Month: December 2012

As we near the fiscal cliff, as Egypt's democracy hangs in the balance, as Syria's chemical weapons look vulnerable, and as the Republicans get nuttier … well, this cheered me up – and might cheer you up too in this rather bleak pre-Christmas period:

Hertzberg wants a carbon tax to fund entitlements:

By all means let’s have a stiff carbon tax—a whole carbon-tax package, one that folds in levies on other pollutants and on the wasteful or dangerous use of natural resources in general. And, at the same time, let’s make the carbon tax the source of the [Social Security and Medicare] trust fund. Call it the Dignity for Seniors tax, because that’s what it would provide. Or the National Patrimony tax, because that’s what it would preserve. Or the Social and National Security tax, because it would underwrite both kinds.

Kolbert and Frum also recently advocated for a carbon tax.

Mitt Romney rockin’ a tire at Disneyland’s California Adventure. #romney #disneyland twitter.com/stansell/statu…

— Stansell (@stansell) November 20, 2012

Alec MacGillis notes that every “few days brings a new snapshot of Romney apres la defaite for us to seize on and pass around.” He connects the popularity of these pictures to “our fascination with fate”:

Put bluntly, it’s rare in this day and age for us to witness a divergence of outcome as radical as what has just occurred with Mitt Romney. Here was a man who was awfully close—if not as close as he thought—to being elected leader of the free world. If a few hundred thousand votes had swung a different way in a few key states, he would have been presiding over the reshaping of the American tax code and federal budget in the year to come, dismantling the biggest piece of domestic policy legislation in more than three decades, and taking the reins on confronting Iran’s mullahs. A special Secret Service team—code-name Hawkeye Javelin—was standing by on Election Night in Boston to swoop in and supplement protection for the president-elect. Instead, the agents melted away, and Romney was driven home by his son Tagg.

Will Wilkinson wants Obama to set guidelines for drone use:

Establishing truly general, and thus potentially morally justifiable, “rules of engagement” for drone attacks is urgent for a rather more important reason than the possibility that a less enlightened politician might come to power: America’s conduct sets an example for the world. As this newspaper noted earlier this month, “Staying true to America’s principles is one worry. Providing a template for other countries is another. China and Russia have similar technologies but their own ideas about what constitutes terrorism.”

He goes on:

The question Americans need to put to ourselves is whether we would mind if China or Russia or Iran or Pakistan were to be guided by the Obama administration’s sketchy rulebook in their drone campaigns. 

Some new data (pdf) pushing back against Kleiman. The Economist's YouGov poll finds 51 percent of Americans want marijuana to be legal, compared with only 36 against. We kinda know that the polls have to be over 50 in a state for legalization to happen. So nationally, we are at exactly that tipping point – where marriage equality used to be, oh, a whole year ago.

And if you doubt Prohibition is ending, just look at the small print. The 30 – 44 age group backs legalization by 60 – 21 percent, slightly more than the under-30s. What's holding us all back is the over-65 cohort who oppose it by 58 – 24 percent. And the biggest surprise? The lowest income brackets support it the most; and even in the South, there is a plurality for legalization: 46 – 41 percent.

When so many are ruined and thrown in jail for something that harms no one else for a "crime" a majority of the country thinks should be legal, why is there no one in our political system in Washington prepared even to talk about the subject? Who are these people supposedly representing us?

As births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 hit the lowest point on record, Douthat worries about "cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change":

The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Bouie cringes at Douthat's "hostility to the entire modern project of human flourishing at the cost of traditional obligations":

The simple fact is that it’s only been in the last century that a substantial number of ordinary people have been been able to build decent lives free of severe hardship. … That is especially true for women, who seem to be the chief target of Douthat’s disdain.

Douthat defends himself against such criticisms:

[I]f we have moral obligations to future, as-yet-unborn generations, as almost everyone seems to agree, surely those duties have to include some obligation for somebody to bring those generations into existence in the first place — to imitate the sacrifices that our parents made, and give another generation the chances that we’ve had? And if that basic obligation exists in some form, then surely there comes a point when a culture in which it’s crowded out by other goals, other pursuits and yes, other pleasures can be aptly described as … what’s the word I’m looking for …decadent?

Meanwhile, the Population Reference Bureau's Carl Haub explains that the US's birth rate isn't collapsing. Haub recommends looking at the total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of babies a women has in her lifetime – which hit 1.89 in 2011, up from 1.74 in 1976:

The TFR is "blind"—unaffected by age structure—and in showing the implied number of children women would have at today’s rate, is directly comparable over the years: apples to apples. This may be a tad confusing, but consider this: If the pace of childbearing were the same today as it was in 1976, the U.S. would have had 3.7 million births instead of the 3.9 million it did have. Why choose 1976? Because that was the year the TFR was the lowest in U.S. history and it still is. Not 2011.

Stephen Bronars, who provides the above chart, adds:

The total fertility rate has consistently underestimated the number of children ever born at times when young women are delaying childbearing longer than women from earlier birth cohorts … Although women age 15-19 and 20-24 today may have lower fertility rates than their older sisters and mothers had at the same age, they are also likely to give birth to more children in their thirties and forties than their older sisters and mothers did.

So does that mean that the US doesn't face a population problem? No – but it's a different one, argues Noah Millman. He says the real source of potential economic imbalance is our increasingly long lives:

The biggest problem Japan has is that they have too many old people. This is partly a function of rapidly-rising longevity, which cannot be solved by increasing fertility. … The problem of longevity can only be solved either by extending one’s working life beyond historic norms, or by advances in productivity that make it possible to maintain a large dependent population on a smaller workforce, or by reduced overall standards of living.

I have more faith in human beings and our adaptability than Ross has, although his concerns are obviously in good faith. (The difference between a conservative and a reactionary is that for the conservative, human beings always have some kind of adaptable future. Reactionaries see only a cultural collapse.) I'd add one thought experiment to explain what Ross rightly sees as a universal decline in reproduction as wealth accumulates. Perhaps we are collectively realizing that with our civilization becoming environmentally unsustainable, the only way forward is with a lower global population of human beings. Given the destructive carbon everyone of us emits, it's actually part of caring about the future that birth rates are declining. This may be a by-product of a civilization structured around material well-being; it may also be a safety valve.

Despite ACORN no longer existing, a PPP poll found that "49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama." Bouie doesn't buy it:

Kevin Drum calls this evidence of the “Fox News effect”—the process by which conservative propaganda outlets convince their viewers of things that just aren’t true—but I think there’s a better, more charitable explanation. In short, a large number of Republicans don’t like President Obama, and when offered a chance to endorse something that signals that dislike, they did it, even if the “something” is absolutely insane.

The one sliver of sanity in the poll is that Republicans have begun to turn on Grover Norquist:

Even among Republicans just 18% see him positively, while 23% have an unfavorable view. Only 23% of voters think it's important for politicians to follow Norquist's tax pledge to 39% who think it's not important and 38% who don't have an opinion.

But, in general, the poll confirms the durable minority Karl Rove and Roger Ailes have successfully created: paranoid, delusional, all-white, older, intransigent, and anti-American. Yes, 44 percent of Republicans either want their state to secede from the US or aren't sure whether it should. The good news is that the ranks of Republicans are thinning. The bad news is that these fanatics control one party which can hold the entire country and world to ransom.

Maybe it will have to get even worse before it starts to get even a little bit better.

(Photo: Motala, age 50, rests in the afternoon sun with the new prosthetic made for her at the Friends of the Asian Elephant (FAE) elephant hospital in the Mae Yao National Reserve August 29, 2011 Lampang,Thailand. By Paula Bronstein/Getty.)

 

Read Alex Massie’s blog here and his recent writing on Scotland’s independence here. Watch his previous videos here, here, here, here and here.

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold," – blue_beetle.

Keegan Hamilton is skeptical that marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington will seriously weaken Mexican cartels:

Not only have the cartels diversified their portfolios (to borrow language applied to other multinational, multibillion dollar operations); the Mexican suppliers have already been edged out of the local markets in the two new green states. …

The only way cartels will be seriously affected by the new pot laws, according to the Mexican Center for Competitiveness, is if Washington and Colorado's legal weed spreads to parts of the country more reliant on Mexican grass. These states include the more conservative ones that are unlikely to legalize marijuana anytime soon.

Ah – that lovely alliance between Puritanism and crime. It's eternal, innit? Kleiman adds his two cents.

(Photo: a bud of Kush from Wiki)