Month: March 2014

Jordan Weissmann analyzes the new jobs data:

The U.S. added a solid 175,000 jobs in February, despite the nasty spate of winter weather that some thought would put more of a damper on hiring. But the real relief may be that in spite of that growth, the unemployment rate actually ticked up slightly, to 6.7 percent. Why celebrate a rising jobless rate? Because it gives the Federal Reserve an excuse to lean back and let the economy keep gathering steam without worrying too much about inflation.

Bill McBride, who provides the above chart, zooms out:

This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage terms – this time aligned at maximum job losses. At the recent pace of improvement, it appears employment will be back to pre-recession levels mid-year (Of course this doesn’t include population growth).

Kilgore wonders if the weather is depressing jobs numbers:

The bigger picture is that economists are very conflicted about the impact of this winter’s unusually bad weather on the numbers, and what that might mean for the underlying strength or weakness of the economy. So there’s a great deal of anticipation of the March and April jobs reports as perhaps resolving some of those arguments.

Danny Vinik calls it “a fairly strong report, particularly if the weather is holding back the economy”:

More than 600,000 people were unemployed due to the weather, the most since 2010. If the weather really is holding back the economy right now, that makes this report even stronger in comparison.

Ylan Mui downplays the importance of the weather. She claims that “that those 600,000 people are still considered employed”:

The argument here isn’t that this abysmal winter has had no impact on the economy. There are other economic factors, such as housing starts, that are more sensitive to changes in the temperature. But pointing fingers at Old Man Winter for every lousy jobs report is a misreading of the data.

Benen focuses on government jobs:

In a rare occurrence, public-sector layoffs did not drag down the overall employment figures. Though most months in recent years have shown monthly government job losses, in February, the private sector added 162,000 while the public sector added an unusually high 13,000.

Drum’s take:

Bottom line: we continue to plod along. Things could be worse, but they still aren’t very good.

I argued that opponents of marriage equality should stop playing the victim and instead of focusing on gays “make a positive argument about the superior model of a monogamous, procreative, heterosexual marital bond”:

There is enormous beauty and depth to the Catholic argument for procreative matrimony – an account of sex and gender and human flourishing that contains real wisdom. I think that a church that was able to make that positive case – rather than what is too often a merely negative argument about keeping gays out, or the divorced in limbo – would and should feel liberated by its counter-cultural message.

Dreher responds:

Andrew asks us to make a “positive case,” but I submit to him that this is impossible now. The climate that now exists, and that will only grow in intensity, is one in which any dissent from the pro-gay consensus, no matter how nuanced or irenically stated, amounts to “hate” that cannot be tolerated. … If Andrew believes that Christians should tell positive stories, then the best thing he can do for us dissenters, now that he is on the verge of victory (and I can’t think of a single figure who has done more than he has to achieve victory), is to explain to his side what he perfectly well knows from being friends with Ross and me: that not every Christian who opposes same-sex marriage is a hater, and it does none of us any good to pretend that they are.

Well, I have done so on many occasions, did so in my books from the 1990s onward, and will continue to do so. I’ve spent a large part of my career angering gays by insisting that a crude “hater!” response to arguments about homosexuality is both deeply flawed and counter-productive. That was the whole point of Virtually Normal – and why it provoked such ferocious hostility from the left. Here’s an essay I wrote for the NYT attacking the whole concept of “hate” as a legal or political phenomenon. My record against “hate-crimes” is also pretty clear. I’ve aired vital reporting that complicates the iconic case of alleged anti-gay hate, in the Matthew Shepard case. Rod knows all this. He must also know that maintaining my loyalty to the Catholic church has not made my life easier in the gay community these past few decades. Why, given some social ostracism in the gay world for being a believing Christian, would I have clung on to a church that I believe is motivated by “hate”? Human beings – and hostility or opposition to gay civil rights – are much more complicated than that absurdly reductionist label. I am not Mark Joseph Stern.

But it remains the case that hatred and fear of gay people is deep and real and alive among many of Rod’s allies on the Christianist right. Not all, by any means. But it would be crazy not to acknowledge this. Rod wants to divide the anti-gay-rights coalition into a tiny fringe of Westboro Church loons and otherwise reasonable, nice Christians who oppose marriage equality for principled reasons. But this is a whitewash. The way gay people have been denigrated, derided, trivialized and demonized by mainstream figures in the Christianist right is appalling. The Christianist campaign to persecute gay people in Africa is horrifying. The callousness and double standards of Pope Benedict XVI – the man who declared gay people inherently sinful in our nature – cannot be denied.

And the only way to distinguish yourself from these hateful factions is to make a positive case for your position. That’s always possible. From the very beginnings of our faith, Christians have made such a positive case, even as they were being thrown to the lions. And Rod won’t do it because someone might say something mean at the office! How delicate and sensitive these Christianists can be.

Sure, insisting that you oppose my right to marry may lead at times to others viewing you as inhumane or bigoted or cruel. But that’s the price of entering the public square. You think I was given a hero’s welcome among conservatives when I first made the positive case for gay marriage? Please. It was open season from right and left.

And if Rod wants to know what persecution is like, imagine showing up to work and being fired simply for being a Christian. Or serving your country, risking life and limb, and then being told you are dismissed, denied any benefits, and thrown out on the street. Much of this has happened and still happens to gay people across the country, in ways no Christian qua Christian rarely faces and could barely conceive of. In Arizona, where Rod feels Christians are under siege, gays can be fired at will just for being themselves, and have no right to marry. When Rod receives that treatment, his self-pity may have some merit. But his obliviousness to the suffering of others is more than a blind spot.

I imagine, however, that he is dimly aware that his version of human flourishing – heterosexual sex only within marriage that is open to procreation – may not win the day in the public debate. Indeed, all the many arguments for such a view of how human beings can reach our fullest potential have tended to lose and lose badly in the last half-century in the free West. The equality of women, the emergence of gays, the fact of widespread contraception, the impact of no-fault divorce … all these prove that Rod’s argument is not succeeding, even when it had the legacy of centuries behind it. Even in the delicate pronouncements of Pope Francis, you can feel the equivocation. It is as if the prohibition against gay people simply cannot survive the scrutiny of reason or the Christian standard of mercy. And this is true for Catholics as much as any other group (just look at the polls of Catholics on marriage equality). And I think this realization that the argument has been lost is what motivates the panic – and leads to the current wave of self-pity.

In response to an earlier post by Dreher, Douthat argues against the religious right claiming “persecution”:

[U]sing the “persecution” label too promiscuously, I think, carries three risks beyond intellectual inaccuracy. First, as Dreher sort of concedes, it doesn’t do enough to acknowledge the vast gulf separating the situation of Western Christians and the incredible heroism of our co-believers overseas, who face eliminative violence on an increasingly-dramatic scale. Second, as I tried to suggest in the column, it doesn’t do enough to acknowledge the gulf separating the situation of Western Christians and the situation of gays and lesbians, past and present, facing persecutionat the hands of religiously-motivated actors. And finally, it doesn’t actually prepare conservative believers for a future as a (hopefully creative) religious minority, because it conditions them/us to constantly expect some kind of grand tribulation that probably won’t actually emerge.

Readers’ thoughts on the post here.

https://twitter.com/AlexKoppelman/status/441604933444304897

John Cassidy watched McConnell’s performance yesterday:

[W]hen you want to boost your bona fides with conservatives, many of whom regard you as a hopelessly compromised establishment figure, there’s still nothing like putting on your hunting jacket, grabbing your rifle, and paying homage to the N.R.A.

This being the Gaylord Convention Center rather than a rifle range or a field in Kentucky, McConnell went without the hunting jacket. His official purpose was to present a “lifetime achievement award”—that would be the rifle—from the National Rifle Association to Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma senator who is retiring this year with a hundred-per-cent approval rating from the gun-rights lobby. McConnell handed Coburn the gun, they both admired it, and then McConnell delivered a lengthy attack on President Obama and the Democrats.

Paul Waldman is jealous that conservatives get all the cool props:

[C]onservatives have lots of these kinds of identity markers that can easily and quickly communicate a whole set of beliefs to an audience when they’re mentioned, like the Bible or Ayn Rand or country music.

The fact that Democrats don’t have these things is probably because their coalition is more diverse, made up of people with a variety of cultural backgrounds and life experiences. The markers that may unite certain portions of the Democratic coalition—like, say, the music of the recently departed Pete Seeger—are not anything close to universal within that coalition, so politicians can’t use them so easily.

Drum joins the conversation:

Conservatives have guns, pocket copies of the Constitution, and the Bible to use as really handy props that instantly demonstrate their tribal affiliation. So why don’t liberals have similar, universally-recognized totems? Waldman may be right that it’s because our coalition is more culturally diverse, but I’d toss out one other possibility: almost by definition, conservatives are in favor of tradition and liberals are in favor of change. So it’s easy to find simple conservative props because every culture has lots of recognizable traditional icons that it’s developed over the centuries. It’s a lot less easy to find liberal props because icons of progress change every decade or two.

Mark Kleiman, fast becoming the biggest buzz-harsher on the planet, worries that our state-by-state approach to legalization will end badly unless the federal government steps in to regulate the pot market:

The systems being put into place in Washington and Colorado roughly resemble those imposed on alcohol after Prohibition ended in 1933. A set of competitive commercial enterprises produce the pot, and a set of competitive commercial enterprises sell it, under modest regulations: a limited number of licenses, no direct sales to minors, no marketing obviously directed at minors, purity/potency testing and labeling, security rules. The post-Prohibition restrictions on alcohol worked reasonably well for a while,but have been substantially undermined over the years as the beer and liquor industries consolidated and used their economies of scale to lower production costs and their lobbying muscle to loosen regulations and keep taxes low (see Tim Heffernan, “Last Call”).

The same will likely happen with cannabis. As more and more states begin to legalize marijuana over the next few years, the cannabis industry will begin to get richer—and that means it will start to wield considerably more political power, not only over the states but over national policy, too. That’s how we could get locked into a bad system in which the primary downside of legalizing pot—increased drug abuse, especially by minors—will be greater than it needs to be, and the benefits, including tax revenues, smaller than they could be. It’s easy to imagine the cannabis equivalent of an Anheuser-Busch InBev peddling low-cost, high-octane cannabis in Super Bowl commercials. We can do better than that, but only if Congress takes action—and soon.

Kleiman makes some good points about the radical insecurity of the legal regimes in Colorado and Washington, but I have to say I find his worst case scenarios a stretch. This, for example, is Kleiman’s understanding of federalism:

Justice Louis Brandeis’s praise for states as the “laboratories of democracy” has been widely quoted … Dr. Frankenstein also had a laboratory.

Oy. Pete Guither offers a must-read and detailed rebuttal. On the federalism point, is Kleiman honestly saying that the federal government is to be trusted in this area? The entire reason the states have taken the lead is that the feds still can’t change its absurd classification of the drug. Then Kleiman has a bugaboo about marketing, as if nurturing and cultivating a customer base for marijuana is some kind of a crime, or inherently damaging. Guither responds:

Sure, if marketing causes an increase in the overall number of users, and you assume that the same percentage of those new users will become dependent as in the original class, then marketing could lead to dependency indirectly. But that assumption is flat-out contradicted by evidence and common sense, since prohibition laws, to the extent that they deter at all, are more likely to deter casual non-problematic use than problematic use.

I know that it’s popular to claim that marketing is used to cause dependency, but there’s really very little evidence to support that claim.

But Reihan agrees with Kleiman that federal oversight is needed:

It’s easy to see why Congress doesn’t want to touch cannabis legalization. Though support for legalization has increased, the issue remains contentious, and it raises difficult questions regarding U.S. treaty obligations. But the federal government needs to step in to see to it that the emerging cannabis markets don’t spiral out of control. One of the central purposes of our federal republic is to regulate interstate commerce, and it would be foolish to deny that legalization in some states will have spillover effects in others.

By “spiral out of control” he means that lots of people may buy the product. It’s so weird to read a conservative making a case for socialized non-profits. Jon Rauch compares legalization to Obamacare, noting that much depends on the implementation:

[E]arly indications are that Colorado and Washington are faring reasonably well. If they pass the implementation test, marijuana legalization could prove that obituaries for effective, adaptive government—some of them written by me—are premature. But if they yield chaos or crisis, they would discredit the policy they seek to promote.

As of now, I’m cautiously optimistic that the states’ experiments will be made to work, not perfectly but well enough. But liberaltarians and drug reformers need to get it through their heads that just passing legalization initiatives is not enough. They need to stick around once the vote is over and commit to the hard slog of making the policy succeed.

Agreed. But I see no reason why reforming, adjusting and monitoring the impact of legalization isn’t best done by the states that have had the cojones, unlike the frozen-in-aspic feds, to actually deal with the issue in a way that isn’t transparently self-defeating.