Month: September 2010

If history is any guide, that is …

Thus spake Cardinal Walter Kasper – the Vatican's "leading expert on relations with the Church of England". He was apparently referring to the country's multicultural and multi-racial evolution. The statement comes as Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the UK. Kasper has now disappeared from the papal entourage for "health reasons."

He was however onto something about the increasingly hostile attitudes in Britain to the public expression of religious faith. But really. How clueless is this Pope's p.r.?

One thing that still staggers me about the Dems (which is why I still feel so much contempt for that party). Why do they expect people to support something when they never make the case for it? You can listen very hard and not hear anyone defending the biggest shift in social legislation in a decade. Are they not proud of it? Or just, as usual, paralyzed by fear and political incompetence?

The pioneer of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" has been forced into the equivalent of a witness protection program, on the advice of the FBI.

Adam Ozimek revisits a never-ending debate:

If someone making $250,000 doesn’t feel rich in Manhattan then they can just move to Queens and feel rich. In fact in most cities there are neighborhoods with really expensive homes less than a mile from neighborhoods with really cheap homes. It would be nonsense for someone living in a $2,000 a month condo they can barely afford and shopping at the expensive local grocery store to say they aren’t rich because their costs are high relative to their $70,000 a year income. They’re simply consuming an expensive neighborhood as an amenity to their home. Note this can be true at the county level as well.

Rauch looks at the structure of the tea parties:

In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on so large a scale. Tea party activists believe that their hivelike, “organized but not organized” (as one calls it) structure is their signal innovation and secret weapon, the key to outlasting and outmaneuvering traditional political organizations and interest groups. They intend to rewrite the rule book for political organizing, turning decades of established practice upside down. If they succeed, or even half succeed, the tea party’s most important legacy may be organizational, not political.

(Hat tip: Reihan)

Josh Barro is wary of combining tax reform with fiscal measures to fix the deficit:

I think tax reform becomes even harder to sell if you combine it with a fiscal adjustment on either side of the ledger: you have to simultaneously sell people the idea that they will pay strange new taxes and that they will pay more and/or get less. I think there is a good reason that the 1985 Social Security reforms (which started a rise in retirement ages and raised the payroll tax) and the 1986 Tax Reform Act (an essentially revenue-neutral reform that cut rates and expanded the tax base) were handled separately.

But that required some kind of bipartisan cooperation. We have a president who could pull this off. But a GOP?

A reader writes:

The Tea Partiers were created by Republicans.

They devolved.

They rebelled.

They look and feel like Republicans.

There are many copies.

And they have a plan. (Maybe)

James Surowiecki's guess:

Paradoxically, the very things that made the stimulus more effective economically may have made it less popular politically. For instance, because research has shown that lump-sum tax refunds get hoarded rather than spent, the government decided not to give individuals their tax cuts all at once, instead refunding a little on each paycheck. The tactic was successful at increasing consumer demand, but it had a big political cost: many voters never noticed that they were getting a tax cut. …  Bizarre as it may seem, a less well-designed stimulus might have been more popular, and that would have made it easier for Obama to sell the electorate on his new stimulus proposals. But, given the scope and depth of the recession, it’s also likely that any stimulus would have become a political albatross.

In the end, good governance must be good politics. I have not given up.