Author: Andrew Sullivan

Beziers, France, 8.24 pm

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

In differentiating between blue collar workers and other workers, I think the biggest obstacle is that it would require more administration, bureaucracy, and paperwork (which would decrease the cost effectiveness of reform), as well as create a political problem of how you define the difference.

In regards to people suggesting that Social Security be means tested (and especially people who recommend it be shifted away from payroll taxes), I worry that it would undermine its base of support. FDR once remarked, "Those [payroll] taxes were never a matter of economics, they are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program".

If the link between contribution and compensation is weakened too much, I fear that in future reforms (which being a pension system, there always will be) it would be easier transition to a way that takes less consideration of low-wage earning Americans. Thus in my opinion, the great balancing act of Social Security reform is how do you keep the program solvent, without weakening its broad based political support.

Andrew Sprung argues that the program is already means-tested in a way:

What seems lost in this conversation is the fact that at present social security benefits are allocated disproportionately to low earners.

It's true that the tax is not progressive — those earning $100k pay the same percentage as those earning $20k, while and those earning, say, $213,600 (twice the cap) pay half the rate on their total income.   But the benefits reaped constitute strongly diminishing returns as one's income increases.  Benefits are based on a taxpayer's  average indexed monthly earnings (AIME) up to the taxable cap. Of those earnings, averaged over 35 years, those who retire at age 66 currently get the following in SS benefits:

• 90% of the first $761 of AIME
• 32% of the AIME between $761 and $4,586
• 15% for the AIME above $4,586 (up to $8900, beyond which there's no tax or benefits).

At present, if your work life is completed and your AIME is $8900, your monthly takeaway is $2,556, or 28.7% of your AIME.  At an AIME of $4586 (roughly $55k/year), you'd get $1909, or 41.6%.  If you earned just $3k/month over your working life, your monthly SS payment would be $1401, or 46.7% of your AIME.  For an income of $2k per month, the payout would be $1081, or 54% of income.

Attention fiscal wonks (who are probably the only people still reading this post): The Urban Institute is holding a forum tomorrow on the topic of raising the Social Security age and its effects on low income workers. Details here.

by Dave Weigel

UNALASKA, AK — When I agreed to blog here for a week I gave a quick word of warning: I was set to spend a week in Dutch Harbor, the remote fishing town made globally famous by 1) the series "Deadliest Catch" and 2) fish.

"Remote" is a word we like to misuse, like "awesome" or "ironic" or "electable." You go to a hunting cabin in West Virginia and you say you're in a remote location. But I am about as far from the great mass of humanity as I could be right now. This is obvious if you open a map and notice that the island is closer to Pyongyang than it is to Seattle. The trip out here made this more obvious. Fly into Anchorage's Ted Stevens International Airport (yes, still) and you don't immediately see the listing for your Dutch Harbor connecting flight. This is because you need to walk out of the main airport and into a few rooms located next to the airfield upon which 737s wait for clearance to fly.

There is usually some diversity of companions on an airplane. Not on this one. The men have beards and gear and heavy boots; the women have all but one of these things. Your fellow travelers look like they're heading to the same bar after work, possibly because they are. Another thing you notice is that most of them have shirts or jackets with "Alaska" written on them. This seems odd — you don't head into Newark and bump into travelers with "New Jersey" jackets. Then you realize you're being foolish, and that almost everyone you're flying with works for some Alaska company, in construction or fishing or research, and that they're wearing the raincoats they've been handed for free.

I said we overuse the word "remote." One example that comes to mind is that commercial for wireless 3G cards that feature a British person (I don't know why this is) camping out in barren locations, showing off the fact that he can, click, get onto the internet. He never made it out here. When you exit your plane your phone informs you that you have a new Alaska Wireless number that you can pay for and use if ever you want to make a phone call. When you sign onto a wireless account, you are one of 4000-odd people who might be on at any given time, and this makes your 4-bar connection about as speedy as a 1-bar connection back in your soft, cozy urban cafe. When you plug in your 3G card? Nothing! Serves you right for trusting commercials with inappropriately wacky actors.

Find a helpful radio station, though, like KUCB, and you're back and blogging, only four hours behind the east coast.

by Chris Bodenner

Susanna Ferreira cautions against celebrating too soon:

Anti-foreigner violence — temporarily suppressed by the World Cup — is about to boil over again. Diepsloot was an epicenter for the 2008 rash of attacks against Zimbabwean refugees that left at least 62 people dead — a third of them technically South African — and displaced more than 100,000 across the country. During the last few months, extra cash from World Cup jobs, as well as scrutiny from the international media and the government, kept things mostly quiet. Fans have been unanimously impressed with how few incidents of theft and assault — both commonplace in South Africa — there have been. But after that temporary work dries up, the foreign media leave, and the government relaxes its watch, observers fear that the brewing animosity toward foreign nationals will re-erupt. If rumors are to be believed, plans to attack the foreigners are in the works.

by David Frum

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary describes the launch of a new pro-Israel group, the Emergency Committee for Israel:

There is a gaping hole in the Jewish community’s response to the Obama administration and in its defense of Israel. In the past, these groups’ close relationship with incumbent administrations has served them well. But as I have written for nearly a year, that tactic is not suited to the current challenges and has proven counterproductive in the Obama era. The need is great to expose, confront, and challenge the administration when it, for example, eggs on an international flotilla investigation or excepts Russia and China from sanctions on Iran or mindlessly pursues engagement with Syria.

Probably much of the press attention will go to the group's directors, which include Bill Kristol. But the real news is the group's director: Noah Pollak, a friend of mine, and a brilliant advocate for rethinking Israel's self-defense in a new media era. As a blogger, he proposed that the Israeli Defense Forces aunch their own YouTube channel, which did enormous service rebutting falsehoods during the Gaza campaign. 

It's long been a thesis of mine, to adapt Clausewitz, that modern warfare is PR by other means. Pollak understands this truth (wrote his Yale thesis on it) – and friends of Israel will be excited to watch his deployment of the truth in the critical days ahead.

Here's a link to the committee's first ad, which will run in Pennsylvania. 

by Dave Weigel

Fish in a barrel, sure, but genuinely a hard test to pass. Why jam band fans and not those other beardy denizens of this hemisphere, fisherman and grad students? I think it's the ill-fed reediness — a trait lacked by those other archetypes — that blurs the distinctions.

Via Attackerman.

by David Frum

Reason hosts a what promises to be a very interesting three-way debate over the right party-political path for libertarians. The debate opens with a tough-minded entry by Cato's Brink Lindsey:

The spirit of freedom is cosmopolitan. It is committed to secularism in political discourse, whatever religious views people might hold privately. And it coolly upholds reason against the swirl of interests and passions.

On that basis, Brink disavows the old libertarian-conservative political alliance.

Declaring independence from the right would require big changes. Cooperation with the right on free-market causes would need to be supplemented by an equivalent level of cooperation with the left on personal freedom, civil liberties, and foreign policy issues. Funding for political candidates should be reserved for politicians whose commitment to individual freedom goes beyond economic issues. In the resources they deploy, the causes they support, the language they use, and the politicians they back, libertarians should be making the point that their differences with the right are every bit as important as their differences with the left.

I am not a libertarian, and I remain committed to the right and the Republican party, but I feel Brink's pain. Here's the consolation however: the party system as we have seen it these past few years is not the party system of tomorrow. The Republican party cannot survive as a coalition of the rural and the elderly – and Republicans are very determined to survive. Democrats have in recent months made a fateful choice to depart from the centrist economics of the Clinton years in favor of bold new exercises in very unlibertarian state control.

Nor is it at all certain that libertarianism itself will remain a single movement. Brink Lindsey, as I read him, is very much a classical liberal. The fate that cast him into the same party as, say, Jesse Helms is just as adventitious as the fate that cast him into the same movement as Rand Paul – or that thrust either of them into the same movement as Thomas Szasz. Libertarianism is itself a fusion of many different component parts. And since the goal of politics is to form coalitions that can govern, the energy of responsibility-minded people like Brink Lindsey should be directed outward to building and sustaining the broadest functional coalition consistent with the most urgent and immediate of principles.

by Chris Bodenner

The NAACP is expected to pass a resolution today condemning the Tea Party movement as racist. Jim Newell sighs:

There are clearly racists in the Tea Party, but how effective can a resolution condemning "racist elements" of a group be? It would be like condemning the racist elements of Walmart or an intramural kickball league or any organization. On the other hand, if you're condemning the entire movement as "racist," you're going overboard and inviting backlash.

Anyway, the Tea Party will call the NAACP "reverse racists" for this, and then the NAACP will have to reconvene next year to call the Tea Party "inverse reverse racists," and so on.