. It’s not Al Gore, or Joe Romm, or any number of climate activists. It’s Andrew Gould, CEO of a $23 billion a year oil services company—a company with a vested interest in climate change not being real. If even he can admit that climate change is probably real, and that it makes sense to invest a small percentage of our wealth in averting its worst effects, surely even the most skeptical libertarian can admit that climate change may not be a hoax after all.

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Ending the use of coal overnight: new study shows it's possible

2010-04-26T00:02:00.000-04:00

One of the common arguments against climate legislation is that clean energy technology just isn't ready yet. Most often, it's made to defend coal, and usually goes something like this: "Sure, maybe eventually we can replace coal, but right now that would be too expensive. For the next 50 years, we'll need to continue using coal at the same time we're developing cleaner alternative fuels."

This argument has always been illogical. Just because alternatives to coal are expensive now does not mean they always will be, and a major national push would soon bring down costs through economies of scale. But a new study goes even further, showing the "technology not there" argument to be not just illogical, but factually incorrect. In fact, the United States could replace nearly 100% of its coal-fired power generation--and do so almost overnight. How? With natural gas (which emits 50% less CO2 than coal). The Financial Times reports:

The shift from coal-fired generation to gas- fired generation sounds like something that would be lengthy and difficult to accomplish. But a new report by PFC Energy, the consultancy, indicates it is anything but. The report says US gas fired power plants average about 25 per cent utilisation, compared with 70-75 per cent for coal.

So operating existing plants at 72 per cent utilisation would theoretically increase gas demand by 30bn cubic feet per day - a rise of about 50 per cent - and displace almost all coal fired capacity. In doing so, carbon dioxide from the power sector would be cut 50 per cent, according to PFC.

Note that this is referring to existing power plants. In other words, we could completely eliminate the use of coal in this country without building hundreds of new power plants.

Also note that this is a recent development. Just three years ago, the idea of abundant natural gas replacing coal actually was ludicrous, and coal's defenders at least had a point. But that's no longer true. The difference is new technology that has unlocked previously out-of-reach shale gas formations such as the Marcellus Shale in Appalachia.

Providentially, much of the nation's most promising gas potential is in the very states where coal is currently strongest politically: West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

All of a sudden, coal miners who fear job losses from shutting down coal mines now could have gas fields in which to work. Looks like King Coal could have some competition for its most supportive Senators. (Indeed, last month The Hill reported that the natural gas lobby is "pushing new incentives to encourage utilities to switch from coal to natural gas, [and] in doing so, the sector is starting a lobbying fight with the coal industry." All I can say is, go get 'em boys.)

The bottom line: any time you hear someone say that the technology isn't there to switch from coal, you're being fed PR dog food. We don't have to wait for solar and wind costs to come down before abandoning coal, because natural gas is already cheap and abundant - and we can make the switch overnight. All that's needed is political will.

How do you take two pieces of fried chicken, cheese, bacon, and special sauce, and only get 550 calories? Deconstructing the Double Down

2010-04-23T12:18:00.002-04:00

I flat out didn’t believe the Double Down’s calorie count. KFC claims the fried version of the sandwich has 550 calories, but intuitively, it just doesn’t seem to add up.

So this morning, I went online to see if the 550 figure was in the ballpark of believability. What I found surprised me.

The Double Down has four ingredients: two fried chicken filets, two slices of cheese, two strips of bacon, and “Colonel’s sauce,” which I’ll assume to be Thousand Island dressing. I’m not sure how big the chicken filets are, so to be conservative, I’m using “chicken strip.” Here’s how the calories add up:

Ingredient Calories

Chicken strip:                              117 (x 2)
Slice of cheese:                            94 (x 2)
Strip of bacon: 46 (x 2)
1 tbsp Thousand Island Dressing: 31
_____________________________________________________
TOTAL                                    545

When I added it up, I was shocked. Just using nutrition facts I got on the internet, I came within 5 calories of KFC’s figure.

The key here is that Thousand Island dressing is actually a pretty low-calorie dressing. In my mental model, I was assuming 100 calories for the dressing—in retrospect, a major overestimate.

Now, the X-factor here is the size of the chicken filets. If they’re roughly the size of a chicken strip, I’ll believe KFC. If they’re much bigger though, KFC may have some accounting problems.

I’m getting a Double Down tonight though, so I’ll soon know.

If there’s a moral of the story, it’s that you should never assume your “common sense” assumptions are correct without testing the numbers. What you’ll find can often surprise you.

Goldman and Jay-Z: The allure of the game...

2010-04-20T20:28:00.000-04:00

The allure of breakin the law
Is always too much for me to ever ignore
I gotta thing for them big body Benzes, it dulls my senses
In love with a V-Dub engine
Man I'm high off life, f*** it I'm wasted
Bey Venay kicks, or them Marvin Kaye wrists
My women friend get tennis bracelets
Trips to Venice, get they winters replaced with
the sun, it ain't even fun no more I'm jaded
Man, it's just a game, I just play it to play it…

I’m livin’ proof that crime do pay.

- Jay-Z, “Allure”

In news about another New York City institution:

Beset by accusations of securities fraud, Goldman Sachs nevertheless showed Tuesday that it was still very good at what it does best: making money.

Earnings for the Wall Street giant rose 91 percent in the first quarter of 2010, to $3.46 billion or $5.59 a share, up from $1.81 billion or $3.39 a share in the same period last year. Revenues increased 36 percent to $12.78 billion, up from $9.42 billion in the quarter a year ago.

Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg had expected revenue of $11.05 billion and earnings of $4.14 a share.

Quote of the Day

2010-04-19T11:23:00.002-04:00

The mind-set of businesses has already changed. Businesses have accepted that they have to address climate change. In fact it seems that is much more accepted by business than it is by political leaders.
- Lars Josefsson, CEO of Vattenfall (one of the largest utilities in Europe), August 2000 - April 2010

Two weeks ago, I noted that anti-government rhetoric coming out of certain politicians in Washington seems yet to be lagging behind the thinking of the business leaders said politicians purport to support. Glad to see there are some CEOs out there who agree with me.

Tax cuts are a bad sales pitch for Democrats

2010-04-15T17:38:00.001-04:00

As a sales & marketing consultant, I have some advice for Democratic politicians: telling people how much you’ve cut their taxes is terrible salesmanship.

Sounds strange, right? The public hates taxes, and generally perceives Democrats as favoring higher taxes—so shouldn’t neutralizing that perception improve Democrats’ competitive position? Indeed, how could lowering taxes HURT a politician?

Simple: the key to effective selling is NOT explaining why you’re better than competitors at the thing the customer cares about—rather, effective selling means making the customer care about the thing you do better than the competition. For Democrats, as long as the public cares about lower taxes, hawking tax cuts plays to the other side’s competitive advantage. To win the tax issue, Democrats must reframe the debate to de-link “low taxes” from “good policy.”

Democratic officials, though, apparently don’t understand this basic marketing concept of differentiation. Instead, they are gleefully pushing an AP story which found that “Congress cut individuals' federal taxes for this year by about $173 billion shortly after President Barack Obama took office, dwarfing the $28.6 billion in increases by states”:

"The fact is in the past year we have had more tax cuts than almost anytime in our nation's history," said Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. "It's something that people don't realize because of the false rhetoric that is spread throughout this Congress.”

…

"From investing in small business to buying a home or making it energy efficient, to sending your children to college to buying a car, these tax cuts are helping families and businesses across the country," said Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-Mo.

Liberal bloggers like Steve Benen are picking up the theme as well. They wonder, Democrats are cutting taxes, so why isn’t the public giving them credit? To policy wonks, it’s an information: if Democrats can keep hitting the “we cut taxes too!” theme enough, the public will eventually pick up on it.

The problem is, this “me-too-manship” fails in politics as badly as in business. This is just like a B2B salesperson trying to compete on price. The sales rep does his best to understand what the customer is looking for, and designs a solution to meet that need. Unfortunately, competitors are asking the exact same questions and diagnosing the same needs. With every competitor designing its solution around the same set of needs, the final offerings all look alike. Price becomes the only perceptible difference, leaving salespeople to out-discount each other and destroy profits all around.

This is exactly the trap Democrats are falling into by promoting their tax cuts; the strategy can only result in a game of tax cut one upsmanship. Since Republicans are already perceived as the party of low taxes, a Republican can respond to any Democrat’s claims of tax cuts by saying, “I’ll do you one better.”

Instead of trying to outdo Republicans on their competitive advantage, Democrats need to reframe the debate—re-chalk the field, so to speak, around their competitive advantage. Since the public will never believe that Democrats will give them lower taxes than Republicans, Democrats should concede the point and sell the public on the value of the services their taxes are funding.

Here’s a sales pitch for Tax Day 2011:

Imagine a world without taxes. No roads and no bridges. No schools or teachers. No police, firefighters, or soldiers. This tax day, we want to thank all responsible Americans for their contributions that make life in society possible.

This pitch completely changes the goal posts of the tax debate. The winner isn’t the politician who can lower taxes the most, but rather who can provide the best services: Democrats’ competitive advantage. Taxes are no longer seen as an evil to be eliminated, but rather as the contribution responsible citizens make in return for the benefits of living in society. Indeed, lowering taxes TOO much would jeopardize society’s ability to function.

Is it risky? Sure. But that always beats a race to the bottom—whether you’re pitching products or policies.

Happy tax day! What are you thankful for?

2010-04-15T00:43:00.001-04:00

Todd Flanders: Daddy, what do taxes pay for?
Ned Flanders: Oh, why, everything! Policemen, trees, sunshine! And lets not forget the folks who just don't feel like working, God bless 'em!

The tax man's taken all my dough,
And left me in my stately home,
Lazing on a sunny afternoon.
And I can't sail my yacht,
He's taken everything I've got,
All I've got's this sunny afternoon.
- The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"

If I were rich, I might hate paying taxes a little more. Until that day though, I'll be thankful for the subsidized buses that take me to work, the roads they drive on, the police officers who protect me from crime, the firefighters who will put out fires if my apartment burns down, the soldiers who protect my country from foreign invasion, and the teachers who gave me the education without which I never could have succeeded.

Oh, and also the refund check.

I like giving credit to the perpetually underrated but sneakily famous Kinks, but no tax day post could be complete without an homage to the most famous tax song of all time:

Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs vs. fresh food

2010-04-14T00:02:00.000-04:00

Real food is making a comeback. Life on foreign shores has exposed the study abroad generation to the pleasures of unpackaged foods. Whole Foods earned $8 billion last year, and its stock is up 287% since February 2009. Films like Food, Inc. and Fast Food Nation have opened our eyes to the horrors of processed food and factory farming, while fresh food evangelists exhort us to "avoid foods you see advertised on television."

But before there was Michael Pollan, there was Bill Watterson:

Calvin: "But it's fortified with eight essential vitamins, so it's good for you! Look, it says right on the box, 'part of a wholesome, nutritious, balanced breakfast.'"

Hobbes: "And they show a guy eating five grapefruits and a dozen bran muffins."

Oh, the things marketers will do to make their product claims! If only it were just a comic strip.

Fight Club and coal company death panels: The value of a statistical life

2010-04-13T08:44:00.000-04:00

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
- Ed Norton in Fight Club

In light of last week's deadly blast at a Massey Energy coal mine in West Virginia, the above quote seemed particularly relevant. Does anyone doubt that there's somebody at Massey who's busy making these types of calculations? "Take the number of mine explosions per year, A; multiply by the probable number of miners killed per explosion, B; multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of new safety equipment + the lost revenue due to slower production, Massey doesn't make the investment in safety."

How much might the average out-of-court settlement be? Well that depends on how much you think a life is worth. And actuaries think they know how much a life is worth... but it's not as much as they used to.

Between 2003 and 2008, the "culture of life" Bush administration EPA lowered its reckoning of the "value of a statistical life" by $900,000, from $7.8 million to $6.9 million. The decision effectively meant that more people could die before a pollution reduction regulation would be considered "cost effective":

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

Ironically enough, coal miners help calculate the value of a statistical life. Here's how to do it. First, take the average difference in pay between workers in a dangerous job (like coal mining) and workers in a similar but less dangerous job. The extra money coal miners earn is the "danger premium"--in other words, how much a person must be compensated to get them to accept the higher danger of dismemberment or death. From the risk premium, economists extrapolate how much monetary value people place on their lives: hence, the economic value of a life.

Which brings us back to the Massey explosion and Ed Norton's equation. Pretend it's January 2007, right after the company's last deadly explosion (2006), and Massey is deciding whether or not to buy safety equipment and implement new safety policies. Also pretend that Massey has perfect foresight, and can see the 2010 explosion coming. Now we can engage in an exercise of economic cynicism.

First, what would safety investments get you? Assume Massey pays $6.9 million for each of the 25 killed miners. That's $172.5 million. Let's double it with other fines just for good measure, and you're at $345 million: a big number to be sure, but one that will probably come down on appeal--say, to $250 million.

And Massey probably won't pay that sum immediately--it can always issue legal challenges to delay paying the fines for years (indeed, Massey has contested two-thirds of fines since 2006, contributing to a "backlog of approximately 16,000 cases that some safety advocates contend could be allowing unsafe mines to continue operating.") Because money has a time value attached to it--the further in the future money is earned or lost, the less valuable it is to you today--whatever Massey ultimately pays counts as even less than $250 million in the cost-benefit calculation. Say Massey finally pays the fine in 2015. Assume a discount rate of 5%, and we're down to $195.88 million in present value benefits of safety equipment.

Now, how do the costs stack up? I know nothing about mines, but for argument's sake, let's say investing in safety equipment would have cost $25 million in January 2007. Still less than the $195.88 fine. But that's not all: safety procedures slow down the process of mining coal, so there's also a revenue impact to consider--we'll assume a 1% reduction in annual revenues. In the three years following the 2006 explosion, Massey averaged $2.6 billion in annual revenues. Assume that the economy recovers in 2010 and Massey gets back to its 2008 number of $2.9 billion, which it earns each year from 2010-2015. In 2007 present value, a 1% hit comes out to $173.89 million in cumulative lost revenues. Add in the year-1 hit of $25 million for the safety equipment, and the costs of safety outweigh the economic benefits by $3.01 million: Massey forgoes safety and swallows the fines.

Of course, it's 100% certain that some of my assumptions are wrong. And there could always be more accidents which add to the fine total, as well as costs in terms of bad PR and regulatory risk. All of which could make safety investments pay off. (Indeed, Massey's stock is down 13% since the explosion, while competitors' are at 52-week highs, suggesting that investors think Massey made the wrong bet on safety.)

But that would miss the point, which is not about the outcomes of the decisions but rather the process by which they’re made. When business decisions are based solely on economic calculation, when CEOs only protect life when it's cost effective to do so, we'll end up with decisions like the one potentially made at Massey to forgo safety equipment--calculated decisions to disregard human welfare in order to maximize profits. And all of it rationalized by the cold logic that the only purpose of an enterprise is to maximize shareholder wealth. To quote Max Weber:

Today it is primarily the capitalist market economy which demands that the official business of the administration be discharged precisely, unambiguously, continuously, and with as much speed as possible… Bureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specialized administrative functions according to purely objective considerations… The "objective" discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and without regard for persons. "Without regard for persons" is also the watchword of the market and, in general, of all pursuits of naked economic interests…

The bureaucracy is "dehumanized," the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation… The more complicated and specialized modern culture becomes, the more its external supporting apparatus demands the personally detached and strictly "objective" expert, in lieu of the master of older social structures, who was moved by personal sympathy and favor, by grace and gratitude.

For all the talk of government "death panels" in health care, we often forget that major corporations are making such life-and-death calculations every day: deliberating on whether it's more expensive to clean up toxic waste or just dump it and pay the fine, on the cost of covering a lifesaving treatment vs. the PR fallout from rescinding a cancer patient's coverage, on how many Pintos can blow up before a recall makes financial sense--and yes, on how many coal miners can die in explosions before lawsuits start to dig into profits. Max Weber must have watched Fight Club.

Lest we forget Massey CEO Don Blankenship's infamous 2005 memo:

This is tremendous tea: Tea Party caught on tape

2010-04-12T22:47:00.002-04:00

Offering a fascinating look into the psyche of young Tea Partiers, this rare footage from 1998 captures what may be the earliest known Tea Party to have been held in the United States:

A fraction of infinity is still infinity: everything you need to know about climate change in seven sentences

2010-04-09T08:35:00.001-04:00

I just finished reading Paul Krugman's 8,000 word masterpiece on climate economics, "Building a Green Economy." If you read one thing on climate change this year, read this.

It's true, Krugman essentially replicates an argument I made in a previous post, which interestingly enough was cited in the New York Times blog "Dot Earth" (maybe THAT'S where Krugman stole my argument from!). It's okay though - he does the job so much more thoroughly and precisely than I ever could. After all, he is a Nobel laureate.

I highly suggest reading the whole piece, but I know you may not have time for 8,000 words. So I'll summarize the four main points of Krugman's argument:

1. Nearly all economists agree that the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be negligible, and likely cheaper than expected.

2. Nearly all scientists agree that the risk of catastrophic climate change is non-negligible, and likely worse than expected.

3. When absolute catastrophe is among the possible risks, decisions should be made on the basis of that worst-case risk, NOT the most likely scenario.

4. Therefore, the prudent, conservative, personally responsible choice is to invest in an insurance policy to mitigate against the threat of climate change.

You don't have to believe your house is going to burn down to know you should buy home insurance. In the same way, you can be skeptical about global warming and still think it's a good idea to insure against the risk that you're wrong. In the words of writer Jonathan Schell (words which became a popular piece of evidence in my high school debate days), "though the risk... may be fractional, the stakes are infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity."

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Keep your carbon off my property: Paul Krugman explains externalities

2010-04-09T00:40:00.000-04:00

To hear some commentators, "free market" means the same thing as "small government." According to this mindset, government and freedom are zero sum. If you want to make the market more free, it always means reducing government interference in the market. And by the same token, any increase in government control over economic activity reduces economic liberty.

But market exchanges don't happen in a vacuum, and they often produce side effects. That's what we call an externality, and it's the classic Econ 101 example of how government interference in markets can make them more free. In an excellent piece on climate change economics, Paul Krugman gives a great intro lesson in externalities for the non-economics student:

But what if a deal between consenting adults imposes costs on people who are not part of the exchange? What if you manufacture a widget and I buy it, to our mutual benefit, but the process of producing that widget involves dumping toxic sludge into other people’s drinking water? When there are “negative externalities” — costs that economic actors impose on others without paying a price for their actions — any presumption that the market economy, left to its own devices, will do the right thing goes out the window. So what should we do? Environmental economics is all about answering that question.

In other words, it's totally simplistic to talk of cap-and-trade as a restriction on freedom. Whose freedom - factories' and coal companies'? And what kind of freedom - the freedom to pollute? The freedom to waste? The freedom to emit dangerous gases into an atmosphere shared by all, even if other people don't want you polluting their atmosphere?

Surely anyone who lives in democratic society lives by the precept that "you can do whatever you want - but not if it affects somebody else." And surely anyone who believes in capitalism and property rights believes in my right to keep other people's carbon pollution off my property.

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So much for global cooling

2010-04-07T01:23:00.001-04:00

After a winter of record snow, is April 7 too early to complain about it being too hot? (Yes.)

The temperature in Washington DC yesterday hit an unseasonable 90 degrees - 2 degrees off the record for that date.

And it's not just Washington DC experiencing unusual heat. According to data from the National Climatic Data Center, 1,116 daily record highs were either tied or broken across the United States between March 29 and April 4, compared to only 77 record lows:

Okay deniers. You had your fun building snow castles on the National Mall, but the gig is up, and it didn't take long. Global cooling, we hardly knew thee.

Of course, weather does not equal climate, so I'd be remiss without rehashing this graphic showing record highs outpacing record lows over the past 50 years - one of many smoking guns in the evidence for manmade climate change:

Shameless self promotion

2010-04-02T00:00:00.001-04:00

As of the time of this post's publication, if you type "explain health care reform" on Google, WAG is the number one hit.

The question is, should I view this as cool or terrifying?

On the one hand, kind of neat to know that what I'm writing is actually having an impact.

On the other hand, the first thing many people will read for information on health care reform will be written by "guy on the Internet." An example of how the Internet era is breaking down Experts' mediation between raw facts and the public's consciousness - Google's algorithms don't account for author qualifications.

At least, unlike some sites, this guy on the Internet has critical thinking skills, so even if I'm wrong on some things, you can trust the analysis to be well thought out.

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Companies agree: "health care reform won't cost us jack"

2010-04-01T09:58:00.001-04:00

Conservative commentators have been crowing over AT&T's report that health care reform has caused it to take a $1 billion accounting charge. House Majority Leader John Boehner called it another example of "job killing tax increases."

Actual business leaders disagree.

Noted bastion of socialism CFO.com explains that "Health care hit is minimal":

AT&T, Caterpillar, and Deere are among the companies that are reporting large first-quarter accounting charges because of the repeal of a tax deduction by the new health-care law. But the charges will have little effect on company valuations or cash flow, analysts say.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act strips companies of a 28% tax deduction related to retiree drug benefits. The deduction is actually the tax-free treatment of a government subsidy that companies receive for providing retiree drug benefits equivalent to Medicare Part D, says tax expert Robert Willens, who heads a consultancy in New York. Since the deduction can't be claimed until the benefits are paid out, companies make the adjustment by writing down the deferred tax asset balances related to the subsidy, notes Willens.

Under the new law, the subsidy is no longer tax-free and must be included in a company's taxable-income calculation. The law eliminates the "double dipping" possibilities that were part of the tax code since 2003, says Willens. Under the original Medicare prescription-drug law, companies received deductions for making payments into retiree drug plans, as well as getting tax-free treatment for the subsidies they received for paying into the plans.

Last week AT&T announced it plans to take a $1 billion noncash charge related to the new law in the first quarter. Also announcing first-quarter charges were Caterpillar ($100 million), Deere ($150 million), and AK Steel ($31 million). Steelcase and DTE Energy also said they would be subject to similar accounting charges, although they have not yet specified the amounts.

A study of S&P 500 companies by Credit Suisse shows that the new law will cause companies to reduce their deferred tax assets by an aggregate $4.5 billion, with 45 of the companies possibly seeing a charge that is more than 10% of their consensus first-quarter earnings estimates. However, investors should not "overreact" to the potential earnings hit, cautions Credit Suisse's David Zion, because the charge will have very little effect on company valuations.

Indeed, the "eye-popping" numbers being reported are not a good indication of the costs being incurred in the first quarter, notes study co-author Christopher Cornett. That's because a quirk in the accounting rules requires companies to recognize the present value today of future cash costs going out as far as the drug benefits are offered.

...

The Credit Suisse report also points out that corporate cash flows from operations won't suffer much from the loss of the tax deduction, either. Between 2013 and 2019, it's likely that 20 companies will pay more than $5 million per year, on average, of additional taxes as a result of the new law. However, the tax hit amounts to less than 1% of the trailing five-year average cash flow from operations for each of the companies.

This argument is strikingly similar to ones made by liberal commentators.

It's becoming clear that although the GOP claims to be the party of markets and of business, the party's ideology is increasingly disconnected from what's actually good for business. Today's business leaders have recognized that sensible regulation is a prerequisite for the operation of their companies, and politicians have been slow to catch up. 20 years from now, will the GOP have updated its policy positions to account for the new realities of business, or will a new generation of businesspeople abandon the party that has championed their interests for the past century?

Joining the rest of the civilized world

2010-03-25T00:55:00.001-04:00

Commenter Tag0Mag0 left this comment on an older post, The Simplest Explanation of Health Care Reform You Will Ever Read:

As an aside, has anyone watched any news coverage of the Reform bill on foreign networks (via the interwebs)? I recently watched a clip from a New Zealand news show explaining the bill and was amused to see the anchor completely befuddled that Republicans could be opposed to universal health care, something the anchor said to his viewers, "You and I take for granted." It's nice to escape the American media circus to get an outsider's perspective.

One man's communazism is another man's common sense.

I guess I should feel a little sorry for health care opponents. When Bush won, hardcore liberals could at least vow to move to Canada or France. Now that the United States has joined the rest of the industrial world in recognizing health care as a right, there are precious few places left to which opponents can flee to escape the horrors of health care for all.

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How to explain the health care reform bill to your family and friends very very simply

2010-03-23T09:27:00.002-04:00

Health care reform has passed. Now it's time to explain what it does.

Why is this so important? Because the public will like the bill once they find out what's in it. Republicans know it, and polling bears it out. It's therefore our job to get the word out to our family and friends - and in a way that's easy to understand.

So how do you explain a 2,000+ page bill in under two minutes? Easy.

First, ask the family member or friend if they think insurance companies should be able to revoke people's coverage when they get sick, or deny people coverage because they've got a preexisting condition.

They'll say "no." (If they say "yes," well, you're never going to persuade them).

Then you explain the bill like this:

"Well that's good, because that's the first thing the health care bill does, is ban those outrageous insurance company practices. In fact, there are really just five basic things the health care bill does:

"First, it bans insurance companies from revoking your coverage when you get sick, or denying you coverage because of preexisting conditions.

"Second, with those regulations in place, you've gotta make sure that people don't just wait around till they get sick before buying insurance - otherwise, insurance companies would all go out of business since only sick people would buy insurance. So the bill requires all Americans to buy health insurance - that's the 'individual mandate.'

"Third, if everyone has to buy insurance, you've gotta make sure people can actually afford it. So the bill provides subsidies to help low and middle income people afford insurance.

"Fourth, if the government is paying for people's insurance, you've gotta keep the insurance companies honest and force them to compete. And the bill does this by establishing 'exchanges' where you can shop around for insurance policies online. Insurance companies must post prices and customer satisfaction data to help you compare policies. Basically, the exchanges would be like the Target of health insurance. (See here for more info on the exchanges)

"Last, you've of course gotta pay for all this. And the bill does this with fees on medical device makers and other corporations that benefit from the bill, taxes on the most expensive "Cadillac" insurance plans, and reductions in Medicare fraud and waste. And the Congressional Budget Office actually found that this would reduce the deficit by over $100 billion over the next ten years.

"So really, the bill starts by preventing outrageous insurance company practices, and the rest is just necessary to make that first part work. It's a pretty moderate, common sense bill."

Framed this way, it's almost impossible to reject the bill. If you reject any piece of this, it means you're implicitly supporting insurance companies' ability to rescind coverage and deny on the basis of preexisting conditions, or you're supporting a system that will bankrupt the insurance industry and the federal government.

So again, the summary is:

Insurance regulation: Bans insurance companies from revoking or denying coverage because you get sick.
Individual mandate: Requires everyone to buy health insurance in order to prevent people from waiting till they get sick to buy insurance
Subsidies: Provides subsidies to make sure everyone can afford to buy insurance
Online exchanges: Establishes online exchanges where you can shop for insurance coverage, in order to promote competition and keep companies honest
Paying for the bill: Pays for the subsidies with a combination of spending cuts and taxes on companies that benefit from reform

If you're really pressed for time, you can explain it as The Economist does in three sentences:

Under Barack Obama’s plan, which ~~is bogged down in Congress~~ [just passed], the private-insurance market would expand dramatically—but so would regulation. The proposal would require all Americans to buy cover. To make it affordable, the government would regulate products and prices and offer subsidies for the poor.

For a slightly more detailed explanation, see my post "The simplest explanation of health care reform you will ever read." And if you're really wanting more nitty gritty, go read Ezra Klein's blog.

Questions? Suggestions? Leave them in the comments.

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CTU job interview

2010-03-22T23:40:00.000-04:00

My youth minister from when I was a teenager in Tulsa had this to say in reaction to tonight's episode of 24:

i think the CTU director job interview goes like this:
Interviewer: Have you ever heard of Jack Bauer?
Prospect: No
Interviewer: Good.
Prospect: What if I meet him?
Interviewer: Patronize him a lot.
Prospect: What if he has friends who stick up for him?
Interviewer: Sequester them for at least 2 episodes.

So true. The show has always been a case study in how not to manage people, but this season's CTU office politics have been so absurdly over the top as to make any HR director hemorrhage.

Doesn't mean I won't keep watching. Jack and Renee Walker - and surprisingly Freddie Prinze Junior's character - can still carry the show. I'll give Chloe some credit too.

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Republican staffer says public will probably like health care reform once they find out what's in it

2010-03-22T19:26:00.001-04:00

I ran into a Republican Hill staffer on my way to work today and asked him about last night’s health care vote. His answer was a little surprising:

I gotta hand it to Obama getting it done. It's somewhat of a political gamble with some of the provisions not kicking in until 2012. Democrats will lose seats in November, but when the bill starts kicking in and people find out what the bill does—if it works—Obama will have put himself in a good situation.

I’m torn. I don’t like the cost of the bill, but I also can't stomach people getting turned away from health insurance. That's just wrong.

Slowly the truth starts to come out. Here's what David Axelrod has to say:

“This only worked well for the Republican Party if it failed to pass,” David Axelrod, one of the president’s closest political advisers, said at the White House as he watched the vote count for the final bill reach 219 in favor. “They wanted to run against a caricature of it rather than the real bill. Now let them tell a child with a pre-existing condition, ‘We don’t think you should be covered.’”

Yes we did! I'll say it again: never bet against Barry Obama

2010-03-21T23:33:00.002-04:00

Back in November, I predicted health care reform would pass for one simple reason: you never bet against Barack Obama. Here's what I wrote:

Some people just have an innate ability to come through in the clutch, to not lose no matter what. Michael Jordan had it. LeBron has it (and it’s gonna take him to a title in the next couple seasons). And Barack Obama has it. All through the election, whenever the media counted him out (down 30 points in the polls to Hillary, “Bittergate,” Jeremiah Wright, Sarah Palin’s Convention speech), he stuck to his plan and pulled out the W. Now that it’s actually time to get things done, I feel the same mojo about him. He’s like the Mike Jordan of reforming, the Papi of the Potomac (2004-07 version), ~~the Tiger Woods of Washington~~. Like Tom Brady (pre-David Tyree), you know that no matter what’s happened for the first 58 minutes, he’s coming through in the last two.

Now he's pulled out the W on health care reform, and life will be infinitely better for millions of Americans. Now if I wanted to start a business, I could do so without losing my health care. Now if I were to develop a heart condition, I know that no insurance company will be able to deny me coverage.

Thank you to the President, to Speaker Pelosi, and even to Bart Stupak, for finally coming to his senses.

The Masters needs new theme music

2010-03-19T01:12:00.000-04:00

I've never understood the wussy music on ads for the Masters. During the Texas-Wake Forest game tonight, when a Masters graphic popped up and started playing piano music at the end of a timeout as the game returned from commercial break, the contrast was palpable.

On the one hand, the deep-throated pulsating of the chanting crowd, the buzzing anticipation of a tight ballgame about to return to action.

On the other, gentle piano music and softly waving grass.

I like golf as much as the next guy, and understand that you don't advertise golf the same way you do basketball, but there's got to be a better way to brand the sport's (arguably) premier event.

The best news for cap-and-trade you’ll never read

2010-03-18T08:35:00.000-04:00

The entire right-wing opposition to cap-and-trade rests on a single assumption: that economic growth and energy use are inexorably linked. If you believe that higher energy prices (which over the long term reduce energy use) will hurt economic growth, you have to believe that the economy can only grow if it uses more energy.

Energy efficiency advocates have long known this to be false. Liberals understand that it’s possible to produce more goods and services without using more energy. And the evidence that this is true continues to grow. Reuters is reporting that “Global oil intensity—oil demand growth divided by economic growth—has fallen by about 2 percent a year over the last decade and the decline is now accelerating.” I’ll quote the article at length:

The world may soon achieve something long dreamed of by governments and policymakers: higher economic growth without using more oil.

Rising efficiency, conservation and substitution are steadily reducing the amount of oil needed to fuel an increase in the goods and services produced around the world.

Oil demand in the rich, industrialized countries of the West already appears to have peaked and the trend in developing economies is towards an ever-smaller increase in the amount of oil consumed for every extra unit of economic growth.

Global oil intensity—oil demand growth divided by economic growth—has fallen by about 2 percent a year over the last decade and the decline is now accelerating, spurred by high oil prices, moves to alternative fuels and measures to curb global warming.

This does not yet mean that absolute oil consumption is falling because population growth and rising wealth in poorer parts of the world will push up oil consumption for some time.

But it does mean global oil use will eventually peak and start declining—and "oil-less growth" may not be far away.

"The rate of decline of oil intensity will accelerate," said Eduardo Lopez, oil demand analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which advises industrialized countries.

"There is a structural change—difficult to measure admittedly, but clear—that demand for burning fuels is no longer what it used to be."

This is great news for cap-and-trade. Or rather, it would be if politicians actually cared about economic growth instead of simply protecting influential industries' share of economic growth. Everyone with the most cursory understanding of the issue has known for years that energy is becoming less critical to the production of goods and services—and not just oil. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data shows that energy intensity for the economy has declined by about 1.5% per year from 1980-2006:

U.S. Energy Intensity (1980-2006)

[Link to graphic: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/country/img/charts/US_intensity_large.png]

In other words, the Republican argument that pricing energy properly would hurt economic growth has never had a leg to stand on, and now even the bloody stumps are being trodden into the dirt. That reducing energy use does not hurt economic growth has always been true—it’s at least refreshing to see one media outlet report it.

(Note: what I’m not saying is that putting a price on carbon pollution would not have short-term costs as businesses pay more for energy. However, those costs will quickly disappear as clever innovators figure out ways to produce goods using less energy—unless you doubt the American entrepreneur’s ability to respond to market forces.)

Amoebas, conservatism, and society: why paying for other people's health care doesn't destroy freedom

2010-03-17T10:27:00.003-04:00

The most primitive organisms are entirely self-reliant. The amoeba goes through its independent life searching for nutrients to phagocytose, without any help from other organisms. It’s even self-reliant in reproduction, passing on its genes asexually through mitosis.

You might say the amoeba is radically individualistic.

As organisms have evolved, they have developed higher forms of social organization. Some are still largely solitary. The male polar bear roams the Arctic alone hunting for seals, rarely interacting with other bears except to mate—or in desperate times to cannibalize polar bear cubs.

Others are radically collectivist. Ants and bees sacrifice all for the greater good of the hive. The workers can’t even reproduce, merely existing to provide nutrients for the few who can. A nightmarish existence.

Some animals find safety in the herd, banding together to defend against predators—but they don’t stop to mourn the occasional wildebeest that gets eaten by the crocodile; the strong must move on without the weak. Other herd animals have evolved more advanced emotions allowing them to connect with others of their species—witness elephants mourning their dead.

Still other animals develop individual personalities, but maintain strict hierarchies within their social group. By working together, the wolf pack can make more productive use of scarce resources—although doing so effectively does require ceding some individual liberty to the most capable leader, to coordinate efforts and prevent destructive competition for resources. The alpha male wolf establishes his dominance early, and until he's deposed, takes the first pick of the food and the girls.

It’s no deep insight that humans have the most complex social organization of all organisms (notwithstanding any objection from any zoologist who may read this). Like the wolf, we have our hierarchies which maintain order, but unlike most other animals, the drive to dominate and control resources is balanced by our capacity for altruism. That is, as an advanced species, we recognize that our interests are best served not by preserving ourselves and our kin at all costs, but by looking out for others as well.

Even before biologists theorized an evolutionary explanation for our ability to project ourselves into others’ shoes (why we yawn when we see others yawn), Adam Smith himself described “sympathy” as:

correspondence of sentiments between the spectator and the person principally concerned... [who] is as constantly led to imagine in what matter he would be affected if he was only one of the spectators of his own situation.

That's from The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith notes that sympathy for others serves our interest, because Man,

conscious of his own weakness, and of the need which he has for the assistance of others, rejoices whenever he observes that they [others] adopt his own passions, because he is then assured of their assistance, and grieves whenever he observes the contrary.

Indeed, you might say that human social organization is the result of an organic tug-of-war between two competing forces: the more primordial drive of self-preservation, and the more evolved emotion of altruism--looking out for others in the group. As society has evolved and humans have learned to check their pursuit of self-interest when that individual pursuit may harm others, rigid hierarchies have been able to give way to flatter, more democratic societies.

What does all this have to do with anything? To answer that question, I draw your attention to Glenn Beck (relevant clip starts about 3:38):

For those of you who can’t view video at work, here’s what Glenn Beck said about Marcelas Owen, the 11-year-old who spoke out in favor of health reform the other day:

Speaking of Marcelas' grandmother, she worked for a place called the Washington Community Action Network. From their Web site, here's what they're all about: Economic, racial gender and social justice for all; decent quality of life for all; change relations of power, so all individuals can significantly impact decisions that affect their lives; shared community and collective responsibility; respect for diversity and building strong communities; truly democratic society with open, honest participation by all.

Boy, there are pesky phrases in that one that we should point out: social justice, shared community, and collective responsibility. And let's not forget truly democratic society. Well, we're not a democratic society. I think that was the Soviet Union. I believe it's a democratic socialist republic in China as well.

Besides being a painful exercise in cognitive dissonance—Beck's case against health care reform is that little Marcelas’s mother already had access to perfectly fine government health care (Medicaid)—it’s a yet another shocking display of just how far conservative political philosophy has devolved. Because in so hyperbolically questioning government’s role in caring for the sick and the helpless, Beck isn’t just attacking “shared community” or even “democratic society” (and it's scary enough that the intellectual force of conservatism doesn’t believe we are a democratic society)—he’s attacking the very concept of society itself: that as humans, we agree to band together and give of ourselves in exchange for the protection of the group.

Maybe Glenn Beck wants to go off and live in the woods and never shave and be totally self-sufficient. I'm all for him doing that. But that’s not the life most of us choose to live, because most of us recognize all the help we get from other people just by living in society. When we’re born, we enter into a social contract with our community, that just as we are cared for and protected by others without having asked for it, so we are obligated to care for and protect others as well. That’s not a WAG original—that’s classic John Stuart Mill:

Every one who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest. This conduct consists, first, in not injuring the interests of one another… and, secondly, in each person’s bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable principle) of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury or molestation.” (On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1991, p. 83).

When Beck rejects concepts like “shared community” and “collective responsibility,” therefore, he’s thus rejecting the centuries-old values that hold us together as a functioning society, and embracing instead a vision of radical self-reliance which holds that a person has no duties to anyone but himself (and maybe his kin). It’s the same phenomenon when the deranged Michelle Bachmann decries an innocuous cap-and-trade bill as “tyranny,” thereby reducing sacred liberty to the churlish tantrum that “I can drive as big a car as I want and leave my lights on and crank my AC and no one’s gonna tell me not to, the environment and everyone else be damned!” (As if protecting my property right to a livable climate constitutes tyranny.) And it's that fiercely radical self-reliance and disregard of responsibility for others, which seems to be sweeping the Republican Party, that disturbs me most of any trend I see.

Now, Beck and Bachmann may say they agree that it’s irresponsible to shirk your duty to society or to abstain from giving to charity, but that they believe that ultimately government can’t compel you to look out for anyone besides yourself.

But if that were true, there could be no such thing as a draft, which compels men to fight against their will to protect the group from threats. Indeed, there could be no firefighters or police officers, because their funding relies on government forcing citizens to give of their resources—regardless of whether or not individual citizens think they need such protection. I may think I’m responsible and my house will never burn down, but I still have to pay taxes to the fire department.

In other words, government has the right to compel individuals to give of their resources and their liberty (commensurate to the need), in order to insure the group against the risk that calamity befalls any small number of its members. That calamity may be a fire which a person can’t put out, a robbery which he can’t turn back, an invasion from a foreign army, or, I believe, a disease he can’t afford to treat. Why? Because such calamity could befall any one of us at any time, and when the time comes, we know others will have our back.

I didn’t initially start writing with this intent, but this has been a long way of saying, the government has every right to compel society's members to provide for each others' health care.

The conservative misinterpretation of self-reliance is this: that I can take care of myself without anyone else’s help, and therefore shouldn’t be compelled to help anyone else if I don’t want to. Two hundred years ago, that may have been possible for some. Maybe a frontier farmer could have lived a life of self-reliance: growing crops, tending his own wounds, and fending off bears and bandits with no help from anyone else. If so, that frontier farmer may have a legitimate gripe against being forced to pay for other people’s health insurance. Today, however, there are very few among us who can legitimately claim that we receive no benefit from the sweat off others' backs. And those few who still can are probably the type of people you don’t want to meet (cue banjo music).

Pot, kettle, black

2010-03-17T02:16:00.000-04:00

Conservative pundits are up in arms over 11-year-old Marcelas Owens voicing his support for health care reform. Beck in particular moans, "But what he's being put through now — knowingly by adults — is obscene. The senators are exploiting him and it's absolutely despicable."

Adults putting words in kids' mouths? Does anybody remember this gem of a video from back in November?

A little like the pot calling the kettle black, don't you think?

Don't want toxic water? It's gonna cost ya!

2010-03-16T20:20:00.000-04:00

This headline and teaser were on the front of nytimes.com yesterday morning:

Saving U.S. Water and Sewer Systems Would Be Costly
By CHARLES DUHIGG

Ruptures in aging water systems cause pollutants to seep into water supplies, but in many cities residents have protested rate increases to fix pipes.

This reminds me of a scene from the Simpsons episode "The PTA Disbands," in which budget cuts force teachers to go on strike:

Ned: Well, all right, I'd like to call this meeting of the PTA to or-diddely-order. Let's see if we can't put an end to this strike fuss, huh? Mrs. Krabappel, why don't you begin?

Skinner: Boo!

Edna: Oh, "boo" yourself. Our demands are simple: a small cost-of-living increase and some better equipment and supplies for your children.

Audience: Yeah! Give it to them! etc.

Skinner: Yeah, in a dream world. We have a very tight budget; to do what she's asking, we'd have to raise taxes.

Audience: Raise taxes? They're too high as they are. Taxes are bad. etc.

Edna: It's your children's future.

Audience: That's right. Children are important. etc.

Skinner: It'll cost you.

Audience: No to taxes. My God, they're going to raise taxes. etc.

Edna: C'mon!

Audience: She makes a good case. Good point. etc.

Skinner: [rubs his fingertips together]

Audience: More taxes? The finger thing means the taxes. etc.

Ned: Well, I guess this is a case where we'll have to agree to disagree.

Skinner: I don't agree to that.

Edna: Neither do I!

Besides being an example of misguided media "balance" (side A says toxic water is bad, but side B says fixing it could be costly - who's right?), the obvious conclusion from the New York Times article is, excitable electorates' ability to make informed tradeoffs between long-term and short-term, and between monetary and non-monetary costs, is quite limited.

The other takeaway is that the word "cost" should never be used when talking about environmental issues. The proper word is "investment." Environmental regulations "cost" money in the same way that buying a stock "costs" money: yes, you have to part with some cash up front, but in doing so you reap returns over the long term in the form of avoided health costs, maintenance of environmental services, and improved quality of life.

So when we say that cap-and-trade will "cost a postage stamp a day," what we really mean is that it will require a postage-stamp-a-day investment in our future prosperity.

Green Zone Spin Zone

2010-03-16T00:58:00.000-04:00

I saw the new Matt Damon movie Green Zone last Friday, the central theme of which is the hunt for WMDs in Iraq. My thought coming out of the movie was, "conservatives aren't going to be happy about this one."

Sure enough, Ross Douhat had a column in Monday's New York Times criticizing the movie:

Consider “Green Zone,” the new Matt Damon thriller that doubles as a meditation on Why We Are in Iraq... the film itself, a slam-bang account of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, has the same problem as nearly every other Hollywood gloss on recent political events: it refuses to stare real tragedy in the face, preferring the comforts of a “Bush lied, people died” reductionism.

The narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare. You had a nation reeling from a terrorist attack and hungry for a response that would be righteous, bold and comprehensive. You had an inexperienced president trying to tackle a problem that his predecessors (one of them his own father) had left to fester since the first gulf war. You had a cause — the removal of a brutal dictator, and the spread of democracy to the Arab world — that inspired a swath of the liberal intelligentsia to play George Orwell and embrace the case for war. You had a casus belli — those weapons of mass destruction — that even many of the invasion’s opponents believed to be a real danger to world peace. And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have W.M.D. was the best way to keep his grip on power.

But this opening act, and all the tragedies that followed, still awaits an artist capable of wrestling with its complexities. In “Green Zone,” everything is much simpler. “We” were lied to. “They” did the lying. The “we” is the audience, Matt Damon’s stoic soldier and the perpetually innocent American public. The “they” is the neoconservatives, embodied by a weaselly Greg Kinnear (playing some combination of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer and Douglas Feith) and capable of any enormity in the pursuit of their objectives...

It’s a lousy recipe for real art, which is supposed to be interested in the humanity of all its subjects, not just the ones who didn’t work for Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense... Our nation might be less divided, and our debates less poisonous, if more artists were capable of showing us the ironies, ambiguities and tragedies inherent in our politics — rather than comforting us with portraits of a world divided cleanly into good and evil.

Mr. Douhat, who David Bradley called an "extreme talent" when he worked at The Atlantic, has a much better grasp of the English language than of the facts. But I won't dwell on his gratuitous glossing over of the Iraq war as the tragic overreaction to 9/11 by well-intentioned politicians "reeling" from the disaster.

No, the real irony of Douhat's piece is that the thing he criticizes - the excessive division of the world into black/white, good/evil dichotomies - is exactly the sort of binary reasoning on which the Iraq war he now defends was sold. Indeed, that sort of simplistic thinking was the foundation of the entire Bush administration: small government vs. big government, high taxes vs. low taxes, good guys vs. bad guys, "you're with us or with the terrorists." Douhat ought to recognize the irony of defending the most simple-minded, binary-burdened administration in recent memory on the basis that its critics are overly-simplistic.

Of course I guess I shouldn't take issue with a prominent conservative for recognizing the world's complexities. For that is a rare and valuable species indeed.

Calvin & Hobbes for when you're stressed out with work

2010-03-09T22:54:00.000-05:00

Because sometimes, productivity is overrated:

Although to be honest, I'm not sure if this is uplifting or depressing. "Childhood is short and maturity is forever." Is there still room for acting like a child once you hit forever?

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Watts vs. Bolt: Who's the Dumbest Denier?

2010-03-05T00:08:00.000-05:00

You have to see this to believe it. Anthony Watts, perhaps the most influential global warming denier, just cited an article from 1989 to prove there's no global warming. You read that right: 1989. Check it out:

Here’s a blast from the past. Dr. James Hansen’s view in 1989 seemed a lot more temperate than it does today. Back then, he’s ready to accede to a study that says something counter to what his theory predicts, saying “I have no quarrel with it”. Today, he uses labels like “deniers” (see here) when such contradictory essays and facts are made public. What a difference 20 years makes...

Well yes, Anthony, actually it does, because over those 20 years, scientists have been accumulating data, and temperatures have been increasing. That's sort of how you become more sure of something: by collecting evidence over time. The fact that Hansen was "temperate" back in 1989, when the evidence for global warming was less unequivocal, would seem to prove that his current views are based on accumulated evidence rather than conspiracy.

Here's the beginning of the NYT article Watts cites:

January 26, 1989
U.S. Data Since 1895 Fail To Show Warming Trend

By PHILIP SHABECOFF, Special to the New York Times
Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Jan. 25— After examining climate data extending back nearly 100 years, a team of Government scientists has concluded that there has been no significant change in average temperatures or rainfall in the United States over that entire period.

...

The study, made by scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was published in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters. It is based on temperature and precipitation readings taken at weather stations around the country from 1895 to 1987.

So Watts's logic is that 22 years of additional data should not allow James Hansen to become more certain of his conclusions?

This bit of boorishness follows right on the heels of another denier, Andrew ~~Dolt~~ Bolt of Australia, making the bizarre accusation that Apple is behind a new "answers to global warming skeptics" iPhone app. Here was his Twitter post:

Breaking News: Al Gore is funding iPhone apps to create secret new world order. First to be sent to the chambers - me. He must be stopped.

Even many of Bolt's commenters were able to squint through the fog and realize that Apple hosts, not develops, iPhone apps. No one's stopping skeptics from developing their own app.

So I propose a vote. What's dumber: Anthony Watts insinuating that a 21-year-old New York Times article disproves global warming, or Andrew Bolt claiming that Apple is nefariously developing global warming iPhone apps? I report, you decide.

Don't believe that government regulations are good for business? Ask the auto industry

2010-03-02T15:28:00.000-05:00

Even as Sen. Lisa Murkowski plans to torpedo the EPA's authority to regulate CO2 emissions, on the grounds that regulations will be costly for industry, opposition to Murkowski's plan is being launched by... the US auto industry. Check it out:

They may not be the most natural of environmental campaigners, but in a surprise reversal US car firms could prove crucial in the fight to stop Republicans stripping the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of its right to legislate carbon emissions.

Republican senator Lisa Murkowski is widely expected to move forward next week with her controversial plan to seek a motion of disapproval in Congress that would, in effect, reverse the EPA's recent ruling that carbon emissions constitute a health risk and can therefore be regulated under the existing Clean Air Act.

However, despite having secured support from a number of business groups, the move could face opposition from the auto industry after it emerged that the motion could reignite a long-running row over national vehicle emission standards, raising the prospect of different fuel-efficiency rules in different states.

According to a letter sent to Democrat senator Diane Feinstein by the Department of Transportation, overturning the EPA's ruling on carbon emissions would stop the agency from implementing the National Fuel-Efficiency standards that were announced by President Obama last year.

The letter – from O. Kevin Vincent, chief counsel at the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), the department responsible for fuel economy standards – warned that if the agency were forced to proceed on its own without the EPA's involvement, many of the benefits of national standards would "substantially erode".

He added that stripping the EPA of its powers would also likely drive California and 13 other states to revive their plan to enforce their own tougher emissions standards, which had been dropped following Obama’s announcement of more demanding national standards. Vincent said the move would create confusion, encourage renewed litigation, and drive up the cost of compliance for automobile manufacturers and motorists.

The letter mirrors one sent earlier this week by EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to a group of eight senators, which warned that Murkowski's proposals would "undo a historic agreement among states, automakers, the Federal government and other stakeholders".

Back in September, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers also sent a joint letter to senator Feinstein, signalling their opposition to an earlier effort by Murkowski to challenge the EPA’s ruling.

The move marks something of a reversal for the auto industry, which has consistently lobbied against more demanding fuel economy standards, but is even more fiercely opposed to the prospect of a patchwork of numerous vehicle emissions targets being adopted by different states.

The move came in the same week as opposition to Murkowski’s proposal (which could come to a vote as early as next week) heated up, with nine environmental commissioners from states that had agreed to originally adopt California’s vehicle emissions standards writing to Senate leaders to warn that the resolution would disrupt the rollout of standards that have "been widely praised by the automobile industry, environmental organisations, labour unions, states, the Obama administration, and many members of Congress".

Business leaders oppose supposedly "pro-business" efforts to gut environmental regulations? Yes, the narrative of "low taxes and low regulation = good for business" continues to crumble. Though the GOP would have you believe that regulation always increases costs and always hurts business, the truth is just not so simple. In this case, federal regulations give auto makers much-needed consistency and predictability in their manufacturing operations, allowing them to benefit from scale nationwide instead of having to adapt to a patchwork of state mandates.

Indeed, if you look at the historical relationship between the auto industry and fuel economy regulations, Detroit's financial bosses opposed the initial Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards. However, once imposed, Detroit's engineers had little trouble rising to meet the new requirements:

[Link to original graphic: http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/12/fuel_efficiency_1945_2005.png]

Thanks to government regulation, we spend half as much on gas today as we otherwise would. Had Detroit willingly accepted the federal government's challenge to improve its cars, instead of fighting tooth and nail against change, maybe the Japanese wouldn't have eaten the Big Three alive.

The auto industry is finally waking up to the fact that it makes better business sense to innovate new technologies for meeting federal regulations, rather than fighting against change. Now if only GOP ideology could catch up to the business leaders whose interests the party ostensibly understands, they'd realize that their anti-regulation stance is just blowing smoke.

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Filet-o-Fish

2010-03-01T22:26:00.000-05:00

I saw an ad for McDonald's Filet-o-Fish on the bus this evening on my way home from work. The ad depicted the famous singing fish from the TV spot, with a big speech bubble reading:

Don't even think about it!

Is McDonald's sending a subtle message about the nameless contents of its Filet-o-Mystery-Fish? "Dear consumer: we know that you don't know what kind of fish our white-square sandwich is made from. And we want you to know that we know you don't know. Our advice: don't even think about it. You know it still tastes good."

Which got me thinking about a conversation I had recently on the near indestructibility of McDonald's fries. Most foods, if they were to fall under the seat of your car, would rot in a matter of days. But a McDonald's fry will still be in nearly the same shape one month hence. Disgusting! you may shudder. What manner of chemicals must they inject into the starchy grease sliver to insulate it from the natural processes biodegrading and decay? So manufactured and unnatural!

But 100 years ago, you may have marveled at the same feat - that food could be protected and preserved for months on end to be eaten when calories were scarce. That food could be scientifically subdued and controlled to taste consistent no matter where it was purchased, and priced at 40 minutes of minimum wage earnings. A miracle!

So Filet-o-Fish: monstrosity of mechanical food manufacturing, or modern technological marvel? My advice: don't even think about it.

Health care reform in three sentences

2010-02-27T12:57:00.001-05:00

The Economist explains President Obama's health insurance plan in three sentences:

Under Barack Obama’s plan, which is bogged down in Congress, the private-insurance market would expand dramatically—but so would regulation. The proposal would require all Americans to buy cover. To make it affordable, the government would regulate products and prices and offer subsidies for the poor.

The above quote is from a special report in last week's Economist on health insurance around the world, which situates the President's reform proposals in the context of how other countries treat health insurance. It's the shortest explanation of the reform bill I've yet seen (though I think my own is still the best).

The article also contained this bombshell graphic, which shows that the US health care system is hardly free of the hand of government, even relative to other countries:

Seen in this light, and explained so succinctly, the President's plan sounds like the moderate, common sense approach that it is. In contrast with its reporting on US politics, the Economist's international and business reporting is still quite good.

Since the Economist is now behind a pay wall, here's the full context of the quote:

In countries where state-financed health care is not available to all, some governments are worried that too few of their citizens have sufficient cover. They want private insurance to be expanded to cover everyone. The most prominent effort is under way in America, where about 47m people lack health insurance of any kind. Under Barack Obama’s plan, which is bogged down in Congress, the private-insurance market would expand dramatically—but so would regulation. The proposal would require all Americans to buy cover. To make it affordable, the government would regulate products and prices and offer subsidies for the poor.

This effort is similar to reforms undertaken over the past decade in the Netherlands and Switzerland. The Swiss were keen to expand access to all, and to contain costs; the Dutch saw private insurance as a boon both to consumer choice and to innovation in the delivery of health care. To ensure equitable access, both countries forbid private insurers from discriminating against applicants because they are in poor health or at high risk of falling ill. This practice, known as “lemon dropping”, continues in the American market for individual health coverage.

Inevitably, however, some insurers (say, those offering cheap, bare-bones packages) will attract younger, fitter and cheaper customers while others (with a reputation for quality or gold-plated coverage for chronic diseases) will attract the old, the sick and the costly. In the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany, which copied some earlier Swiss reforms, regulations force companies that make “excess” profits in this way to hand over that money to those who end up with costly patients. Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University, jokes that Germany has the illusion of 200 private health insurers but because of risk adjustment it in fact has just one. The Dutch are now shifting from risk-smoothing after the fact to doing it even before the fiscal year begins.

Such a tightly regulated expansion of private insurance—in effect, turning health insurance into a utility—can expand coverage. European countries that followed this path now enjoy near-universal access. So does the American state of Massachusetts, which has implemented similar reforms. If Congress eventually accepts Mr Obama’s proposals, the rest of America will also see coverage increase markedly.

Tea Partay: the real force behind the Tea Party movement

2010-02-26T16:27:00.001-05:00

Resurrecting a viral hit from years ago. Lest there be any doubt that East Coast business elites are bankrolling the crazed right wing Tea Party movement, let's all remember that before the Tea Party, there was Tea Partay:

I'd completely forgotten about this video, but now the connection is so obvious!

The silver bullet proving there's no climate conspiracy

2010-02-22T23:49:00.001-05:00

There's another hopelessly misinterpreted story making the rounds in the denialsphere. Apparently one of the lower projections of sea level rise has been retracted due to errors in its methodology. Most people understand that when you have a set of numbers and remove one that's below average, the average rises, so the only logical conclusion to draw from this retraction is that sea level rise will likely be greater than expected. Indeed, observed sea levels over the past decade have risen at the very upper end of IPCC projections:

But leave it to the denial PR machine to twist evidence that proves them wrong into the opposite conclusion. Joe Romm lists the insanity:

Betsy Newmark: Another global warming claim that has had to be retracted because of problems with the data.

Sammy Benoit: OOPS Never-mind! Climate scientists withdraw IPCC-related article claiming sea is rising.

JammieWearingFool: Another global warming myth comes crashing down. No warming since at least 1995, no melting glaciers and now no rising sea levels.

It goes on like that. To deniers, any time a scientist admits an error, it's proof that all of climate science is crashing down. And yet at the same time that deniers trumpet scientists' admissions of error, they also cling to the delusion that climate scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy to cover up errors in their research. You can't have it both ways: either climate scientists are honest operators who make honest mistakes, or they're conspirators who never admit to the possibility that they are in error.

In this sense, far from being another brick in the conspiracy theory, this retraction is in fact the silver bullet which proves there’s no climate conspiracy at all. A couple scientists made a mistake. Other scientists spotted and pointed out the mistake. The original scientists accepted their errors and retracted the paper. No trying to cover up the mistake. No bruised egos or defensive, politician-style squirming. No intentional manipulation of data. Just an honest mistake, and an honest response. Sorry deniers, science still works.

Bottom line: Any time you read a denialist take on an error or retraction in climate science, keep three things in mind:

The error is only one in a vast body of research. Retracting one study does not discredit the others.
In this case, the retracted study was on the low-end of projections of sea level rise. When a below-average estimate gets eliminated from contention, the logical conclusion is not that sea levels will not rise.
An admissions of error is not evidence of ineptitude or fraud. Quite the opposite: it proves that science works, and should give you more reason to trust the body of climate science as the product of honest research and rigorous review.

UPDATE (2/23/10 at 9:28am)

Right on the heels of this fallacious fracas over sea levels, new research by the US Geological Survey confirms that Antarctic ice shelves are melting faster than previously thought:

Ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide.

Research by the U.S. Geological Survey is the first to document that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. The USGS previously documented that the majority of ice fronts on the entire Peninsula have also retreated during the late 20th century and into the early 21st century.

The ice shelves are attached to the continent and already floating, holding in place the Antarctic ice sheet that covers about 98 percent of the Antarctic continent. As the ice shelves break off, it is easier for outlet glaciers and ice streams from the ice sheet to flow into the sea. The transition of that ice from land to the ocean is what raises sea level.

…

Retreat along the southern part of the Peninsula is of particular interest because that area has the Peninsula’s coolest temperatures, demonstrating that global warming is affecting the entire length of the Peninsula.

Yes, sea level rise will be on the high end of estimates.

h/t Financial Times Energy Source

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Study written by banks says bank regulation will hurt the economy

2010-02-17T10:01:00.000-05:00

This is cute. A New York Times headline ominously reads, "Analysts Put Bank Reform Costs at $221 Billion." If you stop at the headline, that sounds pretty scary, and a good reason not to regulate banks. But reading the article itself, you quickly find out that the inmates are writing the report on the asylum:

If all the initiatives from regulators are implemented it would cut the average return on equity to 5.4 percent from 13.3 percent next year, hurt economic growth and raise costs for bank services, JPMorgan analysts warned.

“The cumulative impact of all the proposed regulation suggests that there is a real risk that we may move from a system that was under regulated to one that is over regulated and that that could cause a significant increase in lending costs and a negative impact on the economy,” Nick O’Donohue, head of research at JPMorgan, said in a research note.

Yes, JPMorgan is writing the report that says it should not be regulated. Can we go ahead and dismiss in advance any argument against bank reform that cites the $221 billion cost figure?

Especially since the New York Times also reports that more level-headed figures on Wall Street actually support bank reform, because they recognize that bank profits are less important than the public good:

Elders of Wall St. Favor More Regulation

Put aside for a moment the political pressure to regulate banking and trading. Ask the elder statesmen of these industries — giants like George Soros, Nicholas F. Brady, John S. Reed, William H. Donaldson and John C. Bogle — where they stand on regulation, and they will bowl you over.

They certainly don’t think of themselves as angry Main Streeters. They grew quite wealthy in finance, typically making their fortunes in the ’70s and ’80s when banks and securities firms were considerably more regulated. And now, parting company with the current chieftains, they want more rules, Louis Uchitelle writes in The New York Times.

While the younger generation, very visibly led by Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, lobbies Congress against such regulation, their spiritual elders support the reform proposed by Paul A. Volcker and, surprisingly, even more restrictions. “I am a believer that the system has gone badly awry and needs massive reform,” said Mr. Bogle, the 80-year-old founder and for many years chief executive of the Vanguard Group, the huge mutual fund company.

Mr. Volcker, 82, signed up the support of nearly a dozen peers whose average age is north of 70 and whose pedigrees on Wall Street and in banking are impeccable. But while Mr. Volcker focuses on a rule that would henceforth prohibit a bank that takes deposits from also buying and selling securities for its own account — risking losses in the process — most of his prominent supporters see that as a starting point in a broader return to regulation. And most do not hesitate to speak up in interviews with The New York Times.

Listen to Nicholas Brady, a Treasury secretary in the late 1980s and early 1990s and before that chairman of Dillon Read & Company, now extinct, but in its day a prestigious Wall Street house. “If you are a commercial bank,” he said, “and you wish the government to guarantee your deposits and bail you out if necessary, then you can’t be involved in speculative activity.”

Current bank bosses cite scary cost figures to justify "heads I win, tails you lose" policies. They want to be allowed to profit from extraordinary risks, and then be bailed out when those risks blow up, because that's the best way for them to maximize profits for their shareholders. But it's important to remember that those cost figures fall on the banks' balance sheets, not America's. And just because the banks and their shareholders lose doesn't mean that the economy as a whole does.

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When global cooling is only in your backyard

2010-02-16T13:19:00.002-05:00

Global warming seems to be obvious just about everywhere - except where the most important decision-makers live. When November's climate data came out, I commented that Sarah Palin must be confused because she could see global cooling from her house. Similarly, record snowstorms in a few parts of the country are giving boorish politicians ample opportunity to grandstand over the end of global warming.

Nevermind that snow is not indicative of cold weather (here and here). To see that weather is not the same as climate, all you have to do is look past your own backyard:

Yes, that's right: while snow has buried Washington, DC, snow must be airlifted in to the Winter Olympics due to record high temperatures. I know, I know, it's hard to believe, but it's true: the weather you experience in your day-to-day life is not necessarily being experienced in other places around the world.

The point is not to say that Vancouver's predicament is proof of global warming - my point is simply that by ignoring an opposite extreme weather event that's happening simultaneously to the East Coast snowstorms, deniers reveal the narrowness of their worldview (or extent of their deception). By any objective measure of unusualness and human interest, "no snow at Winter Olympics due to high temperatures" is at least as newsworthy a headline as "more snow than usual falls on East Coast," so the fact that deniers highlight only the latter while ignoring the former is telling.

In any case, there's still the larger point: despite record snowfalls in a few small locations, the vast majority of the globe is still experiencing uninterrupted warming. In fact, January 2010 was the warmest on record, even according to the satellite dataset deniers trust most. Anyone who points to extreme snowfall in a few locations as proof that global warming has ended is either exceedingly stupid, or exceedingly lying.

(Source for the airlift photo: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/vancouver/2010-02-08-weather-concerns_N.htm; h/t Joe Romm)

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Chillibuster: government takes a third snow day!

2010-02-10T13:28:00.001-05:00

In this post, meteorologist Jeff Masters has apparently made official the unofficial names of the first two major snowstorms to hit the Mid-Atlantic this winter:

The top 10 snowstorms on record for Washington, D.C.:

1. 28.0", Jan 27-28, 1922
2. 20.5", Feb 11-13, 1899
3. 18.7", Feb 18-19, 1979
4. 17.8" Feb 5-6, 2010 (Snowmageddon)
5. 17.1", Jan 6-8, 1996
6. 16.7", Feb 15-18, 2003
7. 16.6", Feb 11-12, 1983
8. 16.4", Dec 19-20, 2009 (Snowpocalypse)
9. 14.4", Feb 15-16, 1958
10. 14.4", Feb 7, 1936

Now that the third major snowstorm has shut down the federal government for a third straight day, I think it's only fitting that we dub this storm "Chillibuster" in honor of Republicans' efforts to bring government to a grinding halt. Over the past several months they've fibbed, flexed, and filibustered against everything President Obama could possibly want to do to keep the country running. Now they're getting a little help from Mother Nature. It's almost as if Tom Coburn were controlling the weather.

(If you missed the Coburn reference, he was one of the "Class of '94" Republicans who led the 1995 government shutdown against Bill Clinton.)

As Ezra Klein notes:

As we've discussed before, the reason holds and filibusters and cloture calls and all the rest of it is so effective is because the Senate operates amidst a scarcity of time: There's a lot the majority wants to do and not enough time to do it. But this week, the snow is holding up business, giving Republicans a much-needed break from doing it themselves.

But even when the government is shut down, at least Starbucks isn't.

Snowmageddon!

President Obama the Destructor

Climate craps: Global warming and uncertainty (or what to say when you hear "the science is not settled!")

2010-02-10T01:27:00.001-05:00

First was Snowpocalypse. Then Snowmageddon. And now the third major snowstorm to hit DC this year... Snowtf? I'm not even kidding, people are snowboarding down Lee Highway outside my window.

So naturally, it's time for a global warming post. And NYT journalist Andy Revkin's provided a good starting point, dropping an illuminating bit of insight in a post Tuesday evening:

But after reviewing the chapter myself just now, I have to say that at least one passage — as far as I can tell — did not contain a single caveat and did not reflect the underlying body of evidence and analysis at the time (or even now):
Human-induced warming of the climate system is widespread. Anthropogenic warming of the climate system can be detected in temperature observations taken at the surface, in the troposphere and in the oceans.
I have yet to see anyone provide definitive evidence — with no error bars — that the fingerprint of human-generated greenhouse gases (or other emissions or actions) is unequivocal. The only thing described as “unequivocal” in the report was the warming, not the cause, unless I really haven’t been paying attention for the last two decades.

The language around "no error bars" is what I wanted to call out here, because it reflects a widely held belief that there's a bright line between certain and uncertain - and more importantly, that it's prudent to wait until we're "certain" about something before taking any action. Indeed, it's this notion - that there's such a thing as "certainty" in science - which enables deniers and delayers to get away with spouting alarmist nonsense like, "the science is not settled!" and "we shouldn't risk trillions of dollars in GDP until we know for certain humans are causing global warming!"

The problem is, as any true skeptic knows, there's no such thing as certainty in science - at least to the degree that a scientific study could ever hope to show "no error bars." Remember, even something as obvious as gravity still has scientific uncertainty associated with it; Einstein proved that gravity's nature was different than how Isaac Newton imagined it, and even Einstein's theories are not reconciled with Quantum Mechanics.

This is especially true for climate science, which is intimately concerned with predicting the future. The earth is not a controlled experiment that allows scientists to add CO2 and empirically test the precise amount of warming that results. There are simply too many variables not in scientists' control. To predict the consequences of carbon emissions, we must therefore rely on climate models built from our best understanding of how the climate system works. And yes, those models are uncertain, with error bars greater than zero: as with any prediction of future events, you inherently can never be certain you're right until those events have already occurred. Certainty can only exist with hindsight.

But here's the kicker: once we're in a position to make hindsight judgments on CO2, once we've reached the point that we can empirically assess CO2's impact on climate in the real world, it will be too late to avert the effects. This is because once CO2 gets into the atmosphere, it takes several decades for the temperature to catch up with the new energy imbalance (see here, here, and here for explanations). So even if you stopped all CO2 emissions today, there would still be warming left "in the pipeline." Moreover, it's likely that once warming crosses a certain threshold, certain feedbacks will take over that drive continued warming regardless of what happens with CO2. Choices we make today commit us to consequences tomorrow.

Thus, as in any facet of life, we must make decisions today in a world of uncertainty, based on our best predictions of what will happen tomorrow; past a certain point, debating levels of certainty is a fruitless recipe for dithering and delay. A businessman who waits for certainty that an investment will pay off will lose the opportunity to a bolder entrepreneur.

Similarly, by the time we've received empirical confirmation of how much humans are contributing to global warming, it will be too late to do anything about it. We can't be certain whether a doubling of CO2 will ultimately result in 1.1 degrees C or 6.4 degrees C of warming, but we can make a pretty good guess, and the latter end of that spectrum would result in a nightmarish world out of "science fiction." It seems prudent, therefore, to invest a small amount of GDP as insurance against the risk of catastrophe. (Indeed, as The Economist points out in making this argument, the investment required to curb global warming is less than the world spends on insurance every year). 73% of economists and the world's biggest re-insurance company agree with me.

The bottom line: Just because we are not certain whether or not bad events will happen in the future does not mean we should not take action to hedge against those risks. By definition, if your condition for acting on greenhouse gases is 100% certainty in the science, then we can never act in time to make an impact. If you want to gamble our future by continuing to emit greenhouse gases, the question becomes, do you feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?

Just don't expect the rest of us to play at your climate craps table.

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Snowmageddon!

2010-02-05T17:57:00.000-05:00

Here's the view from my office window, looking out over the Key Bridge in Washington, DC about 5:00 Friday - just hours into the great Snowpocalypse of 2010.

It also snowed in DC, much less apocalyptically, just three days ago. With no wind blowing, the snow coated the tree branches in white. It was really quite beautiful.

With all this snow, I have no doubt that climate change deniers will be crowing that global warming is over. Obviously if it snows in the middle of winter, global warming is a hoax.

Of course it's worth noting that while snow in summer would certainly be cause for concern, snow in the middle of winter is nothing unusual. Indeed, it is almost EXACTLY the middle of winter. Today, February 5, is 45 days after December 21, and 43 days before March 21.

I may be slightly off on the exact start dates for spring and winter, but you get the picture. Global warming does not mean that we will never see snow again, and snow in the middle of winter is certainly no reason to start fueling your furnace with dirty coal.

And this doesn't even mention the fact that we just experienced the warmest January on record according to the satellite dataset global warming deniers love to cite most.

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2010-02-02T09:59:00.002-05:00

I'm with Calvin's dad on this one:

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President Obama the Destructor

2010-02-02T00:50:00.001-05:00

If you haven’t seen President Obama’s address to the House Republican retreat in Baltimore last Friday, stop what you’re doing and watch it now. Then, email the Youtube videos or this post to everyone you know. It’s long—-a 20 minute speech and an hour long Q&A—-but it will be the best-spent hour and 20 minutes of picture-and-sound watching you’ll have in a long time. Immensely entertaining and eye-opening.

I don’t think the House Republicans will be inviting the President back anytime soon. Seen side by side in the same room, with the President’s willingness to engage on substance pitted against the stale Republican talking points, the President was revealed as a man among boys. It was like Michael Jordan playing basketball against a court full of middle school kids. Bad ones.

You can read the transcript here.

GOP leaders were no doubt expecting a chance to retell sob stories of the President's supposed rejection of their entreaties to him, and feign willingness to work with him in a bipartisan way. Instead, the retreat turned into a stage for the President to list all the Republican ideas he has already embraced, and shine the light back on the GOP's own refusal to cooperate. The President's central point was that he is, and always has been, open to good ideas from the other side - as long as they work (or can be expected to work based on analysis by independent experts).

House Republicans are doing their best at damage control, trying to spin their destruction as a victory. "We've been locked out in the cold for the past year," they moan. "Finally the President is showing he's willing to listen to us. Finally he admits we have ideas."

And incredibly, the mainstream media seems to have accepted this narrative (or at least had before Obama's performance Friday). The media tells the tale that President Obama moved too far left, ignoring Republicans' pleas to contribute, and has now been forced to move back to the center by the Boston Massacre of 2010. Writing in Forbes, Paul Howard of the Manhattan Institute advises:

Obama campaigned as a centrist who would draw on the best ideas of both parties, but he has governed by deferring to the liberal wing of his party and locking Republicans out of Democrats' backroom health care deals…

As a sign of his (new) good faith, the president should invite the Congressional leadership of the Republican Party to the White House, listen to their concerns and find ways to hash out policy compromises that will result in truly bipartisan health care reform.

Even the ordinarily astute Economist seems suckered, writing that "After the Democrats’ stunning loss, Barack Obama has no choice but to move back to the centre."

Am I missing something? Has the President been pursuing a leftist agenda and ignoring Republicans for the past year, only to reach out to them for the first time last Friday? In that address, the President pointed out that his health care bill is quite centrist, and claimed he's been keeping an open door all year, but is that anything more than politics?

The notion that the President has kept Republicans locked out all year struck me as absurd, but as a consultant, I understand the possibility that my own partisan feelings are clouding my thinking.

So I decided to find out. I did a news search in the database Factiva over the dates 01/20/2009 (the inauguration) to 10/01/2009 (roughly three weeks after the President’s health care address), using the unsophisticated search terms: “Obama,” “reach out,” and “Republican." There were 2,582 hits. Here was the first hit, and it's quite telling:

Title: Republican Lawmakers To Obama: Give Us A (Tax) Break

Source: CongressDaily/P.M., 27 January 2009, 533 words, (English)

Text: President Obama met with Republican lawmakers today to try to win support for the $825 billion economic stimulus plan, but even before he arrived, GOP House leaders urged members to oppose the package when it comes to a vote Wednesday...

The idea that the Obama administration has been "unilaterally and universally rejecting all Republican proposals" sounds preposterous given that just seven days into his presidency, those same House Republicans were busy rejecting the President's stimulus while he was on his way to meet with them.

Here's another one. On the day after President Obama's inauguration, the New York Times wrote:

President-elect Barack Obama is set to visit a gathering of House Republicans. The incoming White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is in running cellphone contact with his former Congressional adversaries. Some Republicans say they hear more from the Obama team than they ever did from the Bush administration.

As Mr. Obama prepares to move into the White House, he and his top advisers are making a visible effort to engage Congressional Republicans, hoping to show they are serious about Mr. Obama's commitment to bipartisanship and to try to enact an economic recovery measure with solid support from both sides in the crucial early going.

The outreach has gone beyond the phone calls that Mr. Obama, Mr. Emanuel and others routinely make, though the influence of that personal contact should not be underestimated. More substantively, though, the House Republican leadership has accepted Mr. Obama's invitation to put together its own ideas for economic recovery and said it will initially offer them as a part of the economic recovery package, not as an alternative as has been the usual practice.

...

Mr. Emanuel said ideas from House Republicans on the economic recovery package will get serious consideration. "There is not just one way to create jobs," he said.

He and Lawrence H. Summers, Mr. Obama's economic adviser, met privately with Senate Republicans on Wednesday afternoon before Thursday's vote on freeing the remaining $350 billion in bailout money. Even Republicans who were not persuaded by the consultation said they were impressed by the candor of the two men.

"I think they have been pretty impressive," said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. "They are saying all the right things, and I think they did themselves some good in the briefing."

(Source: Hulse, Carl. "Obama Team Makes Early Efforts to Show Willingness to Reach Out to Republicans." New York Times, 1/20/2009. Found on Factiva)

In other words, not only had President Obama met with Republicans from day one, Republicans had also agreed to submit their ideas with the understanding that they would be incorporated into the broader package, not as the sort of all-or-nothing alternative proposals they've been offering since.

On health care, the story is equally telling. I went back and edited the search terms to include "health care," and found some interesting stories from the first nine months of the administration.

For example, on July 27, 2009, Adam Nagourney wrote in the International Herald Tribune:

The decision by Senate Democratic leaders last week to devote more time to winning Republican support for a health care overhaul has allowed President Barack Obama to keep alive the possibility of bipartisanship on one of the most contentious issues on his agenda.

Why did hopes for bipartisanship subsequently fail? Was it because President Obama and Democrats had locked Republicans out and ignored their ideas? To the contrary: two months later, Kaiser Health news (of the non-partisan not-for-profit Kaiser Family Foundation) found that as the final Senate bill was unveiled, "Republicans are denouncing the Democrats' latest health care proposal, even though some Republican ideas are embedded in the plan." The article explains that the Senate health reform bill contains several "Republican-inspired" provisions, including:

Cross-state sales of insurance to individuals and small businesses: The Baucus bill would allow two or more states to form "compacts" that would allow individuals to buy policies from insurers in the other states. The insurers would be subject only to the laws and regulations of the states in which the policies were written. In a separate measure, insurers could create national policies with uniform, federally set benefits that could be sold in any states in which the companies are licensed. The policies would be exempt from state benefit rules.
Medical malpractice: The legislation says Congress should consider creating state demonstration programs to evaluate alternatives to the current litigation system. Republicans had called for creating special malpractice courts and limits on damage awards.
High-risk pool for people with pre-existing medical conditions: Within a year of the enactment of the legislation, a high-risk pool would be set up for people with pre-existing conditions. The pool would continue until 2015, when the new state insurance exchanges would be up and running and insurers would be required to sell policies to all who apply, regardless of their medical conditions.
Prevention and wellness incentives: Medicare beneficiaries would become eligible for annual "wellness visits" with their doctors, paid for by the government program. They no longer would have to pay out of their pockets for certain tests and treatments, such as flu vaccinations or diabetes screening. Financial incentives also would be offered to beneficiaries who completed certain "healthy lifestyle" programs targeting risk factors such as high cholesterol, diabetes or smoking. This isn't just from the Republicans; Democrats embrace the idea as well.

(Source: Pianin, Eric and Julie Appleby. "Republican attacks on Baucus health plan ignore its GOP ideas." Kaiser Health News, McClatchy Washington Bureau, 9/17/2009, found on Factiva)

So when you hear someone complain that President Obama has refused to consider Republican ideas like tort reform and allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines, you can tell them that THEY'RE IN THE BILL.

Of course, the fact that these Republican-inspired provisions are in the Democratic health care bills will not stop Republicans from saying they are not. And it certainly won't stop them from voting against the bill. After all, all 40 Senate Republicans just voted "no" to pay-as-you-go legislation. They filibustered defense appropriations 37-3. These are Republican bread-and-butter issues - deficits and defense - and yet the GOP is voting against them. As Steve Benen points out, "GOP lawmakers are so reflexive in saying 'no' to everything, they end up opposing ideas they support, and at that point, reason has no meaning."

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Yes, government creates jobs

Yes, government creates jobs

2010-01-29T12:20:00.000-05:00

Erick Erickson at the right-wing blog Red State made Keith Olberman's "worst person in the world" list Thursday night, but what he rants here is far worse:

After reflection on Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, I am left with one overarching conclusion... Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was a declaration of war on the free market.

Barack Obama said, “Now, the true engine of job creation in this country will always be America’s businesses.”

But prior to that, he said, “Because of the steps we took, there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed. 200,000 work in construction and clean energy. 300,000 are teachers and other education workers. Tens of thousands are cops, firefighters, correctional officers, and first responders. And we are on track to add another one and a half million jobs to this total by the end of the year.”

Review the list. Every job listed is either a government job or a job so connected to government that it would not exist but for government. The clean energy industry? It would not exist, but for government subsidy. Construction? He is talking about roads and other infrastructure — jobs that will go away once the project is done and the whole way through is dependent on the government.

All of these are government jobs.

Hmmm, yes, it's bad to create government jobs - a war on the free market even. Jobs like firefighters, teachers, police officers, scientists. Everyone knows correctional officers and first responders are the bulwark of socialism.

Here's a question for Erickson: Without these government jobs, who will protect private property from fire and theft? Who will teach our children to invent the technologies and build the companies that create jobs 10-20 years from now? Private companies are the engine of growth, but government is the foundation.

There are few left in the GOP who understand such ideas, simple though they be. Since purging intellectuals from the party, the GOP has lived in a magical fantasy land in which businesses will solve all our problems, if only the government would get out of the way. The base has descended into boorish binaries: that Government and Business are opposing forces and never partners, that everything good comes from the private sector and government action always kills growth. If an infant industry depends on government support, it must be a war against the free market; since the market is always perfect, the government is stopping it from finding more efficient uses for capital.

For example, Erickson bashes the clean energy industry because "it would not exist, but for government subsidy." But can he name a single industry created in the last 100 years that was not jump-started by government subsidy, research, protection, or infrastructure? The automotive industry could not have gotten rolling without government-built roads. Power lines and water pipes would not have been laid without government backing up private investment. Today's high-tech firms would not exist even in our imaginations were it not for the government-created Internet. Indeed for almost any tech firm around today, its latest top-selling technologies stand on the shoulders of discoveries made 20-30 years before in government-funded research labs - research which would never be funded by private capital because the payoff is too uncertain and far away.

And just what does Erickson think will happen to American business when our infrastructure crumbles to the point that goods can't move quickly across the country? After all, the federal government subsidized the railways and built the interstate highways. Maybe infrastructure jobs wouldn't exist "but for government subsidy," but they're the lifeblood of commerce.

The bottom line is, government and business need each other. The way the economy works is that the government lays the foundation upon which private companies build, and corrects externalities that result from market breakdowns. Government-employed police officers allow businesses to operate without fear of theft or intimidation. Government regulators enforce property rights that allow investors to create jobs without fear that their investments will be damaged by others (Republicans ostensibly support property rights, but they aren't doing much to protect my property right to a clean atmosphere). Government-subsidized hospitals help the working poor get better and get back to work. Government-employed teachers educate tomorrow's inventors and job-creators, while government scientists conduct crucial basic research - research that's not commercializable on any kind of investment time frame, but which lays the groundwork for the next 50 years of growth. And yes, government environmental regulations prevent companies from dumping waste into our drinking water and polluting our air - kindof important services, don't you think?

This is the narrative liberals need to tell, the counter to the brutish but intuitive thinking of "taxes bad, regulation bad, markets good." Low taxes increase profits on iPads and iPhones, but it took government-educated brains to create them.

State of the Union smackdown, plus Republicans' hilarious plan for health care reform

2010-01-28T03:11:00.019-05:00

Like I said earlier, Wednesday was a big day. First, Apple unveiled its iPad tablet computer (on which I think Congress should model its health care bill). Hours later, President Obama gave his first State of the Union address.

And it was a good one.

I have to admit, I was worried. Over the last week, for the first time since his 2004 Convention speech, I had less than total faith in Barack Obama. It wasn't Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts: as I've explained, there's no logical way to interpret it as a rejection of President Obama or his policies. Rather, it was the President's own actions. First, his apparent refusal to push Congressional Democrats to pass health reform immediately seemed morally indefensible and politically baffling. Second was his out-of-character about face to put a three-year freeze on discretionary spending; what disconcerted me was not so much the policy implications of the spending freeze, but that it seemed so reactive to events - a rare break from his brand of calm steadfastness.

Before this evening, I genuinely feared that the President might say in his State of the Union, "I came to this office to bring change to America, but the American people are telling me I'm moving too fast--and I'm listening."

Thank God that did not happen. With this speech, Barack is back. [UPDATED: Mostly back. A couple people have pointed out that the President did not explicitly endorse cap-and-trade, which is a major concern. For the moment, I'm relieved by the speech, but no longer quite reassured. If the President really wants to lead, I'll need to see him sticking his neck out for a cap on carbon, not just the easy rhetoric on green jobs.] Several points reassured me that he still is the man he said he was, and that there's still Hope to bring change to Washington - and America. For now, I want to focus on one: health care.

On that issue, which has consumed my thoughts for the past two weeks, I thought the President made it absolutely clear where he stands: pass the damn bill.

After nearly a century of trying, we are closer than ever to bringing more security to the lives of so many Americans. The approach we've taken would protect every American from the worst practices of the insurance industry...

Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan. It would reduce costs and premiums for millions of families and businesses. And according to the Congressional Budget Office the independent organization that both parties have cited as the official scorekeeper for Congress our approach would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades.

Still, this is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, this process left most Americans wondering what's in it for them.

But I also know this problem is not going away. By the time I'm finished speaking tonight, more Americans will have lost their health insurance. Millions will lose it this year. Our deficit will grow. Premiums will go up. Patients will be denied the care they need. Small business owners will continue to drop coverage altogether. I will not walk away from these Americans, and neither should the people in this chamber.

As temperatures cool, I want everyone to take another look at the plan we've proposed. There's a reason why many doctors, nurses, and health care experts who know our system best consider this approach a vast improvement over the status quo. But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Here's what I ask of Congress, though: Do not walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people.

This is the closest Obama has come to articulating express support for a specific health reform proposal, and he's urging Congress across the goal line. True, he didn't say, "I want the House to pass the Senate version of the bill, and the Senate to pass House-friendly Amendments A, B, and C." But it doesn't take a prophet to read the writing on the wall. Four times the President refers to "the approach we've taken," "our approach," "the plan we've proposed," "this approach." Those are all past tense, describing an object that already exists: he's expressing that he's in favor of some close version of what's already been written. The basic elements common to the House and Senate bills - the five pillars of insurance regulation, an individual mandate, subsidies, taxes + spending cuts, and competition, together in a comprehensive package - constitute the plan he wants everyone to calm down and "take another look at."

The President does of course say that he's willing to consider "a better approach" from either party, and he urges Congress to "come together and finish the job." But in context, surrounded by the language of urgency, those don't seem like exhortations for Democrats to work with Republicans to develop a compromise. Rather, he's calling the Congressmen's bluff who say there's no rush, who advise that we should put on the brakes until we find a better approach. He's saying, "I haven't seen anything that makes me think that any of you out there have something better than what we've got. Prove me wrong, I dare you. But if you can't do it - and fast - we're not waiting any longer." Thus when he says, "come together and finish the job," I think he's talking about the House and Senate coming together, not Democrats and Republicans.

Now, one Republican says he does have a "better approach." In the GOP response, my current state's governor Bob McDonnell asserts:

Republicans in Congress have offered legislation to reform healthcare, without shifting Medicaid costs to the states, without cutting Medicare, and without raising your taxes.

Really? You mean Republicans haven't just been obstructing the President's agenda for obstructionism's sake, but have had a plan of their own all along? Where might I find this mysterious document? Fortunately, Gov. McDonnell told me:

In fact, many of our proposals are available online at solutions.gop.gov

Ah, so that's why no one in the GOP can ever seem to talk about their solutions: they've been hiding on the Internet! Naturally, I looked up the GOP health care plan to see what Gov. McDonnell was talking about. Here's the summary of it:

You mean the Republicans put so little effort into their health care plan that they couldn't even change the formatting from the Microsoft defaults? The three zeros in the "Scorecard" at the bottom of the page are also a nice touch. The GOP thinks it can give everyone in the US affordable health care with zero tax increases, zero Medicare cuts, and zero job losses - and not even an asterisk next to those zeros to provide the source of the info? Who's putting their trust in naive hope now?

And there's more comedy to be had. Check out the very first plank in the plan:

That's right: the GOP plan for "lowering health care premiums" is to...... pass a "plan [that] will lower health care premiums"!

The non-partisan CBO score already showed that the GOP health plan was a joke, but surely the existence of this document is the best proof I have that the GOP is doomed in the long-term, utterly bereft of ideas. And in the short-term, I don't think President Obama should wait up for "a better approach."

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iPads and iPols

2010-01-28T00:58:00.002-05:00

Wednesday was a big day. While President Obama was preparing his State of the Union address, Steve Jobs was announcing Apple's new tablet computer: the iPad. And I have to say, I wasn't exactly blown away.

As numerous bloggers have pointed out, it seems basically like a giant iPod Touch. Perhaps more shockingly, Steve Jobs didn't sell me on it either (you can watch his presentation here). "It's thin," he says. Ok, so what? "If you rotate it, the screen rotates too, so it doesn't matter which way you're holding it." Yeah, the iPhone does that too.

Beyond its features, I don't understand the niche for it. What does it do that you can't do with a Kindle or laptop? The Kindle lets you read books without burning your eyes out. A laptop is easier to type on. And if you already have these devices, why buy an iPad?

Despite these questions, I have little doubt that the iPad will sell. Apple's loyal early adopters will line up outside Apple stores to buy them. The media will cover the lines outside the stores, causing more people to think, "this must be a great product," and line up behind the early adopters. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

More importantly, while the iPad itself hardly seems revolutionary NOW, I have no doubt that the subtle changes it ushers in today will have major follow-on impacts on business, technology, and the way we live our lives. Most obviously, the iPad fundamentally changes the way we interact with computer content: from manipulation of physical devices (e.g. keyboard, mouse) to control the content, to manipulation of the content directly. It seems small now--maybe even inconvenient (I imagine the keyboard is nowhere near as effective as a physical one)--but who knows what innovations will be built on the shift the iPad has initiated? 20 years from now, will computers be Minority Report style interfaces where we whisk icons, graphics, and text through the air with a hand flick? Based on the difficulties of interfacing with MS Office software, that doesn't seem like such a bad future.

The other important thing to note is that whatever the iPad lacks now, it's only version 1.0. Apple doesn't presume it can anticipate all the device's flaws and potentialities in advance and bake those into a perfect, final product: it lets the device evolve over time. Based on flaws it finds in the field and suggestions solicited from users, Apple will no doubt have version 2.0 out in 6 months that fixes flaws and adds new features. Moreover, Apple understands that creative iPad users will figure out new ways to use the device so much better than Apple can, and therefore farms the job of improving the device out to the users themselves. If there's a problem, a developer will write an app to fix it. If a developer spots an unrealized capability the device has enabled, well there'll be an app for that too.

Which makes me think, why can't we take an approach like that to health care? Why can't Congress work more like the App Store? The House can pass the current Senate bill that does five basic things, then have the Senate develop "apps" to fix bill 1.0 through the reconciliation process. Even better, allow health reform's users (e.g. doctors, nurses, patients, scientists, economists) to write "app legislation" to solve problems they spot as they go about their business, and make those "apps" available in a market in which smaller institutions (states, localities, hospitals, companies) can shop for ones that solve their own unmet problems as needed.

Call it the Apple approach to health care reform. Of course, the second half of that is just a little unconstitutional, but I don't see why the House and Senate can't act as hardware manufacturer and app developer.

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Why scaling back the health care bill is suicide for Democrats

2010-01-25T16:26:00.000-05:00

Last week I cited a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon that I think expresses liberals' sentiments regarding the prospects for not passing a health care bill: to have elected Barack Obama to the White House and 59 Democrats to the Senate, only to see health reform "scaled back" at the 1-yard line, would be like winning 10 cents in the lottery (or for Calvin, waking up to snow, only to find that it's just an inch and school is still on). Earlier today, I explained why the health care bill simply cannot be broken up into pieces, because it only works as a comprehensive package. The bottom line is this: if Democrats wimp out and pass a scaled back health bill, their strongest supporters will stay home in November. They certainly will not volunteer or donate money. (This is all the more likely if Democrats also wimp out on cap-and-trade and other progressive issues.)

Now, here's further proof of this. An email from MoveOn.org not-so-subtly suggests that if Congress can't pass the health care bill, its 5 million members should punish Democrats by refusing to volunteer for them in 2010:

The message to Congress is clear: if you can't deliver, don't expect on the loyal support of your most dedicated supporters come November. What's the point of spending sweat and cash if Democrats can't deliver on the issues that define them as Democrats?

Will Congress get the message? There's only one way to make sure: Call Congress and let them know that if they don't pass comprehensive health care reform NOW, you will become disillusioned and refuse to support them in November. Follow the link to find your Representatives' and Senators' numbers.

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The simplest explanation of health care reform you will ever read

2010-01-25T01:11:00.009-05:00

The problem with the health care bill is that nobody knows what’s in it. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has done an excellent job explaining that while the public opposes the generic entity of “Obama’s health care bill,” a majority actually supports the bill once you explain what it does. In fact, most people who oppose the bill believe things about it that are demonstrably false.

It’s understandable: health care is an incredibly complex issue—one in which there are few obviously right answers—and the current bill has been tortured by political sausage-making into a 1,000+ page behemoth of convolution.

But when you step back and look at the health care bill, it’s really not as hard to understand as it seems, and it's possible to write a simple explanation of the health care bill. In fact, the Senate bill does just five main things:

Bans insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, and from rescinding coverage after you get sick
Requires all Americans to purchase health insurance
Provides subsidies for those unable to afford insurance premiums
Establishes "exchanges" for people to compare and purchase insurance policies
Pays for all of this with taxes on expensive “Cadillac” insurance plans and companies in the health care industry, and reductions in Medicare spending

As Paul Krugman points out, each of these pillars is crucial to the others’ success. Take one pillar out of the package, and the whole structure collapses. Understanding that, here's how to truthfully explain the health care bill to any skeptic on left or right such that its necessity becomes obvious - if you just want the short, bulleted version, scroll down toward the bottom.

We’ll start with the component that everyone agrees on: insurance companies should not be able to deny Americans coverage because of pre-existing conditions, nor take away your coverage once you get sick. Our current system ensures that the Americans most in need of health care have the hardest time getting it. This is wrong and immoral. The bill bans these insurance company practices, so that no American will ever be denied by an insurer because of sickness. Even Republicans support this provision (or say they do at least).

But this universally popular provision creates a new problem: if insurers have to accept anyone regardless of health, it creates an incentive for healthy people to wait until they get sick to buy insurance. It’d be like waiting until your house burned down to buy home insurance - no insurance company can stay in business if it's forced to pay benefits to people who haven't paid premiums into the risk pool. To cover these late-comers, insurers would have to raise premiums on everyone else. Rising premiums would drive more people out of the system, requiring further premium increases, creating a “death spiral” that would bankrupt the insurance industry and ultimately require a true government takeover of health care. Hence the individual mandate: if insurance companies have to cover everyone regardless of health status, then you have to require everyone to buy insurance. (Check out Ezra Klein's blog for more on this.)

Not everyone, of course, can afford insurance premiums. So the health care bill provides subsidies to defray the costs for lower-income Americans. Perhaps these could be more or less generous, but philosophically, the idea is sound: if you require everyone to buy insurance, you have to help out those who can’t afford to pay for it.

Of course now we’re requiring everyone to buy insurance companies’ product—and paying for those who can’t afford to do so. If this is not to be just a massive transfer of taxpayer wealth to insurance companies, we have to limit insurers' ability to raise prices. This can be done through command-and-control policies (e.g. price ceilings), but I prefer market solutions that work by facilitating competition. It seems like the easiest way to do this would be to create a government-run insurance option to compete with private insurers, but that's off the table, so the current bill does the next best thing: it creates “insurance exchanges” that help Americans to compare and choose private insurance policies. Again, there are better and worse ways to implement the exchanges, but on principle, it’s a reasonable idea.

Finally, we need to find a way to pay for all this (the subsidies and exchanges). There are two ways to do it: borrow money and continue to explode the deficit, or pay for it ourselves with taxes and/or spending cuts. The Senate bill does the latter, and actually reduces the deficit over the next 10 years:

First, the bill taxes so-called “Cadillac” insurance plans that require very little out-of-pocket expenses. This makes sense: these Cadillac plans are partially responsible for driving our health care costs so high, because their generous coverage encourages people to over-consume health care with little regard to the cost. Since we need to raise revenue, it makes sense to do so in a way that has the additional benefit of discouraging irresponsibly extravagant plans.
Second, the bill taxes various companies in the health care industry, notably medical device manufacturers. This also makes sense: the bill would help more Americans to afford these companies’ products, so it’s only fair that the companies should pick up part of the tab.
Third, the bill reduces Medicare spending, mostly by targeting inefficiencies and waste, and by reducing payments to doctors. I can’t speak to the specifics, but the broad concept of freeing up dollars from Medicare makes sense. It’s a bloated program that will deplete its trust fund by 2017, so Medicare can’t continue in its current form for much longer, regardless of what Obama's bill does. In any case, Republicans have long clamored against entitlement spending; to oppose cuts in Medicare spending now reveals the extent of their party’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

So there you have it. The Senate bill isn’t perfect, but it makes a lot of sense. And the calls to break up the bill and pass only the popular provisions simply won’t work, because taking one provision away will doom the whole system. Here’s a summary of the argument:

The Senate health care bill starts by doing what everyone agrees is right, and bans insurance companies from denying or rescinding coverage because of illness.
To avoid creating an insurance death spiral where people simply wait until they get sick to buy insurance, it mandates that all Americans buy insurance (just like we do with car insurance).
And to help lower-income Americans afford the product they’re now being required to buy, the bill provides them with subsidies.
To prevent insurance companies from simply raising premiums on its now-captive market, the bill introduces competition in the form of insurance exchanges that allow you to shop around for the best policies.
Finally, to pay for all this, the Senate bill taxes health care companies and Cadillac insurance plans, and reduces spending on Medicare—reductions which are inevitable in any case given Medicare’s looming insolvency.

If you want to ban insurance companies from discriminating against sick people, all of the other provisions of the bill must follow (in one form or another). By the same token, if you oppose all forms of the other provisions, it means you support insurance company practices of denying or revoking sick people’s coverage. Now your Congresspersons just need to get the message—so call them!

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Calvin & Hobbes and Democratic proposals to "scale back" health reform

2010-01-22T11:47:00.000-05:00

I get a daily Calvin & Hobbes cartoon emailed to me, and this one couldn't have been more timely. Calvin's shattered excitement - you might say hope - instantly reminded me of how I feel about Democrats' current proposals to scale back health care reform: in Rep. Anthony "Wiener" Weiner's words, to "take a step back and say, ‘What are the things people really want out of health care, the things that are popular?’ Then we could step back in and try again."

Do only the parts that are most popular? To win the Presidency on a message of hope, secure 59 seats in the Senate, and pass a good health care bill in both the House AND Senate, only to "take a step back" at the 1-yard line - that would be like winning 10 cents in the lottery. In fact, based on the proposals that seem to be taking shape, 10 cents may be overly generous.

Here's what the New York Times is reporting:

Lawmakers, Congressional aides and health policy experts said the package might plausibly include these elements:
Insurers could not deny coverage to children under the age of 19 on account of pre-existing medical conditions.
Insurers would have to offer policyholders an opportunity to continue coverage for children through age 25 or 26.
The federal government would offer financial incentives to states to expand Medicaid to cover childless adults and parents.
The federal government would offer grants to states to establish regulated markets known as insurance exchanges, where consumers and small businesses could buy coverage.
The federal government would offer tax credits to small businesses to help them defray the cost of providing health benefits to workers.
If a health plan provided care through a network of doctors and hospitals, it could not charge patients more for going outside the network in an emergency. Co-payments for emergency care would have to be the same, regardless of whether a hospital was in the insurer’s network of preferred providers.
The package could also include changes in Medicare, to reduce the growth in payments to doctors and hospitals while rewarding providers of high-quality, lower-cost care. To help older Americans, it could narrow a gap in Medicare coverage of prescription drugs, sometimes known as a doughnut hole.

That first bullet is especially egregious. Limit the ban on discriminatory insurance practices only to children? Kissing babies is for the campaign trail, not governing. Maybe we can include little American flags for war widows in the health bill as well. How could that be unpopular?

The proposals listed in the Times are worse than nothing - they're a festering pile of garbage. If that's all Democrats can muster after getting this far, if they change their votes at the last minute because they suddenly think that health care reform is not popular, it will only confirm the prevailing narrative of the party as spineless and lacking core ideals. It may even necessitate a new level of losing beyond The Choakley.

The point is, the reason elected officials exist is so that they can do precisely what is NOT popular. That's why James Madison and the "demi-gods" who created this country established a republic and not a democracy.

The current crop of spineless "leaders" in Congress fall somewhat short of demi-gods. If they are the best that our brilliant Constitution can produce, well that's like winning 10 cents in the lottery.

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