Month: February 2014

A reader writes:

You quote Conor thusly: “I can’t help but wonder, when I hear about Christian businesses boycotting gay weddings, is how many of those businesses also refuse to take photographs or bake cakes for other marriages that don’t strictly conform to Biblical codes.”

In fact we know exactly that it’s only the gays they have discriminated against. The two biggest cases cited for these laws are the photographer in New Mexico and the baker in Oregon, Sweet Cakes by Melissa. The Portland alt-weekly, the Willamette Week, contracted Sweet Cakes for a host of cakes for other seemingly unChristian occasions, like babies out of wedlock, divorce party, pagan solstice, and stem cell success. All were agreed to by the company.

Indeed they were. Two priceless examples:

WW Asks – I was calling to get a quote on a cake for a midsummer solstice party. My coven is celebrating on Friday, June 21. The decoration would be very simple: just a green pentagram. We’d like to pick it up sometime that afternoon, before the bonfire. It’ll be for about 30 people.

Sweet Cake says – “For 30 people we have a couple options… We have two kind of cakes you could have. About the diagram you want on the cake, I’m not sure how much extra that would be.”

And this:

WW Asks – I’m shopping around for a nice baby shower cake for my friend. It’s her second baby with her boyfriend so I’m not looking for anything too big or fancy—probably enough to serve 15 to 20 people.

Sweet Cake says – “We have a sheet cake that will feed 30, or a 10-inch cake that would feed 30 people. The 10-inch cake is $50 and the sheet cake is $52. Or we have an 8-inch cake that would feed 15 for $40.”

I think the question in the core case is answered. Their only expression of religious freedom is the right to turn gay couples away. That’s not religious freedom. It’s bigotry.

Nora Caplan-Bricker observes that the 2012 Regnerus sociological study, which suggested that children of gay parents had relatively poor outcomes, is still being used to support conservative arguments against marriage equality despite the expert consensus that it was fundamentally flawed:

The denunciations of Regnerus’ work haven’t kept it from having influence. The study appeared in amicus briefs during the DOMA and Prop 8 cases that went before the Supreme Court in 2013. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which has tracked mentions of the study, it has come up in legislative debates in Hawaii, Illinois, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and the U.S. Congress. Before Regnerus was scheduled to testify in Michigan, his study was used as evidence in cases that went to court in Hawaii and New Mexico. Regnerus’ work has even influenced debates abroad—especially in Russia, where Yelena Mizulina, the chairwoman of the Duma’s committee on family, women and children, cited him to argue for a law banning same-sex adoption, which was enacted this February.

House Ways And Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp’s tax simplification proposal is out (pdf). Waldman provides the knee-jerk liberal response:

The centerpiece is an elimination of most tax brackets, leaving only two, at 10 percent and 25 percent. In a total shocker, that means a huge tax break for the wealthy! I know—I too am amazed that Republicans would propose such a thing.

Pareene has actually read the proposal:

Yes, it contains a tax cut, and effectively cuts tax rates on dividends and carried interest — two huge sources of income for the very rich — but it also taxes large financial institutions, adds a surcharge for very high-income households, and closes some loopholes that primarily benefit wealthy taxpayers.

Drum gives Camp credit “for going after a long laundry list of very specific deductions”:

Camp’s plan is long and includes upwards of a hundred specific tax deductions that he wants to reform or eliminate. There are enough caveats that it’s hard to tell exactly how far his proposals go, but again, kudos to him for making specific proposals at all. His plan may be DOA precisely because he was so specific, but kudos anyway. I’ll be interested in following the reaction as everyone figures out just whose ox would be gored by his various bullet points. Should be fun.

Critics are already dismissing some of Camp’s revenue-raisers as “gimmicks”:

Camp reportedly would allow U.S. companies with overseas operations to repatriate some of their foreign-sourced income at a lower tax rate — which would raise revenue in the short term but not in the longer term. The same would be true with some of the proposed depreciation changes allowed in the proposal.

Chuck Marr, the head of tax policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said his organization would oppose any proposal that uses these methods to raise revenue temporarily while cutting taxes permanently. He also questioned whether Camp’s proposal would count against revenue the enactment of so-called tax extenders, provisions such as the research-and-development tax credit, which expired at the end of the year, and are always extended by Congress.

Salmon likes Camp’s proposal for a bank tax:

At heart, this is a Pigovian tax on something (too-big-to-fail financial institutions) we don’t want, and often Pigovian taxes are more effective than regulation when it comes to minimizing such things. What’s more, it’s sharp enough to hurt: JPMorgan, for instance, would have ended up paying about 15% of its 2013 net income in this one tax alone.

For exactly that reason, however, I’m still skeptical that the tax will ever actually arrive. Those ten institutions are extremely powerful, and are more than capable of persuading politicians on both sides of the aisle to vote against a tax which singles them out for pecuniary punishment. The tax was a good idea in 2010, and it’s a good idea today. But it has very little chance of ever becoming a reality.

Pethokoukis thinks “mortgage interest reform is maybe the best of his tax reform plan”:

The [mortgage interest deduction] is a $70-billion-a-year, market distorting subsidy for the purchase of expensive homes by high-income taxpayers. It does little to promote homeownership by Americans of more modest means. There is no sound economic reason to use the tax code to artificially advantage the higher-end real estate sector over other sectors of the economy.

In any case, Brett Logiurato expects the plan to go nowhere:

On Wednesday, even House Speaker John Boehner wouldn’t publicly offer his support for the legislation. In a press conference, he said it was good to start a “conversation” about tax reform. But, when asked if the party was prepared to back Camp’s plan, he told a reporter, “You’re getting a little bit ahead of yourself.”

Camp is likely making this play because it’s the last year of his chairmanship on the Ways and Means Committee — and because one of the dreams of every Ways and Means chair is to lead a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s too-complicated tax system.

Howard Gleckman looks further into the future:

In the end, the details of Camp’s plan are less important than the fact that he wrote a plan. His framework, like the ones proposed by President George W. Bush’s orphaned tax reform commission, the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and others will help inform future efforts to rewrite the code.  Think of Camp’s plan as one big step down a very long road.

Stephen Mihm explains what Chuck Hagel’s 2015 defense budget might mean for the economy:

Hagel’s proposal to cut the military spells trouble for the stock market, right? Actually, no. The headlines about plans to reduce the size of the Army by 6 percent obscured the news that, over the coming years, the actual level of defense spending is set to rise slowly, from $535 billion in 2016 to $559 billion in 2019. And that’s before members of Congress move to shelter their districts’ pet projects.

In fact, what most analysts have missed is that the reduction is strictly in the number of active personnel, not overall military expenditures.

Joyner supports the cuts:

Hagel and the Joint Chiefs have repeatedly emphasized—correctly, in my judgment—that it’s far preferable to take the risks associated with a small but highly trained and well equipped force than those associated with a larger but “hollow” force that is unprepared for the fight. Accordingly, they “chose further reductions in troop strength and force structure in every military service—active and reserve—in order to sustain our readiness and technological superiority, and to protect critical capabilities like special operations forces and cyber resources.” That’s a difficult but necessary trade-off.

But Lindsay Cohn thinks the Pentagon is going about personnel reductions in the wrong way:

It is a mistake to believe that reducing numbers automatically introduces efficiency. In a normal American firm, cutting personnel is an efficient means of reducing costs because a firm can choose whom it wants to fire and can engage in lateral hiring when its need for personnel increases again. In the military, however, one cannot simply fire the lowest-performing people and replace them with new hires, nor can one engage in lateral hiring for certain specialties when a sudden need arises (e.g. combat medics, artillerymen, military lawyers). While it is possible to pass over low-performing officers and deny re-enlistment requests from below-average enlisted personnel, the military has little control over the timing of such actions, and may face budgetary time limits that force out higher performers. In general, the forces will achieve personnel cuts by reducing recruiting and relying on voluntary attrition. This is an inefficient means of managing personnel.

Michael Krepon considers the fate of our nuclear arsenal:

So far, Hagel has been silent about reductions in nuclear forces, promising to preserve all three legs of the so-called triad — missiles, bombers and submarines — while making “important investments to preserve a safe, secure, reliable and effective nuclear force.” But reductions in nuclear forces are coming: It’s not a question of whether, but when — and how deep.

Diving deep into a history of Jamaican music, John Jeremiah Sullivan attempts to pinpoint the emergence of ska:

When I … [was] doing my best to stake out some understanding of what was going on musically in Kingston in the late Fifties and early Sixties, I ran into the riddle that bedevils every person who gets lost in this particular cultural maze, namely, where did ska come from? That strange rhythm, that chop on the upbeat or offbeat, ump-ska, ump-ska, ump-ska, exemplified quintessentially in “Simmer Down” (or in parts of Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven,” if there’s doubt of its relevance). Did someone think that up? Can it be traced to a particular song or band, or accident, or earlier Caribbean style (mento, calypso)? Maybe its evolution should be followed out of the island’s deeper past, from African and Afro-Caribbean sources, and Indian influences—both kinds of Indian, in Jamaica’s case. There were a disproportionate number of Chinese-Jamaicans helping to shape Kingston’s music scene—did that have any effect?

As with almost all cases of musicological origin-hunting, the answer is something tedious like, “Yes and no to all of the above.”

Multiple streams converged to prepare the ground for that rhythm, for it to become a rhythmic move that would make sense to the Jamaican ear (and body), or to the fingers of a Jamaican guitarist.

Nevertheless there are moments that can be pointed to, when you hear the insistent uptick venturing forth. Theophilus Beckford’s piano on the classic Fifties proto-ska “Easy Snappin’” is one. You hear it there in the way Beckford’s pounding the chord, hear the rhythm offering itself, If you felt like going all the way, we could play it like this. Count Ossie’s polyrhythmic Rasta drumming on the Folkes Brothers’ “Oh, Carolina” is another such moment. The horns on Cuban-Jamaican blues master Laurel Aitken’s “Boogie in My Bones.” (Or over in the States, electric-guitar pioneer Wild Jimmy Spruill’s string-scratching fingernail technique on Wilbert Harrison’s 1959 “Kansas City”—Spruill a sharecropper’s son from Fayetteville, North Carolina; Harrison a churchgoing city kid from Charlotte). Sit down with any ska freak, and they’ll give you many other moments.

Update from a reader:

I’m a music and film producer based in San Francisco. I just had to add one really cool anecdote about ska music from Jamaica, as I didn’t see John Jeremiah Sullivan mention it in his write-up. I have worked with many Jamaican musicians, and some of the old school ones as well, including The Melodians, who were one of the original reggae groups. I have heard this story repeated by many of them. The “ska sound” story is essentially that there were radios around here and there in Jamaica, and of the few radios that did work, some were able to get signals from the United States, but signal was not fully clear, and frequently bounced in and out. So when musicians listened to these American songs, they thought that’s how cool music from the U.S sounded, with this off-beat rhythm. Some of the early ska songs from Jamaica are literally covers of early American Motown songs, almost 95% like the original recordings, except the Jamaicans adding a ska beat.

(Video: “Simmer Down” by Bob Marley and the Wailers, 1964)

The oldest Bitcoin exchange has gone offline and appears to be insolvent. The crash has cast doubt on the crypto-currency’s future, but Patrick McGuire downplays the event:

For those who are taking the long-view of Bitcoin, this is a large speed bump that will cause a lot of people grief for a long time; but there are bigger and better services on the way that will be able to learn from this crucial example of how not to run a Bitcoin exchange.

Brian Doherty puts the crash into perspective:

A reminder: if you had invested $1,000 in the horrible mistake of Bitcoin five months ago, that thousand would be worth about four times that today. After this Mt. Gox news.

Certainly, that huge value increase is not proof of Bitcoin’s eternal value as either investment or currency (and inflation in the former isn’t that healthy for use as the latter). But it is a sign that “it’s over, man” seems doubtful. People still believe. And that’s important when it comes to either investment or currency.

Kadhim Shubber bids the exchange good riddance:

Mt. Gox has become a gangrenous limb, infecting the wider bitcoin community with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Its reputation has been in a slow decline for some time now—toward the end of last year, news emerged that $5 million of Mt. Gox’s cash had been seized by the U.S. government. The revelations appeared to explain why withdrawals from Mt. Gox had been slow since June 2013, when the seizures occurred. As new and better-run exchanges sprung up, Mt. Gox increasingly became a burden, a holdover from bitcoin’s teenage years.

McArdle thinks the Mt. Gox crash makes Bitcoin regulation inevitable:

I’ve never been very bullish on Bitcoin, because ultimately, the better it performs at evading government surveillance of currency transactions (and government ability to manage debt loads via inflation), the harder those governments are going to try to shut it down. And it turns out that governments are very good at shutting down these sorts of … call them financial workarounds … because they can order the banks and payment networks that service the vast regular economy to refuse to take Bitcoins or take payments from companies that do take Bitcoins. What governments have done to online poker and offshore banking havens, they can do to Bitcoin vendors.

What happened at Mt. Gox only helps the government make its case for much tighter regulation of these networks.

Heather Timmons notes that some Bitcoiners are coming around to the idea of regulation, at least from within:

A growing number of participants believe the nascent bitcoin industry needs to accept the fact that expanding beyond the fringe comes with some some trappings of accountability.

“Nowadays, all bitcoin exchanges are very seriously considering and implementing compliance requirements based on their local jurisdiction’s rules,” said Eddy Travia, chief start-up officer of Seedcoin, a bitcoin company incubator. His firm’s investments include MexBT, a Mexican Bitcoin exchange, where “a large part of the resources…are invested into compliance-related activities,” he said, mostly based on self-imposed rules that are “a kind of self-regulation in anticipation of any potential concerns from the local authorities.”

Felix Salmon assesses the situation:

I actually do believe Coinbase and other next-generation bitcoin companies when they say that they’re much more robust than their predecessors. But I don’t believe that regulators, and the public at large, will believe them. Bitcoin is based on mistrust, which makes it almost impossible for this circle to be squared. There is a small number of cryptogeeks who really love the paradox that they can trust the protocol precisely because they don’t need to trust any given institution. Regulators, it’s fair to say, tend not to be among them. And neither are normal people, who don’t understand the math behind bitcoin, and who have no real ability to secure their coins on their own, and who thereforeneed to be able to trust whatever institution they’re using to store their bitcoin-denominated wealth.

In order for the end of Mt Gox to be a blessing for bitcoin, we’re going to need to see an influx ofnew entrants into the asset class — people who never trusted Mt Gox, but who are happy to trust (say) Coinbase.