Month: November 2010

A conservative fan says he isn’t unique:

I knew other NPR listeners in rural Nebraska: electrical journeymen, shop keepers, school teachers. They noticed NPR’s political and religious blind spots. But they appreciated its consistent effort to put policy before personality and substance before scandal. I am not sure if these virtues are conservative, but the people who valued them were.

Attempts to spot and highlight media bias have, I think, caused us to overestimate its importance in media coverage. Say one station is biased but offers otherwise excellent content while another is unbiased but does spotty and shoddy reporting. Any person willing to expend a little effort in listening can simply ignore the bias and take in the good content, though he may find it necessary to occasionally shake his fist at the radio. Rural Americans are no more susceptible to being buffaloed by liberal bias than their suburban or urban counterparts.

I endorsed "raising the early retirement age for eligibility for social security from 62 to 65. " Ezra Klein says I'm experiencing Elite Blindness:

Though I agree with Sullivan that this is, at least, a serious idea for reducing the deficit, count me out. … Biggs quotes evidence showing that health has improved among elderly Americans, and jobs have grown less physically demanding, since Social Security was founded. That's true, but it's also true that America is much richer than it once was. Adjusting for inflation, our gross domestic product in 1935 was $865 billion. In 2009, it was more than $12 trillion.

Leisure time at the end of life is something we can buy.

The question is whether we want it. Elites don't, and so raising the retirement age is very popular among them. They — or maybe I should say we — want to work until 70, and 75, and 85. It's a painless reform for us, and so we've convinced ourselves it's a painless reform for most people. Conversely, we don't want to raise taxes on ourselves, and so you don't hear much about lifting the cap on the payroll tax that funds Social Security. But, funnily enough, when you pose the question to Americans, they see it differently: They don't like taxes, but benefit cuts are much less popular. And notice that that poll question doesn't even note that the relevant tax would mainly hit wealthier Americans. 

Karl Smith chews on the following from the NYT:

Nearly a quarter of South Korean men over 75 are still in the labor force, as are 14 percent of Japanese men. In the United States, a 10th of such men are working or seeking work, compared with half of 1 percent in France.

Put another way, a Korean man over 75 is more likely to be working than a Frenchman in his early 60s.

 

A reader writes:

I see that you have put up a link to Bill Maher's HBO program without acknowledging the virulent and bigoted anti-Muslim comments he made – comments that put the controversial words of Juan Williams into the category of benign. Why no criticism of Maher's comments, at least equal to the overblown remarks that you made about those of Williams? I gather it is safe to assume that you will continue to appear on Maher's program.

I missed that, but upon viewing it, it appears that Maher made a stupid, and bigoted generalization about English babies being called Mohammed leading to some inevitable future of Sharia law – an unproven fantasy nicely smacked down by Reihan. The obvious logical problem: why wouldn't second or third generation British Mohammeds turn out as atheists? Or stoners? Or agnostics like the rest of them?

Should HBO fire him for being mean about a religion?

Well, that's their choice not mine, as with NPR. But if it was only one religion, and if it wasn't related to any actual fact (like, the notion that people in traditional Muslim garb have a record of blowing up airplanes), and if it wasn't a comedy show, HBO might have to ponder a little. But opposing Sharia law is not the same as assuming that every devout Muslim might be a terrorist; and everyone knows that Maher's just as vicious about Catholics and Jews and Buddhists and anyone with a religious mindset. So it's not prejudice against a specific religion for him, but for all of them. It's anti-faith; not anti-Muslim as such. And it's not directed at adult fellow citizens as if they were all guilty of mass murder until proven innocent.

Andrew Samwick sides with Biggs:

The core program is for Old Age and Survivors Insurance.  None of the ages being discussed – 62, 65, 67, even 70 when all age-related aspects of the program max out – constitute old age.  What matters for the effectiveness of Social Security as an insurance program is whether it keeps the truly old – think age 85 and almost certainly unable to work – out of poverty. 

Another important point:

Social Security includes not just the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance but a Disability Insurance program as well.  The DI program enables workers to leave the workforce and claim benefits immediately and without the reductions to benefits that are applied for early eligibility.  The DI rolls have been increasing over the past couple of decades.  The counterpart to DI in many Western European countries already serves as a de facto early retirement program.  And the pressures on DI are likely to increase as the new health care law becomes operational – particularly, the parts of that law that make health insurance more widely available for older workers outside of employment relationships.  If you trust the DI application process to get unreduced benefits to those who are unable to work (and not to those who are able), then you should be less concerned about raising the [Social Security Earliest Eligibility Age (EEA)].

So says an academic who specializes in the Founding era. She is profiled by Craig Fehrman here:

Academic historians rarely mix it up with modern political movements. They even more rarely do so by walking into Boston bars, notebook in hand, and interviewing local Tea Partiers. But that’s what Lepore did — first for a long story in The New Yorker, where she is also a staff writer, and now in “The Whites of Their Eyes.” What she found, and what she dedicates much of her book to arguing, is that the “Tea Party’s Revolution…wasn’t just kooky history; it was antihistory.”

Lepore admits that the Tea Party movement belongs to a long tradition of squabbling over the Revolution’s meaning, a tradition that began before the Revolution had even ended and continued through the Civil War, the Civil Rights debate, and up to today. But the Tea Party has outdone its predecessors on both the left and the right, Lepore suggests, in fashioning a nostalgic and inflexible version of that history. The Tea Party simplifies the Founding Fathers — it turns them into an orderly (and angelic) choir when, in fact, they were a confusing and contradictory group. And Lepore sees this as an error not just of historical fact, but also of historical method. “The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect,” she writes. “Reverence just doesn’t enter into it.”

Chait argues that elections are mostly about fundamentals. Andrew Gelman counters that the party in power has some control over said fundamentals:

I think it's perfectly reasonable for liberals to interpret some of the current state of the economy, and thus the predicted election outcome, to "timid policies by the Democrats." That's what Krugman is saying every day. Similarly, why shouldn't conservatives think that the current economic doldrums are partly explained by the Democrats' policies, from regulation to stimulus to health care? Republicans have been making this argument for awhile, that these activist government policies are counterproductive.

I fail to see how a stimulus-free 2009 would have helped lower unemployment by now. It seems to me that even the purists concede it would have meant a free-fall, but argue it would have been worth it in the long run. Seems like a huge human cost for the admittedly important principle of moral hazard to me, and one no actual president of either party would have considered. Kevin Drum is worth reading on the electoral repercussions if Krugman had had his way and Fox News was actually accurate about the "radical leftism" of the current administration:

• The actual stimulus bill that was passed in Feburary 2009 amounted to about $800 billion. The biggest bill anyone was talking about at the time was $1.2 trillion. That's 50% bigger, and presumably would have been about 50% more effective.
• For calendar 2010, CBO estimates that the stimulus bill reduced unemployment by something between 0.7 and 1.8 points. Split the difference and the consensus average is about 1.2 points. A stimulus bill that was 50% bigger would therefore probably have reduced unemployment by 0.6 points more than the actual bill.

If this is in the ballpark, it means that with a bigger stimulus bill unemployment today would be 9%, not 9.6%. That would have been well worth the price, but just because it was worth doing doesn't mean it would have made a big electoral difference.

While trying to make sense of David Broder's economic theories, Ryan Avent's head hits the desk:

Either Mr Broder thinks that Iran will take a war effort on a par with that for World War II, in which case we might expect him to be a little more sceptical about just whether or not an Iran attack is a good idea (lots of Americans died in World War II!). Or he's not actually relying on the extent of spending to dig America out of its weak recovery, but instead is imagining war preparations as something like a light switch—on means the economy grows, off not. But if that's all it is, then why not declare war on some uninhabited island somewhere? Or the moon? Or, you know, ignorance? Then maybe fewer people would be killed!

Larison imagines how the GOP would actually react to war with Iran (does anyone still think they are in any way serious about national security?):

Obama has given the hawks all they could want in Afghanistan, but that has not stopped them from railing against him as the second coming of Jimmy Carter because he set a withdrawal deadline. If Obama claimed that Iran was about to construct a nuclear device, Republican hawks would react in a few different ways, and none of them would help Obama politically. Many would formally support the military action, but they would happily attack Obama in the process. Some would berate Obama for having let things get to this point, and they would actually blame him for having previously “failed” to stop it. Despite having spent decades fretting about Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons, they would pin an Iranian bomb solely on Obama, whose alleged weakness and “appeasement” invited the Iranian threat. McCain would be all over cable television saying something like, “This is what happens when you try to engage with dictatorships. Our military is paying the price for the President’s failed leadership.” No doubt they would throw in some added shots at his Israel and Afghanistan decisions in the process. “While Obama was wasting our resources on nation-building in Afghanistan, the real threat was gathering in Iran,” they would tell us. It won’t matter if this is consistent with their own previous statements or not. 

"If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking, “God, I’ve got to get my rocks off”, or they’d go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush. ‘It doesn’t happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it… I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want. Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, “Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!” But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?" – Stephen Fry. And I know it's accurate because I read it in the Daily Mail.