After all, a lot of things are possible in our system. To the best of my understanding, nothing is stopping Rahm Emannuel from sauntering onto the floor of the Senate, murdering Republicans from states with Democratic governors in cold blood, having them replaced by new Democrats, and then getting a pardon from Barack Obama.
But that would obviously be a sharp break with the traditions of our government!
Indeed it would.
By the way, nobody mention this legal scenario to Glenn Beck. Let the man enjoy a good night’s sleep once in awhile.
Surely no matter whether we identify as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, we can all agree with President Obama’s statement regarding robotics.
Now, the students from Oakton High School are going to be demonstrating the Cougar Cannon designed to scoop up and toss moon rocks. I am eager to so what they do, for two reasons. As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything.
I stand with this Administration and its opposition to a robot takeover.
Back when the stimulus bill was passed, I have to say that I was opposed to it. When the White House claimed it was working, I pretty much scoffed. So I have to admit that I was taken aback to read this article, which indicates that professional economic forecasters support the claim that the stimulus has made the economy better off than it would have been otherwise.
The legislation, a variety of economists say, is helping an economy in free fall a year ago to grow again and shed fewer jobs than it otherwise would. Mr. Obama’s promise to “save or create” about 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010 is roughly on track, though far more jobs are being saved than created, especially among states and cities using their money to avoid cutting teachers, police officers and other workers.
“It was worth doing — it’s made a difference,” said Nigel Gault, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, a financial forecasting and analysis group based in Lexington, Mass.
Mr. Gault added: “I don’t think it’s right to look at it by saying, ‘Well, the economy is still doing extremely badly, therefore the stimulus didn’t work.’ I’m afraid the answer is, yes, we did badly but we would have done even worse without the stimulus.”
Here are some charts from three major economic forecasters:
I admit that I am a little flabbergasted by this. As both Matthew Yglesias and Brad Delong point out, these are companies who have every incentive to do accurate forecasting for “people who are trying to exploit macroeconomic information in order to make money.”
I haven’t had an opportunity to review the data underlying the charts or analysis, so I don’t know how much of this I agree with. That said, I thought the data presented here so far was important enough to call attention to.
The L.A. Times has a fascinating article about the difficulties in accounting for estimated costs in a troop surge in Afghanistan.
The calculations so far have produced a sweeping range. The Pentagon publicly estimates it will cost $500,000 a year for every additional service member sent to the war zone. Obama’s budget experts size it up at twice that much.
[...]
The Office of Management and Budget says adding 40,000 troops would cost about $40 billion a year, or $1 million each. White House officials included in their estimate everything they consider necessary to wage war, including troop housing and equipment.
[...]
The Pentagon arrived at its much lower estimate by dividing its war funding request by the number of troops throughout the region: 68,000 in Afghanistan and up to 95,000 in supporting roles elsewhere, such as on nearby ships or in surrounding countries.
The Pentagon cost includes higher combat wages, extra aircraft hours and other operations and maintenance costs, but omits such items as new weapons purchases — one-time costs that vary by year — and support equipment like spy satellites and anti-roadside-bomb technology.
The Pentagon also does not try to estimate costs of new bases for additional soldiers.
But in a memo early this month, obtained by The Times’ Washington bureau, the Pentagon’s own comptroller produced an estimate that broke with the customary Defense formula and did include construction and equipment.
That memo said the yearly cost of a 40,000-troop increase would be $30 billion to $35 billion — at least $750,000 a person. An increase of 20,000 would cost $20 billion to $25 billion annually, it said — a per-soldier cost equal to or greater than the White House estimate.
Keep in mind that these are per year figures, and most discussiosn of troop escalations involve deployments for longer than that–possibly much longer.
As for which figures to go with, I have to say that I’m going to be inclined to go with the OMB on this. Indeed, I’d be perfectly willing to bet that the OMB is underestimating the costs, and the Pentagon almost definitely is. The appropriations required for combat have, in my experience, often exceeded the initial estimates. After all, who can forget this famous estimate?
Q: Mr. Secretary, on Iraq, how much money do you think the Department of Defense would need to pay for a war with Iraq?
Rumsfeld: Well, the Office of Management and Budget, has come up come up with a number that’s something under $50 billion for the cost. How much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other countries, is an open question. I think the way to put it into perspective is that the estimates as to what September 11th cost the United States of America ranges high up into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, another event in the United States that was like September 11th, and which cost thousands of lives, but one that involved a — for example, a biological weapon, would be — have a cost in human life, as well as in billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, that would be vastly greater.
As a refresher:
The cost of the Iraq War to date: over $700 billion.
The number of biological weapons that were found in Iraq: zero.
I was reading this Megan McArdle post about the federal government restricting bonuses to AIG employees. As I was reading, I came across this sentence:
To wit: the traders at AIG are threatening to walk if Ken Feinberg pays them what he says he’s going to pay them, particularly if the company tries too hard to withhold the retention bonuses they were promised in order to stay on board and clean up the mess.
One of the common criticisms about the federal government intervening in the payment of bonuses to employees of bailed-out firms is that if those employees don’t get those bonuses, they’ll leave and go elsewhere.
I have a question about this, and I mean this with all sincerity: where will they go to work? Is there a lot of demand for trading jobs right now? I would think that from the general state of the economy, the answers to the above questions are pretty much “nowhere” and “no.” But I can’t find any data one way or the other.
If there isn’t much demand for traders at the moment, then is retention of those traders that big of a concern? After all, if there’s not much demand, there’s probably people who would take any job, even with income restrictions, because $500,000 a year is a lot better than $0 a year.
Does anybody out there know the state of the job market for traders right now?
It appears that the Republican National Committee is working on a set of principles that Republican candidates have to adhere to in order to receive funding and support from the RNC. There are ten principles listed, and the candidates have to adhere to at least seven of these principles “as identified by the voting record, public statements and/or signed questionnaire of the candidate.” If they do not, then the candidate “shall not be eligible for financial support and endorsement by the Republican National Committee”.
On the face of it, this doesn’t really seem to be too unreasonable. After all, a political party should have a set of core issues, and too much deviation does beg the question as to whether the party should support that candidate. So far, not a big deal.
However, something that interests me is that of the 10 principles that have to be adhered to receive funding, pretty much all of them could be opposed by a principled conservative, and many of them have been opposed by prominent Republican officeholders and candidates. Here’s a rundown:
(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;
Taking this construction literally, it appears that any increase in spending would have to be opposed for perfect adherence–or, at the very least, any bill that increases spending in one area would have to cut another. So a Republican politician who wants to, say, increase defense spending would violate this principle unless he also supports an equal or greater spending reduction somewhere else. What if a bill doesn’t allow that?
(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;
Well, Obama-style “government run” health care is not, in fact, government run and it is very similar to the health reform plan in Massachusetts, which was adopted and supported by Mitt Romney, who is probably the current frontrunner for 2012 GOP Presidential nomination. Additionally, I would also say that strict adherence to the letter of this principle would mean that GOP candidates would have to oppose Medicare and Medicaid–which is fine if that’s how they want to run, but it’s probably not an election winner. Furthermore, many prominent conservative intellectuals, notably Friedrich Hayek, have offered support for government-provided health insurance. Is Hayek too liberal for the modern GOP?
(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
Technincally, cap and trade is a market-based reform, as it creates a market for carbon emissions. Structurally, it’s similar to the Clean Air Act of 1990, which set up an emissions trading program for sulfur dioxide. The Act was signed by then-President Bush, co-sponsored by several Republicans, and passed with a vote of 89-10 in the Senate and 401-25 in the House. Why was it okay for Republicans then, but not now?
Additionally, both John McCain and Sarah Palin announced their support for a cap and trade program during the 2008 elections (although Palin has since come out against it).
(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;
And if someone, as a conservative, opposes this government intrusion into contractual relations among individual workers, a union, and their employer on the principle that such individuals should set their own rules?
(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
Amnesty is a policy that used to have large amounts of Republican and conservative support. President Reagan, for example, signed amnesty legislation in 1986. George W. Bush and John McCain both supported a path to legalization that was often derided as “amnesty.” Again, why is this a central issue when clearly there is a disagreement among prominent Republicans as to whether this is optimal policy?
(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
This just doesn’t make sense. Last time I checked, nobody in the military was requesting more troops in Iraq. And there is a division in the Pentagon over whether more troops should be supplied to Afghanistan. More to the point, there is a large strain of conservative foreign policy thinking that opposes interventionism and nation-building. Are those thinkers now no longer considered Republican?
7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;
This is rather simplistic. What is meant by “containment”? Additionally, if the State Department is able to, say, negotiate an end to Iranian or North Korean nuclear programs based on an end to sanctions, would a Republican who supported such negotiations be violatiing this rule because that wouldn’t be “containment”? Or adhering to it because the negotiations are “effective.” This is frustratingly vague.
(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
And so a conservative politician, such as the late Barry Goldwater, who believes that DOMA violates federalism and state control over marriage policy, would be determined to not adhere to this principle.
(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and
Again, this is frustratingly vague. Does opposing “rationing” mean no government-imposed cost controls, even though programs such as Medicare or through selection of federal employee’s health insurance programs? If a conservative politician opposes a bill that would mandate coverage for people with a pre-existing condition, is he supporting the “denial of health care”?
10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership;
Once again, this is frustratingly vague. How stringently do we define “government restriction on gun ownership”? Does that mean a politician who supports laws that prevent convicted felons or the mentally ill from owning firearms, he violates this rule? Does a politician who supports laws preventing the ownership of fully-automatic machine guns violate this rule? Once again, those don’t seem like election winners or something that a majority of Republicans would support.
* * *
Like I said, I think that the RNC is completely within its rights to decide what candidates it wants to endorse and finance. But if the resolution above is passed as it is, it will almost certainly lead to more heated confrontations between the various wings of the Republican Party and make it much less effective. As someone who wants a strong, multi-party political system, this makes me really uneasy. Although I do support a lot of Democratic Party policies at the moment, I don’t support all of them and would much prefer that voters have an opportunity to vote for a strong alternative in elections.
But if the Republican Party continues to splinter over these types of issues and give in to a particular minority of Republican opinion, it’s only going to serve to alienate more moderates from the GOP and further strengthen the Democrats’ hold on power for a long time to come. That’s not a healthy outcome for our Republic.
A few months ago, when Ross Douthat became a New York Times columnist, I was pretty excited that the Times had chosen a fresh, conservative perspective for its editorial pages. Since then, I admit I’ve been a little disappointed. Douthat’s columns have, by and large, been pretty lackluster–there was none of the depth, wit, or thoughtfulness that made his blog a daily read for me.
However, this week Douthat has started blogging for the Times and I have to say that in one week of blogging, he’s already produced better stuff than his six months of columns. Go check it out–it’s good stuff.
Susette Kelo’s little, pink house in New London, Conn. — like the houses of all her neighbors — is now a pile of rubble, overgrown with weeds. But Pfizer, the company that called for the demolition in order to build a new research and development plant, announced Monday it is packing up and leaving town in order to cut costs after its merger with fellow drug-giant Wyeth.
[...]
The Fort Trumbull neighborhood Pfizer had bulldozed today consists only of “weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters,” according to the Associated Press. Nobody has built the high-rise hotel or the luxury condos the city’s planners had envisioned. The credit crunch and housing collapse took the air of out of that grand plan.
And Pfizer’s sparkling R&D facility that was supposed to anchor the city’s “rejuvenation?” It’s being shuttered as a cost-saving measure following Pfizer’s merger with Wyeth. Some of the 1,400 jobs there will move across the river to Groton. Some will be terminated.
The best-laid plans of central planners, it seems, have once again gone awry-unless you look at it from Pfizer’s perspective.
The Hartford Courant reports Pfizer may sell the building and the land, which it got for nearly nothing. Or it may lease it out. So, the drug giant still gets the profits from the government’s taking. But for New London? No more R&D jobs. No development of Fort Trumbull. Just some rubble where families once lived.
Despicable.
Update: I was on vacation last week, so I totally missed the fact that Steve Verdon covered this already. Still, we can keep being mad, right?
Brookins cartoon courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch via Doug Mataconis.
Bruce Bartlett articulates something that I’ve been wanting to write about for a while about the “read the bill” nonsense, and since he did a better job of it than I would have, I’ll just direct you to him:
The 1,990-page length of the health reform bill is once again bringing forth demands that members of Congress be required to read the legislation before voting on it. While a seemingly reasonable demand, it is, in fact, a waste of time.
The reason becomes obvious the moment one actually reads legislative language.
[...]
For these reasons, reading an actual bill is a completely useless exercise for the vast majority of members of Congress and staff. They rely heavily on committee reports that are supposed to accompany all bills coming up for a floor vote. These reports are written by committee staff and are required to faithfully reflect the bill’s intent. They may contain important details, clarifications, data, citations to hearings, and supporting materials, such as a section-by-section analysis, that allow the legislation to be intelligible to non-lawyers and other non-experts.
In addition, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have organizations that review all bills coming up for a vote, summarize them and offer political perspectives. Here, for example, is the House Republican Conference report on the health bill. If one’s party holds the White House, a member may find the Statement of Administration Policy to be important in understanding a bill and how to vote on it. Here is the SAP on the health bill. The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis may also be important. Here is its report on the health bill.
Read the whole thing, which is quite illuminating. The bottom line is that the language of a bill is generally technical and may have impacts on various pieces of existing law. If you’re a member of Congress who is not on the appropriate committee or not involved in drafting the legislation, it’s not necessary to read it. The legal language is there to ensure that particular policies get enacted. The important thing is that the members understand the policy, not the technical legal language.
You may recall that a couple of months ago, there was a “shocking survey” circulating around which showed that only 23% of Oklahoma students knew that George Washington was the first President of the United States. At the time, my colleague James expressed his extreme skepticism of this result, a skepticism shared by most of the commenters. Well, as it turns out, this skepticism was quite justified, as Nate Silver points out:
[Oklahoma State Representative Ed] Cannaday therefore had little difficulty setting up an experiment: he arranged to have all the seniors in the 10 secondary schools in his district take the Strategic Vision/OCPA survey. Cannaday tried to replicate the Strategic Vision survey to the greatest extent possible. The same exact questions were used, and as in the case of the original survey, the answers were open-ended rather than multiple choice. The survey was administered to a total of 325 seniors, including special education students.
Cannaday’s survey however, found his students doing just fine: They answered an average of 7.8 out of the 10 questions correctly. By comparison, the high school students that were purportedly surveyed by Strategic Vision had gotten just 2.8 out of the items correct. 98 percent of the students on Cannaday’s survey — not 23 percent — knew that George Washington was the first President. 81 percent — not 14 percent — knew that Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence. 95 percent — not 43 percent — knew that the Democrats and Republicans are the major political parties. There was just no comparison between the two.
[...]
There is no reason to think, in other words, that the students in House District 15 should have gotten such profoundly superior results to the “students” in Strategic Vision’s survey. Nor could Strategic Vision’s results have been the result of any sort of mathematical or methodological oddity. Consider their claim that literally none of the 1,000 students they surveyed were able to answer more than 7 of the 10 questions correctly — lower than the average score achieved in Cannaday’s test.
There are, rather, only two possibilities. Either the Strategic Vision survey was entirely fabricated — or Cannaday’s was.
I would put every dollar to my name on Cannaday, who has kept the surveys and is happy to show them to them to anyone who comes asking.
So would I. Cannaday’s results appear to have a sounder methodology, and also make more intuitive sense.
The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged to end the Bush administration practice of paying for the conflicts with so-called supplemental funds that are outside the normal Defense Department budget.
The financing would be on top of the $130 billion that Congress authorized for the wars just last month.
The military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not say how much additional money would be needed, but one figure in circulation within the Pentagon and among outside defense budget analysts is $50 billion.
Personally, I think it would be supremely irresponsible to act on this legislation without seeing the CBO score. I’m hoping Max Baucus and the blue dogs will get on that, because I’d like to know how this legislation will pay for itself. I suggest we put this off a few months to talk about the costs and how we are robbing future generations.
Via Kevin Drum, I have learned that current Senate version of the health reform bill would provide for insurance payments for Christian Science prayer treatments–and probably other “spiritual” treatments as well.
Reporting from Washington – Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.
The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual healthcare.”
Ugh. You know, it’s bad enough that insurance companies are already wasting money paying for quack treatments like chiropractic “adjustments” and acupuncture, but this isn’t just the camel’s nose under the tent–it’s the camel in the tent, spitting and defecating over everything.
If we’re going to be serious about controlling health care costs, we have to stop covering quack treatments just because they might make people “feel better.” Chiropractors, acupuncturists, homeopathists, faith healers, reflexologists and the rest of that pseudoscientific lot are committing fraud: they claim they can heal, but they cannot.
It’s bad enough that we allow them to practice at all. It’s terrible that some insurance companies are idiotic enough to pay for such treatments. It is a derogation of the governments’ duty to its citizens that some states license these trades. But evolving a national health care system that preserves this quackery in law and ensures they get taxpayer dollars is absolutely criminal.
One of the few roles of government that I think folks from every political stripe can agree on is that the government should protect citizens from fraud. It’s not supposed to help people perpetrate fraud.
Ford Motor Companies, the only major American automobile company to adequately prepare for a future where fewer cars are manufactured, and the only one not to receive signficant government handouts in the past year, posted a proft last quarter.
Ford Motor Co (NYSE:F – News) posted a quarterly profit on Monday, defying Wall Street forecasts for a loss as it cut costs and gained market share, leading it to raise its 2011 outlook to “solidly profitable” from break-even.
Ford’s shares surged over 9 percent as the surprising profit and increased outlook overshadowed an expected announcement later Monday that the United Auto Workers union has rejected a tentative cost-cutting deal with the automaker.
The results provided more evidence that Ford has distanced itself from U.S. rivals General Motors Co (GM.UL) and Chrysler, which have struggled to complete restructurings after emerging from government-funded bankruptcies earlier in 2009.
Ford seized North American market share from GM and Chrysler when they halted most production to prepare and execute their bankruptcy cases.
No doubt some of this profit was fueled by the time-shifted purchases produced by Cash For Clunkers. Nevertheless, I am happy to see this, as I was worried that government financial backing of GM and Chrysler might end up with the Feds giving them an advantage over Ford. I’m pleased to see that that hasn’t happened. (Frankly, government interference in the operations of GM and Chrysler to date has been surprisingly restrained, all things considered.)
Frankly, of the Big 3 automakers, Ford is the only company that I considered buying a car from in the past decade. They make good cars and they’re much better managed than the other two. I’m curious to see if they can sustain a profit into the first half of 2010, though.
All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.
And don’t forget that national security spending also contributes to our growing budget deficits. In Fiscal Year 2009, the United States spent approximately $383 billion on interest payments to service the debt (by way of comparison, that’s about 7.5 times NASA’s budget). As we continue to allow national security spending to go unchecked, those numbers are only going to get worse.
The amount of money being poured into national security spending is completely irresponsible and unsustainable. We can’t afford it. As we (hopefully) wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to take a real hard look at our foreign policy–particularly why we feel the need to spend more on defense than the rest of the world does combined. There’s no reason why we can’t adopt a more restrained policy and still keep the United States secure. I mean, let’s put this in perspective. We could cut DOD appropriations in half, today, and we’d be spending more on defense than all of the EU nations combined.
Update: Just to be clear, I wouldn’t advocate cutting the defense budget in half today. I merely wanted to illustrate that cutting DOD appropriatons in half from $680 billion to $340 billion would still result in the U.S. spending more than the EU on the military. I do think that a 50% cut from current levels is feasible, but it would have to be phased in long term–15 years or so–to be at all workable.
On his new policy blog at True/Slant, E.D. Kain provides a good defense of the Wyden-Bennett Act.
In Congress, however, we get bad compromises, not good ones, which is why we have the Baucus bill, which is neither as cost-effective, as close to universal coverage, or as fundamentally game-changing as Wyden-Bennett. Indeed, there is little to be enthusiastic about in the Baucus plan, which jealously protects the anti-competitive status-quo from any real changes, and thus – despite any analysis the CBO might put forth – does very little to challenge the fundamental problems which have led to such staggering health care cost increases in the United States.
There was, however, still a chance that the Baucus bill could be amended to bring more competition and cost-savings on board, and once again it’s the incorrigible Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden, who introduced the Free Choice Act in the Senate Finance Committee. Basically Wyden’s proposal would open up the new health care exchanges to everybody no matter their employer’s coverage and no matter the size of their business.
Read the whole thing. Frankly, I’m baffled that the Republican Party hasn’t picked up Wyden-Bennett. It’s a much better reform proposal than the awful Baucus bill–which, awful as it is, still manages to be better than the status quo–and it’s also a more-market oriented reform. It’s not my ideal, but it’s a vast improvement. This would be a golden opportunity for the GOP to both steal the Democrats’ thunder and improve our hideous health care system. It’s win-win.
Instead, the Republican Party seems to be focused on simply opposing Obama, and the only significant “reform” being offered is the constant, anti-responsiblity drumbeat of “tort reform”: i.e. making physicians a special class of Americans who get to be protected from the consequences of their negligence.
