Month: February 2010

Annie Lowrey counters David Roodman:

I think Roodman underplays the impact of debt payments on Haitian government spending. Sure, aid and remittances will dwarf debt payments next year. But why should the country have to worry about them at all — ever, even 10 years from now, when Haiti will likely be stable and poor?

I made another chart from data from Haiti’s budget. (The Port-au-Prince government, it turns out, posts its budget documents online.) Last year, it shows, Haiti spent around $37 million servicing its debt. (I looked up the numbers in Haitian Gourdes, and performed a current-day currency conversion — note that the currency has cratered recently.) That’s more than the government spent, say, on agriculture — despite the fact that a massive proportion of Haitians are subsistence farmers. It’s more than it spent on its ministry of tourism, despite the fact that tourists once posed the best way for Haiti to bolster its economy in the short term. Had Haiti not had to repay external debt, it could have boosted its education budget by nearly a third.

Larison nitpicks me. I stand by my fundamental point.

Greg Ip looks at the new budget projections:

$2 trillion gone, with nothing to show for it: no new tax cuts, no new domestic programmes, not even new bail-outs: just gone because the economy is delivering up less tax revenue than Mr Obama anticipated a month after taking office.

The New York Times has an interactive chart (screen-grab above) showing how rarely budget forecasts correspond with reality. Ezra:

The dark line is the deficit, while the silver threads shooting are forecasts. As you can see, what forecasters do is extend the current trends. When something happens to break that trend — a massive financial crisis, say — they're generally caught unawares. Which is as you'd expect. If they knew a crash was coming, they'd be making money betting against the market, not running budget models.

And the reverse is also true as well. Beyond a certain point, you can get surprised on the upside as well. And we still don't know the future of this recovery for sure.

Hitch reviews B.R. Myers' The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters:

[A] North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people. But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

Gautham Nagesh points out an inconvenient truth for proponents of DADT:

[A] Military Times poll in December 2008 found that 58 percent of U.S. troops do not want gays to serve openly in the armed forces. Ten percent of respondents said they would leave the armed forces if the ban were lifted and 14 percent said they would consider doing so. Polls of soldiers in the United Kingdom similarly found that as many as two-thirds of soldiers said they would consider leaving the service if gays were allowed in, but the British military reported that very few soldiers actually chose to depart when the ban was lifted in 2000.

And just as few gay soldiers actually came out in the ranks. The closet will remain the norm for a while – but without the threat of persecution and the taint of dishonesty as a condition for service.

This, in my view, is the ultimate reality behind all this: when the ban is lifted, it will be the biggest non-event you can imagine.

Michelle Cottle, as a "protective parent," wishes the Tebow ad wouldn't air:

[I]f many Americans indeed hold to this notion of the Super Bowl as more-or-less family-friendly, then it really isn’t an appropriate venue for any ad that talks about abortion—or any other seriously sexual topic. Not date rape. Not child porn. Not international sex trafficking. Grading on a curve, a split-second peek at [Janet Jackson]’s boob, while utterly tasteless, isn’t that hard to wave off with kids in the room; an ad that specifically aims to provoke discussion by focusing, no matter how cheerily, on a woman’s high-stakes decision about whether or not to terminate her pregnancy opens up a darker, more complicated can of worms.

Massie agrees with Reihan:

Messaging matters in politics, but so does timing. Suppose the Republican leadership had worked with the White House this past year to craft a health care bill that, though opposed by both the purer elements of both right and left, could pass the House and Senate; suppose too that this bill actually worked. Who gets the credit for that? Not the Republican party or Republican candidates across the country, that's who. No, it would be the President's triumph and his alone.

(I'm assuming, for the sake of this argument that the bill would have covered 30m Americans, controlled or lowered costs etc.) It's Obama who would have reaped the electoral rewards from this process. So what, rationally, does it profit the Republican party to help him achieve that aim?

You might argue that this is a form of political nihilism or that it's putting party before the national interest and you might well have a point. But the country is, much of the time, a secondary concern. Parties exist to win elections and then – and only then – take measures they believe are in the national interest. Helping the other mob win isn't part of their brief.

If this is truly the case, and if the GOP is prepared to use a filibuster to prevent any change, then we basically have a pattern in which the only changes to the Bush-Cheney disaster would be to move the republic to even more extreme "right" positions: national bankruptcy because of endless entitlements, soaring health costs and ever-expanding and costly empire.

I do not believe that, given the fiscal and healthcare crisis we are in, that we should simply surrender to the basest impulses of partisanship. And I believe that was the core message of the Obama candidacy. And if this opportunity is simply thrown away, the bitterness will deepen, the polarization will widen, the public cynicism will explode and the country will truly pass the point of no return on its core and pressing problems. 

And when good folks like Reihan and Alex simply endorse all this, it's enough to make one despair.