Month: January 2012

There was such a flurry of Dish activity surrounding the speech last night we decided to take stock. Live-blog link here. My takeaway:

I was hoping for a vision. I was hoping for real, strategic reform. What we got was one big blizzard of tax deductions, wrapped in a populist cloak. It was treading water. I suspect this will buoy liberal spirits, but anger the right and befuddle the independents. It definitely gives the Republican case against Obama as a big government meddler more credibility. I may be wrong – but the sheer cramped, tedious, mediocre micro-policies he listed were uninspiring to say the least.

Readers pushed back here, here, here and here. One of them queried:

What crawled up your ass and died tonight? After consistently advocating the long view of Obama's politics, you can't recognize a tactical campaign speech when you see one? The laundry list of promises was vintage Clinton (a guy who did pert dang well amongst indies), it threw red meat to a dispirited base, and it consistently undercut the GOP case against him as an anti-American anti-jobs socialist.

I reiterated my disappointed with the speech:

[S]eeing the tax code littered with a thousand more populist meddles is not what this Obamacon hoped for. And if he gets a governing majority, we would get more of that? That's my fear.

My take on Mitch Daniels' SOTU response:

It was that rare event when the GOP response surpassed the actual State of the Union. It was what a sane Republican critique of this presidency would be. … [H]e outclassed the man who just left the stage. If I were merely presented de novo between Daniels' speech and Obama's, I would vote for Daniels.

Blogger reax on Obama's address here. Lastly, some pre-SOTU criticism of the president on Bowles-Simpson:

As it is, Obama really doesn't want the steep defense cuts that Republican Alan Simpson wants. And in a sane world, conservatives would be attacking him for this overweening bloat. But my real suspicion is that Obama does not believe he can defeat the special interests that would attack Bowles-Simpson. Look at how he cites business leaders whining about taxing income and dividends at the same level. He doesn't want to take them on. But why not? Fighting for a level playing field in taxation is a good thing – as policy and politics.

The Colbert Report kindly gave me a really nice hotel overnight in NYC. My breakfast from room service was a triple latte, orange juice and oatmeal. $68. Starbucks is across the street, dammit.

Bruce Bartlett on the blizzard of new complexities and gimmicks Obama said he wants to add to the tax code last night:

He wants a special deduction available only to companies engaged in manufacturing to be doubled, but most tax specialists think this should just be abolished. He’s in favor of extending a tuition tax credit, which mostly gets capitalised into higher tuition fees and does little to improve access to higher education for middle class families. There’s also special tax relief for small businesses “that are raising wages and creating good jobs” that he wants to introduce even though no one knows how to target such incentives and past efforts have failed. Finally, he would like a new tax credit for “clean energy” and tax credits for companies hiring military veterans.

At the same time, Mr Obama proposes a variety of gimmicky new tax penalties, to punish companies that move jobs overseas for example. He wants to force every US-based multinational corporation to pay a minimum tax, and made individuals earning at least $1m per year to pay at least 30 per cent of their income in tax.

In a word: bullshit that distorts the market economy and is designed purely for pandering.

"This is a Clinton style SOTU: writers will hate it, listeners are loving it … 'Corny? Of course it's corny!'" – David Frum. His full reax is here.

Buzzfeed Politics isn't sure that the RNC ad below is "exactly an attack," but it's one reason I hate State of the Union addresses. They're a list, and the list gets repackaged every year:

J.J. Goldberg is perplexed by the neocon freakout:

Worst president Israel has ever faced? Dwight Eisenhower kept aid to a minimum, kept Israel at arms length and forced Israel to give up the ground it won in the 1956 Sinai Campaign without negotiating a quid pro quo. Gerald Ford explicitly blamed Israeli “stalling” for a breakdown in peace talks in 1975—something Obama has never done—and ordered a six-month “reassessment” of Middle East policy, which translated into a suspension of aid and military assistance, until Israel was bludgeoned into submission. George H.W. Bush clashed openly with Israel more frequently and more bitterly than any of his predecessors, to the point where he once called a nationally televised press conference to attack American Jewish volunteer activists who had come to Washington for a day to advocate for Soviet Jewish resettlement assistance.

Matt Stroud weighs the merits of "wet shelters" such as Seattle's 1811 Eastlake, where drinking isn't prohibited:

On the street, [1811 Eastlake administrator Bill Hobson] says, "these people have a 5 percent chance of survival." And furthermore, he says, when they’re out on the street, these folks end up in the emergency room, get picked up by police and often end up in jail, costing taxpayers money. He points to an April 2009 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that says the chronically alcoholic homeless people cost the city of Seattle two-thirds less housed in Eastlake than they do out on the street.

Maia Szalavitz underscores the benefits of wet shelters:

The homeless residents in the study cut the number of drinks they consumed daily by 40% over the course of two years in a home that did not require abstinence. Moreover, for every three months of their stay, participants consumed eight fewer drinks on average on their heaviest drinking days. The occurrence of delirium tremens, or DTs — potentially life-threatening withdrawal symptoms — also declined by more than half, with 65% of residents reporting suffering DTs in the month before being housed, compared with just 23% in the month afterward.

(Photo: A homeless man lies on his back a grille in a Paris street on January 13, 2012. By JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images)

Bryan Caplan runs through eight reasons we see the My Lai massacre as a war crime but believe nuking Hiroshima was justified. His conclusion:

The soldiers in My Lai murdered people they could see face-to-face.  The crew of the Enola Gay dropped a bomb from a high distance and flew away. Needless to say, if [this is] the true explanation…either Hiroshima was a war crime, or My Lai wasn't.  

Jason Kuznicki broadens the argument:

A parallel reasoning also explains why Michael Vick became a national pariah, while the meat industry went unaffected.  Whatever you think about animal rights — and I’m personally a skeptic — the inconsistency remains.  It’s likely due to our varied intuitions about near and far acts of violence.  And, because I can’t resist some shameless self-promotion, this month’s Cato Unbound is highly relevant as well.

David Friedman tentatively makes it: 

Faced with a congress controlled by the other party, a substantial minority of it in favor of a sharp reduction in government expenditure and regulation, [Obama] might well decide that his best strategy is to outflank the Republicans on the right. He has already made a few gestures in that direction, in rhetoric if not yet in substance.

That could, of course, mean being even more willing than they are to reduce liberty in the name of fighting terrorism. But it could also mean trying to reduce government expenditure and regulation wherever doing so is not too politically expensive—most obviously the military, which Romney is quite unlikely to cut, but perhaps in other areas as well. And it is at least possible, although not likely, that if the Republicans do not learn from the lesson Ron Paul is teaching, Obama will, that he will conclude that a shift in a libertarian direction somewhere, perhaps drugs or foreign policy, is a sensible tactic to create a Democratic majority.