Month: December 2010

A map of connectedness:

William Easterly picks up on a couple dark spots:

One interesting pattern is a kind of Facebook Curtain somewhat related to the old Iron Curtain. The whole area including the former Soviet Union and China, along with other adjacent autocracies like Burma and North Korea, is pretty much a Facebook void … This reflects some combination of language barriers, preference for other social networks in Russia and China, and some (rather unclear) role for Internet censorship by the authorities, which either prevents or lowers the payoff to participating in Facebook.

 Thorsten Gaetz remixes the map to highlight these non-Facebook regions.

Bernstein isn't sure where the political advantage lies:

[As a Republican candidate for president, would] you rather risk being attacked for going along with the Obama tax boondoggle that raised the estate tax along with all sorts of new wasteful spending and pork…or would you rather risk being attack for voting for The World's Biggest Tax Increase?

You might think that one can examine the bill itself and some set of principles to determine the proper conservative position.  If so, you would be wrong.  For the relevant value of "conservative" (sorry, Andrew Sullivan), what matters here is what movement conservatives will believe going forward.  That's especially true on something like this, in which there's no obvious reason to believe or way to prove that either a yes or no vote is in favor of lower taxes. 

Sargent has questions:

How hard will the White House press Reid to hold this vote? Will Obama work GOP moderates behind the scenes? And will Reid resolve the remaining procedural issues in a way that removes the final pretext GOP moderates have for opposing the bill? Prediction: Gay rights groups and leading commentators on the left will expect Reid to make this happen, and will be very reluctant to tolerate any efforts to blame Republican obstructionism if it fails.

Allahpundit echoes:

Long story short, anything can happen, but they’re tantalizingly close to finally getting this done. Exit question: After threatening to hold the lame duck session over until January 4th if need be to deal with the START treaty and other business, Reid basically has to bring this bill to the floor now, right? Gay activists aren’t going to accept “we ran out of time” as an excuse.

Sen. Olympia Snowe is onboard:

You never know with those two Maine senators, but if Snowe keeps her commitment, that gives DADT repeal 59 of the 60 votes needed to get past the Republican filibuster. Sens. Scott Brown (R-MA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are the key uncommitted senators at this point.

(Photo: A man wears a shirt during a news conference on December 15, 2010 in Washington, DC. Moments earlier the House voted 250 to 175 to overturn the ban on openly gay and lesbian soldiers serving in the U.S. military. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Don Taylor wants to know (don't we all?):

I don't believe that [Republicans] do have an offense on health reform. That does not mean they don't have ideas, but they are mostly expert in using them to argue against things. I would love to see Paul Ryan's budget committee mark a bill along the lines of his roadmap proposal. I suspect he cannot pass it through his own committee, much less the entire House, but who knows? The default of our health care system with no changes is future fiscal disaster for our country, so we have got to do something. Offense is a whole lot harder than defense…I think the House Republicans owe it to the country to lay out their vision for health reform, and to go on offense. 

Kim Meyers has an idea.

Wilkinson further diagnoses the problem:

In my opinion, the seeming inevitability of Orszag-like migrations points to a potentially fatal tension within the progressive strand of liberal thought.

Progressives laudably seek to oppose injustice by deploying government power as a countervailing force against the imagined oppressive and exploitative tendencies of market institutions. Yet it seems that time and again market institutions find ways to use the government's regulatory and insurer-of-last-resort functions as countervailing forces against their competitors and, in the end, against the very public these functions were meant to protect.

We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism. So it's no surprise that progressives would rather worry over trivialities such as campaign finance reform than dwell on the paradoxes of political power. But it really isn't the Citizens United decision that's about to make Peter Orszag a minor Midas. It's the vast power of a handful of Washington players, with whom Mr Orszag has become relatively intimate, to make or destroy great fortunes more or less at whim.

Tyler Cowen's new article on inequality is getting deserved attention. Money quote:

[T]he inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. To be sure, Gates receives the very best care from the world’s top doctors, but our health outcomes are in the same ballpark. I don’t have a private jet or take luxury vacations, and—I think it is fair to say—my house is much smaller than his. I can’t meet with the world’s elite on demand. Still, by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.

Joyner nods:

While there’s simply no doubt that being wealthy — or even in the comfortable professional upper middle class — allows parents to confer untold advantages to their children, the differences between the well off and the fabulously rich are relatively modest.  Going from making $30,000 to $60,000 in annual salary makes a profound difference.  Doubling it again to $120,000 makes less difference in day-to-day lifestyle but does make nice vacations, private school for the kids, and other luxuries more easily affordable.  Doubling it again to $240,000 may mean a second home and a fancier lifestyle.

But at some point it’s meaningless.  Is Bill Gates living more lavishly than Tiger Woods?

Spurred on by other sections of Cowen's article, Douthat, Drum, and Yglesias debate the political system's inability to control big finance.

Which one is the one with no sleep?

Mike Meno passes along some new statistics:

Marijuana use by 8^th, 10^th and 12^th grade students increased in 2010, with more American teenagers now using marijuana than cigarettes for the second year in a row, according to numbers released today by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan as part of the annual Monitoring the Future survey. In 2010, 21.4 percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the last 30 days, while 19.2 had used cigarettes.

“It’s really no surprise that more American teenagers are using marijuana and continue to say it’s easy to get. Our government has spent decades refusing to regulate marijuana in order to keep it out of the hands of drug dealers who aren’t required to check customer ID and have no qualms about selling marijuana to young people,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. 

Drug dealers not checking ID is a legitimate point to raise. Additionally, many dealers are themselves under-age – as any high school student can attest. One reason teens have such easy access to drugs is because dealers are embedded in their social networks. It's usually easier to ask a peer for a dime-bag than it is to ask an older sibling for a pack of smokes or a six-pack.

A reader writes:

Megan asked, "On a reading of the commerce clause that allows the government to force you to buy insurance from a private company, what can't the government force you to do?"

The government forces you to do stuff all the time – they just use a different label: taxes. 

For example, the government forces you to save for retirement by paying Social Security and Medicare taxes every pay check.  In return you get a pension and reduced rate health care from everyday after you turn 65.

Hypothetically, let's assume that instead of paying a fine for not having insurance, instead you had to pay a tax for not having insurance.  If you have insurance, either this tax doesn't apply to you or you get a refundable tax credit equal to the tax.  In both the hypothetical situation and the ACA's mandate, we accomplish the same thing.  We incentivize having health insurance, though we call each thing a different name.  If one is unconstitutional but the other is not and the only difference is the label we apply to each, then aren't we being overly formalistic?  Should the constitutionality of a law turn on the label the authors of the bill gave it? 

I can see why you would say yes or no, but clearly ACA opponents are not arguing about formalist verse pragmatic statute interpretation; they are engaged in an ideological struggle.

In National Affairs, Daniel Desalvo is taking on public employee unions:

The emergence of powerful public-sector unions was by no means inevitable. Prior to the 1950s, as labor lawyer Ida Klaus remarked in 1965, "the subject of labor relations in public employment could not have meant less to more people, both in and out of government." To the extent that people thought about it, most politicians, labor leaders, economists, and judges opposed collective bargaining in the public sector … 

[Even] F.D.R. believed that "[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable." Roosevelt was hardly alone in holding these views, even among the champions of organized labor. Indeed, the first president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, believed it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government."

I think a key test of future Democratic seriousness with repect to making government work more efficiently will be their attitude toward public sector unions. On education, Obama has made a decent start. But there's far more work to be done.