Category: The Dish

Clive Crook: 

The Democrats are promising to raise taxes only on the rich: the country’s vast middle class expects to be unaffected. And as long as Mr McCain declines to explain exactly how he will curb spending (aside from attacking earmarks, the special interest spending projects which in the larger scheme of things are trivial), voters will be equally blithe about that side of the calculation too. Everyone can deplore the fiscal incontinence of the Bush administration and hardly anyone need worry about what restoring fiscal control might require. In this, as in other areas, the thinking boils down to: “After George W. Bush, everything will be fine.”

On taxes and spending – as on Iraq – it will not. The point has become dulled through repetition, but the fact remains that the US faces, from a position of fiscal weakness, new and mounting pressures on public finance. In dealing with the larger problem, muddling through is unlikely to succeed. The country will have to change how it confronts fiscal questions.

That’s an understatement.

Polaroids return – reinvented. I’ll miss the waving around in the air, though.

Having done an analysis of Pennsylvania’s 19 congressional districts, CQ predicts Clinton will take 53 delegates and Obama will take 50. Yeah: that’s it. No wonder we’re parsing hard-to-hear off-the-record fundraisers.

Stephen Bates on Christian fundamentalism in Britain:

Conservative Christianity has been much less effective in Britain than in the US because it has less social and political influence, less unchallenged access to the media – and less money. But there is certainly a desire in some quarters to mimic the tactics of the US right. They think they are winning the argument, but fear they may be losing the war. They assume that because the world is against them, that means they must be right. But the ultimate irony is that the more urgently they profess the need to win the nation for Christ, the more they repel those they say they most wish to save.

Sara Corbett contemplates the global impact of cell phones and their role in alleviating poverty:

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000.

And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries. As more and more countries abandon government-run telecom systems, offering cellular network licenses to the highest-bidding private investors and without the burden of navigating pre-established bureaucratic chains, new towers are going up at a furious pace. Unlike fixed-line phone networks, which are expensive to build and maintain and require customers to have both a permanent address and the ability to pay a monthly bill, or personal computers, which are not just costly but demand literacy as well, the cellphone is more egalitarian, at least to a point.[…]

Something that’s mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal — land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars — can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information. A “just in time” moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.

Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

Encouraging:

Asked how his economic policies would differ from President Bush’s, McCain said: "Spending, spending, spending. This administration let spending get completely out of control. We mortgaged our children’s futures and it led to corruption, and we presided over the largest increase in the size of government since the Great Society."

A highly enjoyable, much-appreciated April 15 Megan rant:

All this useless activity is so that our politicians can look like They Care by giving tiny tax breaks to all of their favorite people–that is to say, the people who vote for them and give them money. All of these tax breaks, almost without exception, do the most good for the people who least need them. Meanwhile, they waste time for the rest of us, distort the economy, and require us to pay extra people to process tax returns. It’s lose-lose-lose all around unless you owned a seal-fur farm between 1987 and 1991.

Richard Lippa studies the connections between sexual orientation, gender, and personality. It’s a big study, with some obviously subjective categories. Money quote:

Gay men were somewhat higher than straight men on agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, and expressiveness. Except for openness to experience, gay-straight male differences mirrored male-female differences—that is, traits that gay men scored higher on than straight men were also traits that women scored higher on than men, and vice versa. The really big gay-straight male difference was for M-F of interests. Gay men had much more feminine occupational and hobby preferences than heterosexual men did.  To give you a sense of the magnitude of this difference, the effect size listed in Table 1 implies that 90% of gay men have interests that are more feminine than the average straight man’s.

Elizabeth Warren says that "hanging the worldwide economic recovery on reigniting consumer spending is like investing in used fireworks." The rest of the post is here.

(Hat tip: Yves Smith).

Not done yet, alas.