Month: March 2013

The GOP’s Favorite Accounting Trick

On Fox News Sunday, Paul Ryan admitted that his new budget will assume Obamacare’s repeal:

Ezra Klein notes that “Ryan’s version of repeal means getting rid of all the parts that spend money to give people health insurance but keeping the tax increases and the Medicare cuts that pays for that health insurance, as without those policies, it is very, very difficult for Ryan to hit his deficit-reduction targets”:

That’s the irony of Ryan’s balanced-budget. Much of it is built on taxes and Medicare cuts that he and his party would never have proposed, and which they in fact fought bitterly, but which they’ve now assimilated into their budget because it’s almost impossible for them to hit their deficit-reduction goals otherwise.

Bernstein calls out the GOP for flipping and flopping on Obamacare’s Medicare cuts.

Shining Light On Solar

VVV at The Economist upends the conventional wisdom on the US/China green-energy trade, noting that in 2011 the US actually exported more solar, wind and smart-grid technology to China than it imported:

One important explanation for this is that while China has strengths in large-scale assembly and mass manufacturing, it lacks the innovation to come up with high-value inputs. So American ingenuity is required to supply Chinese factories with such things as polysilicon and wafers for photovoltaic cells, and the fibreglass and control systems used in wind turbines.

When Chinese solar firm Suntech flirted with bankruptcy last week, Todd Woody explored another wrinkle of the US-Chinese solar relationship:

Look up at a rooftop array in California and it’s likely the solar panels came from China. Between 2007 and 2010, for instance, China’s share of the California market jumped from 2% to 46%. If Suntech and other Chinese companies go bankrupt, warranties on their solar panels will likely become worthless, leaving solar installers like SolarCity liable for any future product failures.

Face Of The Day

INDONESIA-RELIGION-HINDU-FESTIVAL-NYEPI

Indonesia’s minority Hindu devotees parade their ‘Ogoh Ogoh’ effigies during a ceremony at Jakarta’s central National Monument on March 11, 2013 on the eve of Nyepi or Day of Silence. The effigies symbolizes evil, and after the procession are torched in a symbolic act of destroying all the negative and demonic elements in the universe and will usher in Hindu’s total Day of Silence on March 12. By Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images.

Establishing Rand’s Bona Fides

Douthat thinks that “the legitimization of Rand Paul as a right-wing folk hero has implications that extend beyond the narrow hypothetical where he chose to plant his filibuster flag”:

[L]egitimizing, as Real Conservatives (TM), politicians who advocate restraint is a necessary precondition to broader policy change. Opportunism follows influence, and creates it — and right now Paul has more influence within his party than every other realist, paleoconservative and libertarian Republican of the last decade put together.

Harry J Enten points out that, were Paul to run for president and get the GOP nod, “Paul would be the most conservative Republican to win the nomination ever.” That may make it harder for his opponents to brand him as a RINO:

Rand Paul is really, really conservative. He’s the second most conservative senator, next to Mike Lee of Utah based on roll call votes. This is matched by the by the ideological ranking system based on campaign donors.

Trading Healthcare For Cash

Retirement Wealth

Using the chart above, Josh Barro points outs that social security is “the most important retirement-saving vehicle” and argues that its benefits should be increased. He would be willing to cut Medicare to do so:

We are talking about the need to cut cash payments to seniors in order to finance ever more expensive health benefits for them, despite those health benefits’ dubious value. Why not give seniors less health care and more cash? With the U.S. devoting an extra six points of gross domestic product to health spending compared with our peer countries, there should be room for much deeper cuts in Medicare than what President Barack Obama has proposed. If a key purpose of those cuts was to expand Social Security, political opposition from seniors might not be as fierce.

McArdle sees a problem with this idea:

[W]hy not give people cash instead of an in-kind benefit? Well, there is a reason, with health care; in fact, there are a few of them, all of come back to the observation that health care is simply fundamentally unlike other in-kind goods that the government provides. Unlike the cost of food, or housing, or other in-kind benefits that we give to people, the value of health care varies wildly between individuals. Some people, even the majority, might be better off with cash. But the people who would be worse off would be really worse off.

Seeding Innovation

Last month SCOTUS heard oral arguments for Bowman v. Monsanto:

The question before the Court is surprisingly simple: when a farmer buys a Roundup Ready soybean seed, is it free to do what it wishes with the seeds harvested from the Roundup Ready plantings?  The farmer (Bowman) says yes – arguing that Monsanto’s rights in the seed and its progeny are “exhausted” by its sale of the first seed.  Monsanto, by contrast, argues that because it never made or sold the harvested seeds, those seeds cannot be replanted without violating the patent.

Ronald Bailey worries about the consequences were SCOTUS to rule against Monsanto:

If the Supreme Court does “eviscerate” seed patent protections, agricultural biotech companies could turn to genetic engineering solutions similar to the Technology Protection System (TPS), an approach developed in 1999 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the seed company Delta & Pine Land Company (now owned by Monsanto). TPS consists of an array of three genes that causes a second generation of seeds to be sterile so that farmers would gain nothing by saving them. Bowman himself suggested in 2009 to the Federal District Court that Monsanto could protect itself against people like him by deploying TPS.

Uncle Sam’s Sister

Garance Franke-Ruta hails Columbia, “the feminine historic personification of the United States of America, who has since the 1920s largely fallen out of view”:

[S]he was as recognizable to Americans of yesteryear as the man in the top-hat and tails remains today, and when the suffragettes donned robes and armor, they garbed themselves in her rebel warrior’s spirit. From the 18th century until the early decades of the 20th, Columbia was the gem of the ocean, a mythical and majestic personage whose corsets or breast-plates curved out of her striped or starred or swirling skirts with all the majesty of a shield. She was honored from the birth of the nation — “Hail, Columbia!”, whose score was first composed for the inauguration of President Washington, was an unofficial anthem until the “Star-Spangled Banner” displaced it as the official national one in 1931 — to the birth of the recording and film industries, which is why we have had Columbia Records and Columbia Pictures. Yes, that lady with the torch at the start of the movies isn’t just some period-costume-wearing chick — she is a relic of this earlier personification of America, immortalized forever by the most American of industries.

America was Columbia in the same way that England was Britannia and France was Marianne. America’s capital is the District of Columbia; New York City’s great early private university was Columbia College (now University).

Why did her star fade? Garance’s view: “Female national personifications in general fell out of vogue as women took on a growing role as emancipated citizens.”

(Photo: A suffrage pageant in 1913 via Wikimedia Commons)

The French Suck At English

David Sessions investigates why. Among other reasons:

[A]lmost all foreign-language television and many Hollywood films are dubbed, rather than subtitled, in France. The practice is driven both by popular demand and by the French state’s attempts to block invasion by foreign languages, especially English. While what the government calls the “cultural exception” —that French culture won’t be left to the ravages of the market—is certainly understandable, it can have unintended side effects, like insulating the French population from linguistic awareness they need in a world increasingly dominated by English.