Tyler Cowen dubs the paradox of choice — the idea that people become unhappy when given too many choices — “one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences.”  He cites Tim Harford’s recent piece in FT describing research on the subject:

Is more choice better? Ten years ago the answer seemed obvious: Yes. Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite: lots of choice makes people less likely to choose anything, and less happy when they do choose.

The most famous supporting evidence is an experiment conducted by two psychologists, Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar. They set up a jam-tasting stall in a posh supermarket in California. Sometimes they offered six varieties of jam, at other times 24; jam tasters were then offered a voucher to buy jam at a discount.

The bigger display attracted more customers but very few of them actually bought jam. The display that offered less choice made many more sales – in fact, only 3 per cent of jam tasters at the 24-flavour stand used their discount voucher, versus 30 per cent at the six-flavour stand. This is an astonishingly strong effect – and utterly counter to mainstream economic theory.

[...]

But a more fundamental objection to the “choice is bad” thesis is that the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. Starbucks boasts about its “87,000 drink combinations”; supermarkets are packed with options. This suggests that “choice demotivates” is not a universal human truth, but an effect that emerges under special circumstances.

Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.

But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.

When I saw that question at Kevin Drum’s place, the likely answer struck me as rather obvious.  Apparently, Kevin though so, too, since he came up with the same answer:

Perhaps the paradox of choice used to be true in simpler times, but the internet and the rest of modern life have taught us to revel in choice, rather than being intimidated by it.  In a related vein, maybe it’s a generational thing.  Maybe choice dazzles me more than it does a 20-something who grew up with 87 cell phone plans, 300 cable channels, and 1,000 Facebook friends.

Even aside from technology, we’re used to more choices.  Yes, we’ve gone from 3 TV channels to hundreds but also from 3 or 4 car manufacturers to a dozen, an almost infinite variety of coffees, ethnic restaurants, and many other things over the course of the past few years.

Kevin’s also right, I think, that our familiarity with the product in question matters.  It’s a bit of a chore to chose between seventeen brands of strawberry jam, for instance, but not all that complicated.  On the other hand, choosing a cell phone and accompanying plan — and being obligated for two years to live with that choice or pay heavy penalties — can be rather intimidating.

It also occurs to me that the original experiment may just demonstrate that people aren’t interested enough in jam to spend a lot of time comparison shopping.  So, unless they’ve run out and really need some more, they may bypass a giant display whereas choosing between, say, strawberry, grape, and cherry and then between Smuckers, Polander, and store brand makes impulse purchases more inviting.

Photo: Country Living

In a much discussed post, Ezra Klein produced a series of graphs showing that Americans pay more for office visits, scans and imaging, drugs, and other aspects of health care — often, far more — than is the case in Canada or Western Europe.

There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same — the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need — but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn’t set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you’ll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers. You’ll also notice that the bit showing American prices is separated into blue and yellow: That shows the spread between the average price (the top of the blue) and the 90th percentile (the top of the yellow). Other countries don’t have nearly that much variation, again because their pricing is standard.

Bernard Finel, recalling a series of posts and comment threads from a while back, observes,

James Joyner has argued that in order to reduce health care expenditures we need to make a choice — we can’t have it be better, faster, and cheaper.  Yes, we can.  The reason we can is that the choice isn’t simply between better, faster, and cheaper, it is between better, faster, cheaper, and more profitable.  If you cut profits — for medical insurance providers, for medical malpractice insurance providers, for med-mal attorneys, for doctors, for hospitals, and for drug companies — you can have better, faster, and cheaper.  The problem is that our system is essential optimized for profits — our goal is not to make people healthy but to make people wealthy.

That’s true up to a point, although some of this is simply the Find The Umbrella phenomenon combined with arbitrary itemizing of costs.  (Maybe the scans are $900 because they can bill that much for it while something that they’d otherwise bill more for is capped because the insurance companies won’t reimburse above a certain rate.)

Beyond that, as Dave Schuler points out, there’s no good reason to think OUR government is going to hold down costs in the same way the social democracies have.

I see no reason to believe that even if we went to a single-payer system that the federal government would be willing to lower healthcare prices so that we’re spending what France, Germany, or the Netherlands is. Despite the legislative mandate to do so that’s been around for about ten years they haven’t lowered Medicare reimbursement rates. Every year they postpone that painful choice and, indeed, they’re preparing to do so again.

And, indeed, as Kevin Drum acknowledges, nothing in the bills before Congress will do anything at all to reduce costs.

Yesterday afternoon, in a bit of faux transparency like you’ve never seen before, the administration released the names of everyone who has toured the White House from Obama’s inauguration through the end of July.  This, after various Freedom of Information Act requests to determine whether, say, William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright have stopped by.

A lot of people visit the White House, up to 100,000 each month, with many of those folks coming to tour the buildings. Given this large amount of data, the records we are publishing today include a few “false positives” – names that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else. In September, requests were submitted for the names of some famous or controversial figures (for example Michael Jordan, William Ayers, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright, Robert Kelly (”R. Kelly”), and Malik Shabazz). The well-known individuals with those names never actually came to the White House. Nevertheless, we were asked for those names and so we have included records for those individuals who were here and share the same names.

Oddly, Kevin Drum and I had the same reaction (although he had it first, since I didn’t get the news until this morning):

This data dump includes everyone who’s been on a public tour of the White House?  Everyone who’s been invited to some kind of White House ceremony?  Seriously?

Yes, seriously.  Max Doebler, for example, is the White House ceremonies coordinator, and sure enough, there are 29 visitor records linked to luncheons and receptions where he’s listed as the official host.  Bill Ayers is one of the many people who were there for public tours.  (Plus a second mystery Bill Ayers who was there for some other reason.)

This is kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?  I suppose it’s easy enough to filter out the dross once you figure out the right codes, but it almost seems like the White House is deliberately trying to inundate everyone in useless mountains of data by including this stuff.  In particular, when the end of the year rolls around and we get the full dump, do we really need the names of all 500,000 people who have been on a tour of the residence?

No. No we don’t. “Transparency” would near-real-time releasing of the names of people who met with the president and other high level White House officials.  It’s long been understood in the legal arena that sending a warehouse full of files in response to discovery requests for a single document is dirty pool.  I fail to see how this is any different.

A minor buzz was generated yesterday by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto message to the state assembly:

It seems that, if one ignores the first two and last two paragraphs, there’s a hidden message spelled out by the first letter of the remaining sentences. If that’s too complicated, Kevin Drum has a version with the message circled in red.

Speculation is that Schwarzenegger was sending a not-so-subtle message to bill sponsor Tom Ammiano, who yelled “You lie!” at the Governator (apparently, this practice is catching on in America’s legislative bodies) and told him to “kiss my gay ass.”

The governor’s spokesman, Aaron Lear, says this was just “a weird coincidence,” noting that other veto messages “spelled out things like ’soap’ and ‘ear’” but ABC polling director Gary Langer doesn’t think so.

What are the odds? Here’s how not to figure it precisely, rather a quick and unsophisticated back-of-the-envelope calculation: If the odds of picking a particular letter at random are one in 26, doing it over seven selections (the number of letters in question) is (1/26)^7, or .0000000001245. Just about one in 10 billion.

Small odds.

This, though, admittedly is not my field. A real calculation would take into account other matters, such as the frequency with which the individual letters in question start words, the ordering odds and the chances of a line break appearing in just the right spot between the two words in question, as it does.

A reader of Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire calculates the odds at .00000000000053937610200661%.

Stephen Green thinks this provides “one last reason to have some small amount of like left for The Governator.”  “Juvenile? Sure. But wouldn’t you rather have elected officials playing harmless pranks on one another, than doing to us what they usually do to us?”  And, indeed, Ammiano spokesman Quintin Mecke gave “Kudos to the governor for his creative use of coincidence” adding “You certainly have to have a sense of humor in politics. Unfortunately, this humor came at the cost of the Port of San Francisco.”

I suppose.  On the other hand, this is a very bizarre thing for a governor. Not least of which because it’s rather odd that someone took the time to look for hidden messages.

Ezra Klein points to a new ABC/WaPo poll showing a solid majority support “a law that requires all Americans to have health insurance, either getting it from work, buying it on their own, or through eligibility for Medicare or Medicaid.” Further, the same poll finds a third of those who oppose would switch sides “if the government gave financial assistance in getting health insurance to people with incomes below about 40-thousand dollars for an individual, and below 88-thousand dollars for a family of four.”

Kevin Drum is intrigued and guesses the phenomenon likely pretty common.

I’m pretty sure you could quote a couple of lines from Jabberwocky, ask an “in that case” followup question, and get a fair number of people to change their minds.  So what I’d like to know is: what’s the average flip rate?

He thinks figuring this out would be a useful project for political scientists, adding yet another data point to Dan Drezner’s suspicion that those of our ilk are becoming more policy-relevant.

I’m sure Kevin’s right that there’s a flip factor.  Partly, people just want to seem agreeable and reasonable.  Mostly, though, adding a lot of caveats just makes poll questions more confusing.

And the ones Ezra cites above are, frankly, pretty damned confusing.  The initial question is beyond double barreled, throwing so many things into the pot that I’m surprised they found 41% to oppose.  A “law that requires all Americans to have health insurance” sounds pretty good on the surface and talk about the employer or Medicare paying for it obscures the actual policy choice.  If, on the other hand, the question were phrased, “Would you support or oppose a law forcing Americans who do not have health insurance through their employer or the government to pay for it out of their own pocket or go to jail?” support would go down tremendously!

Similarly, if the follow-up were phrased, “Would you be willing to pay more in taxes so individuals making under $40,000 a year — or  $88,000 for families– could get free health insurance from the government?” I’m guessing it wouldn’t do so well.

Peter Suderman and Berin Szoka provide sane, libertarian arguments against the Nanny State regulating the volume of television commercials.  While they both find the longstanding practice where the ads are several decibels higher than the surrounding programming annoying, they nonetheless argue that it’s not a matter where government should intervene.

Says Suderman,

It’s easy enough to turn your TV off (or even live without one, as Szoka does). And if that’s too arduous, there are various technological solutions from companies like Dolby and SRS that help keep TV volumes on a more even keel.

[...]

But the larger problem is the assumption this grows out of — that government’s job is to regulate every minor annoyance out the lives of its citizens. That’s bad for government, because it gives it unnecessary power and distracts it from legitimate government activity. It’s also worse for citizens, who develop an implicit sense that, when problems arise, the way to fix them is to beg Congress, pass a law, wait for new irritations to arise, then wash, rinse, repeat. And  in the end, I think that’s far more grating and obnoxious than a little volume manipulation from advertisers on the idiot box.

Szoka notes that proposed legislation is technically unsound and subject to selective enforcement.  And there’s the issue of freedom:

[T]he bill does embody a recurrent presumption that it’s ok to regulate advertising in ways we wouldn’t accept for the “show” itself (i.e., non-advertising content). Of course, the show could be “commercial” (which, in First Amendment terms, means it would generally get only “intermediate” scrutiny) while the advertisement could be “non-commercial”—such as a political ad. But even if most ads are commercial, so what? If the government is going to protect us from “noisy or strident” commercials, why not all “noisy or strident” programming? Even the most annoying TV ad is probably less annoying than, say, the James Carvilles of the world debating the Glenn Becks of the world. (Of course, users really bothered by noise, but unwilling to give up TV, would probably much rather have a dynamic market for TVs with volume moderating features than rules that dull the din of commercials alone.)

Kevin Drum doesn’t care. He just wants the noise to stop.

[B]laring TV commercials have been an obvious and fixable problem for several decades and no “basic harmony of interests” has yet manifested itself.¹ This suggests to me that it never will unless the industry is pressured into doing it.

[...]

¹A shortcoming, by the way, that’s made worse by the artistic decisions of certain shows.  The worst for me is 24, which I have to crank up in order to hear the hoarse stage whisper that Kiefer Sutherland affects in his Jack Bauer role.  The ads are loud even at the best of times, but they’re really loud when you’ve already turned up the volume just to hear the show itself.

²This is an issue, like the Do Not Call registry, that transcends politics.  I don’t really care whether volume regulations are liberal or conservative or trample the Bill of Rights or whatever.  I just want the noise to stop.  If it takes jackboots to stop it, then so be it.

While I’m naturally in the Suderman-Szoka camp on the issue of Nanny Statism, Drum has persuaded me on this one with the strength of his footnotes.

The fact of the matter is that the federal government has regulated the manner in which television has been broadcast since before we were broadcasting television. (The Radio Commission, the forebear of the FCC, predates television.)  They regulate the spectrum on which broadcasters operate, require a certain amount of “public interest” programming as a condition of licensing, require a certain amount of “truth in advertising,” restrict the use of coarse language and images in over-the-air broadcasts, and otherwise oversee many aspects of what’s shown on television.   Why shouldn’t they set parameters on something that genuinely annoys most of us?

This isn’t a free speech issue. It doesn’t impinge on speech in any way. It merely requires that broadcasters refrain from blaring the ads.

Government already regulates the content of commercial speech, which has long been less protected than political speech.  Indeed, those of us over a certain age can recall the days when those advertising ladies’ undergarments had to use mannequins to demonstrate their wares.  Or that it took the AIDS epidemic to get the FCC to allow advertising for condoms — or, hell, the use of the word “condom.”

Yes, I suppose consumers could invest in sophisticated technology to solve this annoyance.  But why should we have to do that?

Via Jonathan Adler, I see that world-renowned economist Robert Barro and his student, Charles Redlick, takes to WSJ to summarize their research report showing that stimulus spending doesn’t work. Oddly, take cuts do.

The bottom line is this: The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus spending stimulus programs will likely raise GDP by less than the increase in government spending. Defense-spending multipliers exceeding one likely apply only at very high unemployment rates, and nondefense multipliers are probably smaller. However, there is empirical support for the proposition that tax rate reductions will increase real GDP.

Given that this comports with my own sense of how things work — and that Barro is sufficiently important that I was aware of him as a political science graduate student in the early 1990s — makes me somewhat confident in the results.  That they mostly relied on massive increases in defense spending during wartime, for reasons that are empirically sound but nonetheless muddy the research finding — detracts somewhat.

What’s interesting, though, is that public opinion seems to match up well with Barro and Redlick’s findings.  Kevin Drum points me to this chart from John Judis showing that most people think the stimulus helped large banks and Wall Street investment companies but not the little guy:

I’m generally skeptical of asking ordinary people questions of this sort since they don’t have the training to make useful evaluations.  (Full disclosure:  Neither do I.)  Nonetheless, I both think they’re right in this case and, regardless, what they think will influence how they vote.

Scott Payne has an interesting interview with Kevin Drum on the evolution of the blogosphere since the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth circa 2002.    I joined the fray about six months later and think he’s dead on.

A couple of excerpts:

But the political blogosphere did have a bit more of a clubby feel to it back then.  Mainly, this is because we spent a lot of time talking to each other and nobody else really noticed us much.  It was sort of like joining a book club, where you talk about the same stuff as the big-time critics but it’s only between friends.

There was also a lot less expertise in the blogosphere back then.  There were a fair number of legal bloggers, and a few economists, but that was about it.  That gave the whole enterprise a very wide open feel.  We could all talk about anything we wanted to without having to contend with a bunch of genuine experts barging into the discussion to tell us where we’d gone wrong.

Indeed, one of the things that got me noticed early on was that I brought some genuine expertise (a PhD in international security and combat experience) to the debate during the run-up to the Iraq War.  Two or three years later, the blogosphere was positively overrun with people who had much more specialized knowledge in counterinsurgency, terrorism, and regional affairs than I did.

First, politics itself has gotten increasingly tribal and the blogosphere has followed along.

Second, as the blogosphere aged, bloggers started to realize that their opposite numbers were never going to change their minds.  As that became clearer and clearer, engaging with them got a lot less interesting.

That’s largely right. The exceptions, oddly enough, are mostly among the group that’s been around since those early days — most of whom have gone professional — and know one another.

One of the curious controversies I’ve been half-following on Twitter but haven’t been motivated to write about is the case of Van Jones, a leader of the 9/11 “Truther” movement who has served since March as President Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, or “Green Jobs Tsar” for short. After several days of denials and revelations proving he was a liar, he “resigned” overnight:

White House environmental adviser Van Jones resigned Saturday after weeks of controversy stemming from his past activism.

“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me,” Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement announcing his resignation just after midnight Saturday. “They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.”  He continued: “I have been inundated with calls — from across the political spectrum — urging me to ’stay and fight.’ But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.”

Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war” and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) called on Jones to resign Friday, saying in a statement, “His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.”  Senator Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) urged Congress to investigate Jones’s “fitness” for the position, writing in an open letter, “Can the American people trust a senior White House official that is so cavalier in his association with such radical and repugnant sentiments?” On Saturday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote on his Twitter account, “Van Jones has to go.”

I haven’t been particularly agitated over this because:

1. It’s theoretically possible to both be a respected expert in one’s field and a genuine nut on an unrelated issue.  And, frankly, in the case of environmentalists, it’s possible to be a respected expert in the field and a nut on that issue.
2. I figured that, if there was enough substance to the criticism, Obama would pull the plug on Jones just as he has with virtually every other controversial advisor or appointee who threatened to distract him from accomplishing his goals.

Oddly, the local NBC affiliate reports it wasn’t his Trutherism that got him but his temperament:

President Obama’s environmental adviser Van Jones resigned from his post late Saturday evening after he came under fire for a series of inflammatory statements he made about Republicans, the White House said early Sunday morning. Jones, Obama’s green jobs “czar,” was caught on tape in an expletive-packed rant, directly attacking Republicans in the Senate who he said abused their majority position in the past to push legislation through. He told Politico after the statements were released that the comments were “inappropriate” and “offensive.”

Jones’ victim mentality here is rich.  Of course people who engage in bizarre conspiracy theories that only the nuttiest members of their party adhere to are going to come under scrutiny when appointed to high positions in government.  (Although, as Rick Moran points out, some will slip through the cracks. In administrations of both parties.) Of course the opposition party is going to launch inquiries and call your fitness into question.  It’s best to just go quietly into that good night when you’re caught.

I’m a bit surprised that Kevin Drum is upset by this development.  So what if Glenn Beck was one of the loudest voices calling for Jones to go?  Stopped clocks and all that.  And Beck has been on this since July 23 and it’s just coming to a head now; methinks Beck wasn’t the main factor.  And “our effort to generate green jobs during a recession will be just a little less effective”?  Hardly.  First, I’m skeptical that a White House advisor is going to create these jobs, anyway.  Second, to the degree that high level leadership is going to help, it’s not going to come from a lunatic.

That said, I think Jim Geraghty goes too far in closing this circle:

Last year, many at NRO and other conservative news organizations, including myself, wrote quite a bit about William Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright, and Michael Pfleger, and Tony Rezko, etc. And more than a few Obama supporters, and more than a few mainstream media voices, thought that the criticism was wildly overhyped and Obama’s ties to those types were irrelevant, because as president, Barack Obama would never put anyone in his administration with such controversial, paranoid, extreme, and anti-American views.

In light of Van Jones, all of those folks who said we made too much out of Ayers and Wright and the rest are invited to dine on a heaping platter of crow; it goes well with the egg on their faces.

There’s little evidence that Obama is a conspiracy loon, an anti-white racist, or an extremist.  There is, however, plenty of evidence that he’s been willing to make alliances for political convenience — which means associating with some unsavory characters, especially in the Chicago political machine — and that his team is unusually sloppy in vetting appointees.   Given that Jones fits the latter pattern, there’s not much need to go looking further for clues.

Claire Thompson issues a call to get rid of the paper phonebooks, citing a recent study paid for by a company that competes directly with same that “only 15.9 percent of U.S. adults recycle their old or unwanted phone books, and that U.S. citizens are largely unaware of the environmental impact of printing and delivering so many phone books.”  Said company is sponsoring a program wherein people would only get their competitor’s product if they specifically asked for it.

Resisting the temptation to note the irony, Kevin Drum notes that he rarely uses his paper phone book and that he indeed recycles his old ones because his community makes it easy.  He observes,

The really mysterious part of all this, though, is that despite the fact that phone books seem like they ought to be a dying breed, there are more of them than ever.  I just looked, and we have not one, not two, not three, but four different yellow pages directories.  One from Verizon, one from Yellowbook, and two from AT&T (they come in two different sizes for some reason).  They’re all crammed with ads, which must mean people are using them, but I do sort of wonder who that is sometimes.  I use the web almost exclusively for this kind of thing these days, and I imagine that most people in my upscale neighborhood do too.  So why all the phone books?

Presumably, because there’s money to be made in selling ads in them by convincing businesses that widespread distribution equals widespread use. This is the same strategy that, for example, has the Washington Post frequently offering to give me the other six days free along with my existing Sunday edition if I’ll merely agree to take them.  I decline on the grounds that having to go fetch a paper six times merely so I can recycle it is not attractive.

One presumes that there are people who still find the listings of businesses by type useful on occasion.  And, I suppose, it would be handy if one’s power and/or Internet connection were down. I’m a straight-to-recycle guy myself.

Dick Cheney is breaking the mold on how recently-departed vice presidents act. First, he immediately went into attack mode against President Obama. Now, he’s going after President Bush, too. Bart Gelman for WaPo:

Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. By habit, he listens more than he talks, but Cheney broke form when asked about his regrets.

“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”

The two men maintain respectful ties, speaking on the telephone now and then, though aides to both said they were never quite friends. But there is a sting in Cheney’s critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.

Gawker’s The Cajun Boy is quite amused:

Now, only Dick Cheney could ever possibly reflect on the “stay the course” presidency of George W. Bush and somehow come to the mangled conclusion that it was conciliatory in just about anything that it did. If there’s one thing that objective people can probably agree almost universally on when assessing Bush as a president, it’s that he and his administration were hopelessly, tragically stubborn.

But Cheney’s actually quite right here. As I’ve been arguing for months, Bush’s foreign policy returned to the Realist roots he campaigned on over time. Wolfowitz, Feith, and the gang were gone in 2005 and Rumsfeld followed them in late 2006. Gelman:

Cheney’s imprint on law and policy, achieved during the first term at the peak of his influence, had faded considerably by the time he and Bush left office. Bush halted the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closed secret CIA prisons, sought congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reached out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea, which Cheney believed to be ripe for “regime change.”

This apparently not only hurt his feelings but, more importantly, a shift away from a national strategy Cheney legitimately thought necessary to protect his country. As Kevin Drum intimates, it’s amazing that he thought we were on the right course.

But Cheney himself seems to have changed his mind on a matter of honor. He’s now working diligently on a tell-all book to set the record straight.

Some old associates see Cheney’s newfound openness as a breach of principle. For decades, he expressed contempt for departing officials who wrote insider accounts, arguing that candid internal debate was impossible if the president and his advisers could not count on secrecy. As far back as 1979, one of the heroes in Lynne Cheney’s novel “Executive Privilege” resolved never to write a memoir because “a president deserved at least one person around him whose silence he could depend on.” Cheney lived that vow for the next 30 years.

As vice president, according to one witness, Cheney “was livid” when the memoir of L. Paul Bremer, who led the occupation of Iraq, made the less-than-stunning disclosure that Cheney shared Bremer’s concern about U.S. military strategy. A Cabinet-level Bush appointee recalled that Cheney likewise described revelations by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O’Neill and former White House spokesman Scott McClellan as “beyond the pale.”

“If he goes out and writes a memoir that spills beans about what took place behind closed doors, that would be out of character,” said Ari Fleischer, who served as White House spokesman during Bush’s first term.

Yet that appears to be precisely Cheney’s intent. Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney’s book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that “the statute of limitations has expired” on many of his secrets. “When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. “Now we’re talking about after we’ve left office. I have strong feelings about what happened. . . . And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.”

I’m generally with Old Dick Cheney on this one. Unless one resigns in protest, one owes a certainly loyalty to those whom one serves. Cheney is one of the more controversial and important figures in recent American political history, though, and getting his considered reflections on why things unfolded as they did should be fascinating.

UPDATE: I appeared on Russia Today to talk about this issue.

Kevin Drum seconds Alex Massie that a British-style nationalized health system is not a politically feasible option in the United States.  Indeed, even Democrats don’t want that:

[W]ith the exception of a few outliers, the liberal community really, truly doesn’t want a fully government owned and operated healthcare system like the NHS.  We want a government-funded healthcare system like Medicare or most of the world outside of Britain.  And unless I’m mistaken, this isn’t a ruse in any way.  That’s really what most of us want: basic care funded by taxes, with additional care available to anyone who wants to pay for more.  France and Holland, not Britain or Canada.

I do think that’s what most want.  HillaryCare was a single-payer system.  That’s what ObamaCare would be, too, if it were politically viable.  Since it’s not, he’s willing to settle for a “public option,” essentially a government-run insurance program that would “compete” against privately run insurance companies.  And he might have to settle for less than that — a system that expands Medicaid and/or Medicare and patches some holes in the existing system.

For a variety of reasons, the public simply doesn’t seem to understand these distinctions.  First, Canada and the UK are the logical comparison points in that they’re fellow Anglosphere countries and the ones with which we’re most familiar.  Second, those who oppose the reform for various reasons have a strong incentive to elide the differences and capitalize on fears people reasonably have about an NHS-style system.  (To say nothing of the silly fears of the “They’d let Stephen Hawking die!” variety.)

Many of the leaders of the pro-reform side are rather dishonest in their presentation, however. They insist that what’s written in the bill should be the limit of legitimate debate when, as Kevin admits and Obama once did, single-payer is the ultimate goal.   The current “as much as we can get” measure is not only a step in that direction but one that will make it inevitable over time as it kills off the existing system of employer-financed insurance.   So, while it’s dishonest to argue against the proposed legislation as if it were NHS-style “socialized medicine,” it’s perfectly legitimate to treat it as HillaryCare Returns.

An honest debate on this is vital. The current system is on a collision course with collapse because the rate of growth in health costs is unsustainable, especially with so many about to hit the retirement rolls.  And there really are significant problems with our hodgepodge public-private system where those of us not on the government dole are reliant on the vagaries of care by whatever provider our current employer offers.

I’m naturally more skeptical than Kevin of government-run anything.  But I’m prepared to be convinced that a French- or Dutch-style system would be an improvement over the status quo.  But pretending that we can simultaneously cover everyone, cut costs, not ration, and retain the current private system for those who want it isn’t a very effective method of persuasion.

Dan Miller laments that “the right has basically abdicated its role in the conversation” on health care reform.

Health care has been THE liberal project for literally decades; entire careers (not to mention presidencies) have been built around it.  There’s a vast policy apparatus on the progressive side of the aisle built around health care, with industrious wonks digging into every nook and cranny.  Meanwhile, the right has…nothing.  To the best of my knowledge, the right has never instituted any major policy shift in health care (with the exception of Medicare Part D, although even that came about substantially because of pressure from the left and with the help of liberal Senators).  The right, speaking broadly, doesn’t see a problem with the current state of affairs in the health care system; it’s just not a subject that excites them.  If there was a way they could continue the status quo while solving the problems of cost growth, I think most conservatives would gladly take it.

Well . . . yeah.

There’s not a large conservative apparatus around health care policy because conservatives, fundamentally, don’t think providing health care is a legitimate function of government.  Defending the status quo simply doesn’t require a lot of infrastructure.

Kevin Drum does a very sound job of explaining why even “status quo, give or take” doesn’t have a significant conservative wonk base.  His post defies excerpting but, suffice it to say, once you get beyond subsidizing defined groups (the poor, the elderly, veterans) there’s no tinkering to be done — massive government regulation is inevitable.  You know what conservatives hate?  If you guessed “massive government regulation,” you get a gold star.

The upshot, then, is that conservatives tend to approach the debate from first principles whereas liberals are pushing their favored implementation plan.  The latter requires far more detailed knowledge.

Conor Clarke has devised the following chart of the federal effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1% over the last 15 years:

While he doesn’t “love the idea,” he think it justifies paying for health care for the poor by taxing the rich.  Kevin Drum agrees, adding,

The basic story is simple: As their incomes have gotten ever higher, their tax rates have gotten ever lower.  So if tax rates on the rich are raised to help pay for healthcare reform, as some Democrats are proposing, it would just return us to the rates of the early 90s, not some hellish confiscatory dystopia.

I’d note that the curve is wildly exaggerated because the Y axis starts at 28 percent. All the variation is between 31.5 percent and 36.1 percent or so; the drop has hardly been precipitous. In addition to the Bush tax cuts, most of the difference is lowered capital gains taxes.

E.D. Kain agrees and actually took the time to replot it:

Quite the difference, no?

Via Catherine Campbell, here are the effective rates by quintile over time as calculated by CBO and plotted using a more conventional starting point of zero:

Not only are those in the top 1% paying more than twice the effective rate of the middle quintile but they’re paying substantially more than those in the top quintile.  And, of course, they’d get zero benefit from the new health care plan whereas those in the bottom quintile.

UPDATE: To be clear, I don’t think that a return to Clinton-level rates wreck the economy or that doing so would be tantamount to socialism.  (See, “Class Warfare: Framing the Debate” for a much longer distillation of my views on that.)   I’m just pointing out that the top 1% has had only a modest cut and still pays a disproportionate share.  It’s one thing to argue that the rich have an ability to pay more and another entirely to argue they have a duty.

In a sidebar discussion via email, Bernard Finel reminds me of a quotation from the fictional Sam on “West Wing” that I’ve used before (See, “Tax Burdens by Quintile” and “Middle Class Tax Cuts“):

Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump, and said, ‘It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share,’ I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid twenty-seven times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of twenty-six other people. And, I’m happy to, ’cause that’s the only way it’s gonna work, and it’s in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads, but I don’t get twenty-seven votes on election day. The fire department doesn’t come to my house twenty-seven times faster and the water doesn’t come out of my faucet twenty-seven times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for twenty-two percent of this country. Let’s not call them names while they’re doing it, is all I’m saying.

While the fictional Sam is more liberal than the actual James, that’s pretty close to where I am as well.  I’d demur on the “happy to” but concede “that’s the only way it’s gonna work, and it’s in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads.”

Willie Sutton famously remarked that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”  I much prefer that rationale to one dressed up in moral obligation.

NOTE: The addition of E.D. Kain’s chart was momentarily UPDATE 2 but I thought it made better sense to insert it directly into the narrative.

Kevin Drum patiently explains to the folks at Townhall and NRO that holding a three day convention in a central location for $1071 a person is far from a boondoogle.

That’s unbelievable.  SSA must have some world class penny-pinching accountants and event planners on their staff.  I doubt there’s a corporation in America that would even try to budget less than two grand a head for something like this.

Considering that said figure includes transportation, meals, entertainment, and whatnot, it is indeed quite the bargain.

One wonders, however, whether the taxpayer got $750,000 worth of value added out of the convention.  What sort of “organizational training” do Social Security Administration managers need that involves dancing, skits, and casino gambling?

This isn’t an anti-government rant, per se.  This sort of thing happens in the private sector all the time and, as already noted, at higher cost.  I’m just generally dubious of retreats, conventions, and the like as productive enterprises.

Photo by Flickr user platinum under Creative Commons license.