Month: April 2011

Kevin Drum, weary from his tax-battle with McArdle, provides a back-of-the-envelope tax plan. He "took the deficit reductions in the Rivlin-Domenici plan and converted them into one-third spending cuts and two-thirds tax hikes." The basics:

The poorest don't get hit at all. The 2nd quintile has to pay an additional 2% of their income in taxes. The middle quintile pays an additional 3% of their income. All the way to the top 1%, who pay an additional 12% of their income. All of this adds up to 7% of total national income.

Remember, this is only the tax half of the deficit plan. To make the numbers come out, you'd also need spending cuts amounting to about half of the tax increases.

He writes that the plan, while very rough, "does show that if we rein in the deficit with a 2:1 ratio of tax hikes to spending cuts, the tax increases can still be quite manageable."

David P. Redlawsk explains it:

The reality is that “facts” are unlikely to mean much to those who believe in their gut that Obama is not American. Political psychologists call this “motivated reasoning.” It goes something like this: I dislike someone; I learn something positive that should make me feel better about him; instead, I dislike him as much or even more. This is clearly irrational, but our feelings about people are complicated, and we tend to hold on to them even in the face of contradictory information. This is not unique to those who dislike Obama.

We are all somewhat impervious to new information, preferring the beliefs in which we are already invested. We often ignore new contradictory information, actively argue against it or discount its source, all in an effort to maintain existing evaluations. Reasoning away contradictions this way is psychologically easier than revising our feelings. In this sense, our emotions color how we perceive “facts.”

They do; and it's important always to keep this in mind. But there remains something called fact, rather than "fact", and empiricism is our only real recourse in public debate. That's why producing a birth certificate is dispositive. It should end the discussion. I might add that merely asking a presidential candidate to produce such a certificate does not seem illegitimate to me. It may be maddening or unfair. But that's the price of public life. And the sign of a mature politician is his or her ability to see that and allow the ethic of transparency trump the humiliation of exposure. Obama easily passed this test.

Will Wilkinson counters me:

[W]e obviously cannot (and therefore are not required morally to) intervene to prevent suffering and death everywhere. We have to pick our battles, so to speak. But then the argument for any particular instance of going big and then spending the next several decades putting Humpty together again requires a supporting argument that this is would be a relatively good use of our limited resources, if not the best use. I don’t believe I’ve heard any such argument, much less a persuasive version of it. Unless Mr Sullivan knows of one, I think he’s wrong to think non-intervention in Libya would have been “morally dirty”. Indeed, my suspicion is that awkwardly and apprehensively prolonging the Libyan civil war—which is the path we appear to be mission-creeping down—is not only the most strategically muddled but also the morally dirtiest of all our options.

I think we can now see that prolonging this civil war may actually have turned out to be morally dirtier than refusing to intervene. But Obama could not have known that at the time and given his choices, I think it’s fair to say he picked the less morally troubling but more politically foolish option. As for the question of whether it’s a fallacy to say that because you cannot intervene everywhere you should not intervene anywhere, I’d put it another way.

Once you have intervened in one situation, the question will inevitably emerge as to why you don’t in another close-to-equivalent situation. At some point, you’ll give in. And so the Libyan intervention marked a high water-mark – since Somalia – of purely humanitarian war. It lays down a marker which begs to be equaled or exceeded.

The lesson learned from Somalia, apparently, is never to let an American soldier go there. And so we send drones. Which, as David Ignatius notes, are arguably the most counter-productive weapon in the battle to win over Arab opinion that we may have. It may be that this escalation is the best option we currently have to keep the possibility of Qaddafi giving up alive, as Tom Ricks notes. I certainly hope so. But if drones don’t do it, what then?

The problem with some clear moral choices to intervene is that they lead to far muddier, sometimes counter-productive and immoral choices later.

Steve Kornacki says it wasn’t because of Trig:

Palin stood out — for reasons that had nothing to do with her new child. She was adamantly pro-life, with or without the Trig story, and her other social issue positions were all in line with the GOP base. She was avowedly Christian, further increasing her potential appeal to the base that didn’t trust John McCain. And she had — or seemed to have — the sort of “maverick” credentials that McCain was eager to stress in the fall campaign.

I don’t disagree with this, but, of course, it’s a straw man. I don’t know anyone who has said that the only or primary reason that McCain picked Palin was her child with Down Syndrome. Given the chaotic nature of the choice, all you can really say is that it was reckless and what my shrink would call “multi-determined”. But I do agree with Kornacki that one aspect to the pick was that she “was avowedly Christian, further increasing her potential appeal to the base that didn’t trust John McCain.” But surely, by far the most telling example of her Christianity – the thing that differentiated her clearly from other pro-lifers – is that she walked the walk on abortion, exemplified by the birth of Trig. And that remains true.

Why else would Palin bring her newborn into such early and excessive public exposure? Why else keep bringing him into the glare of the public eye even during a book tour? It’s perfectly possible that McCain knew this about her, liked it, but that Palin is the figure who made the most out of it – and always saw it as political gold.

And she is and was not wrong. This was not even that controversial a view in the beginning, before the “referees” established that “deference” was the appropriate role for the media in dealing with this issue. To cite a couple of early reactions. Tim Shriver:

We already know that John McCain is pro-life while Obama is pro-choice but there’s a new factor: Trig Paxson Van Palin, the infant son of the governor, who has Down syndrome. Trig could be a game changer.

George Packer:

[McCain] gambled, all right, but it was in the direction of orthodoxy—for Palin is a creature and an icon of the Republicans’ evangelical base, which came into full possession of the Party this week and completed the G.O.P.’s conversion to identity politics.

Tyler Cowen:

There is one biographical fact about Palin’s life that the critics (Drum, DeLong, Yglesias, Klein, Sullivan and Kleiman are among the ones I read) are hardly touching upon.  I mean her decision to have a Downs child instead of an abortion.  This is the fact about her life and it will be viewed as such from now through November and perhaps beyond.

Tyler was right. What matters is not what McCain believed but what Palin did. Even so, there’s no question that the McCain campaign played up the Trig angle from the get-go. They knew what they were doing. And it worked.

Ben Smith searches "for a good analogue to the willingness of Republicans to believe, or say they believe, that Obama was born abroad." He digs up an old poll:

More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks.

Check out McCain strutting around in Benghazi. And breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Annie Lowrey imagines the consequences – a massive run on treasuries:

Within 72 hours, Congress has a deal on President Obama's desk, raising the ceiling to $16 trillion in exchange for balanced budgets to take effect in fiscal-year 2015 and some serious cuts now. Treasury starts issuing new bonds and making all payments on existing ones. But the market panic requires the Federal Reserve to reboot its emergency programs, disrupts the housing market, permanently raises the United States' borrowing costs, reshapes the world bond market, and shaves more than a percentage point off GDP growth—enough to throw the economy back into recession. Globally, investors no longer consider the dollar the reserve currency of choice.

Scott Adams endorses Trump… for pulling the ultimate prank:

Normally I wouldn't call out a prankster while the prank is in play. But this is a special case because the people who think he's serious have made up their minds. In order for them to accept that this is a prank, they'd have to accept that they can't tell the difference between a real candidate and one who is yanking their chains. Brains are not wired for that sort of 180 turn. In the history of humankind, no one has ever said, "I thought I was a brilliant observer of politics but this new information proves that my brain is the size of a tiny mouse turd." Trump's prank literally can't be exposed by anyone but him.

And that's why it's serious.

(Map via I Love Charts)