Category: The Dish

[Patrick Appel] In response to these two posts about McCain’s economic advisors, a reader writes:

I think the way that McCain may well be able to connect the two schools of economic thought, supply side and budget balancing, is to look at what he has said would be his primary priority:  restraining federal spending.  He has acknowledged that he was wrong to believe that the Bush tax cuts (and previous tax cuts) led to reduced revenues for the Federal government.  Clearly, at least in the past 50 or so years, the U.S. has been on the side of the curve where cutting taxes results in increased economic activity which results in greater tax receipts for the Federal government.  The problem, as Senator McCain has repeatedly noted is in the Federal government’s insatiable appetite for said revenues and Congress’s inability to stop the growth in spending.  If non-military spending had remained static, adjusted for inflation, since 2000, we would not be running much if any budget deficit.

In short, you favor a lower and less regressive tax regime which favors investment and wealth creation, while being hawkish on restraining government spending.  Of course, two huge items in the Federal budget which McCain or his opponent must reconcile are the (a) continuing drain of Iraq, and the (b) exploding costs of SS & Medicare/Medicaid.  But the two philosophies can be reconciled if McCain is serious about curtailing Federal spending and he can deal with the War and Entitlements.   

[Update]: I recongize that the evidence overwhelming suggests this reader’s statment about the Laffer curve is false, but I imagine McCain may make this arguement in the fall and therefore thought it was worth posting. I should have made this clear.

As another reader writes:

The reader appears to be claiming that a reduction in tax rates will result in increased tax revenue. The statement that we are on the right side of the Laffer curve, where cutting taxes results in increased tax revenues, is blatantly false and not supported by any data.

Economic studies have pegged the maximum revenue generating point of the Laffer curve as somewhere around a 65-80% tax rate, substantially higher than today. Cases of countries where the tax rate was on the right side of the Laffer Curve include Sweden, when at one time they had a 90% marginal tax rate.

Another dissent to this dissent is above.

[Patrick Appel] Derbyshire on Intelligent Design:

I’ve said before here, and repeated as politely as I could in panel discussions with creationists: they’re not just wrong, they’re shifty. In my opinion, they wandered off the straight and narrow when they started pushing this "intelligent design" stuff. My advice to them — frequently offered but, for reasons that are baffling to me, never taken up — is to drop the i-d b-s and go back to good old Biblical creationism. At least that’s an honest point of view founded in Scripture. I understand why the move to i-d was made: to try to get out from under current church-state jurisprudence (not all of which I agree with). However, the constant strain of keeping a straight face while insisting that theirs is not — no way! absolutely not!! — a religious campaign, and talking about the mysterious-but-definitely-not-supernatural "Designer," has corrupted them irredeemably.

by hilzoy

The Pakistani elections have taken place. Turnout was low, partly because of fear — it was estimated to be around 35%. And Musharraf seems to have lost decisively:

“Pakistanis dealt a crushing defeat to President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections on Monday, in what government and opposition politicians said was a firm rejection of his policies since 2001 and those of his close ally, the United States.

Almost all the leading figures in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, the party that has governed for the last five years under Mr. Musharraf, lost their seats, including the leader of the party, the former speaker of Parliament and six ministers.

Official results are expected Tuesday, but early returns indicated that the vote would usher in a prime minister from one of the opposition parties, and opened the prospect of a Parliament that would move to undo many of Mr. Musharraf’s policies and that may even try to remove him.

Early results showed equal gains for the Pakistan Peoples Party, whose leader, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated on Dec. 27, and the Pakistan Muslim League-N, the faction led by Nawaz Sharif, like Ms. Bhutto a former prime minister. Each party may be in a position to form the next government.

The results were interpreted here as a repudiation of Mr. Musharraf as well as the Bush administration, which has staunchly backed him for more than six years as its best bet in the campaign against the Islamic militants in Pakistan. American officials will have little choice now but to seek alternative allies from among the new political forces emerging from the vote.”

As the NYT rather tactfully says:

“The results opened a host of new challenges for the Bush administration, which has been criticized in Congress and by Pakistan analysts for relying too heavily on Mr. Musharraf. Even as Mr. Musharraf’s standing plummeted and the insurgency gained strength, senior Bush administration officials praised Mr. Musharraf as a valued partner in the effort against terrorism.”

Yep: when your policy involves relying exclusively on one increasingly unpopular leader, and that leader is demolished in an election, it tends to open “a host of new challenges.” All the more so since by aligning ourselves so closely with Musharraf, we did real damage to our own reputation in Pakistan.

One interesting note: as far as I can tell, the Pakistani religious parties seem to have done very, very badly. Here are the results so far; the MMA is the union of religious parties, and it looks as though they are being demolished. Background here: apparently, the MMA was both divided and not very good at running things. Interestingly, the party that seems to have done best in the NWFP is a secular Pashtun nationalist party.

I hope this means that we won’t hear any more hyperventilating about the possibility that jihadis could sweep to power in Pakistan at any minute if we don’t keep supporting dictators. The religious parties have never been very popular in Pakistan. They seem to be even less popular now.

by Reihan

Unlike my older and smarter sisters, I wasn’t much of a reader as a small kid. But then, in a stroke of genius, my eldest sister gave me a bunch of comic books and a They Might Be Giants CD for my tenth or eleventh birthday. And so I was doomed to be an incorrigible nerd for the rest of my life. The comic books (an Uncanny X-Men from the dense and confusing time the team was laying low in Australia while battling Reavers, and a few other Marvel titles) blew my mind. I soon became an obsessive collector, aided and abetted by my father. Because both of my parents worked a lot, Sunday afternoons with my father at Comics Plus, then located in a big and beautiful building in Park Slope, were the highlight of my week. Afterwards we’d get milkshakes at the Greek diner and I’d try to explain who Galactus was as my father looked on, dazed and bemused. I shudder to think about how much money I badgered and pestered him to spend, but I also know that comic books filled me with curiosity about the wider world.

This was in the days before Wikipedia, when learning the minutiae of the Marvel Universe, and the DC Universe and Nexus and Magnus, Robot Fighter and all the rest, was a serious undertaking. Definitely not for dabblers. Pretty soon I knew virtually everything there was to know. I even badgered my father into taking me to a comic book convention at the old Hotel Pennsylvania, where I blew my "savings" on an old-ish Uncanny X-Men from a patent lawyer who was probably younger than I am now. On another memorable weekend my parents took me with them on a long drive to Pittsburgh to visit some of their close friends from Bangladesh. Turns out my parents’ friends had two very cool college-age sons who were amused by my interest in comics. By "cool" I mean they spent summers working in Alaska on the pipeline, certainly the coolest summer job I can think of. They handed over a treasure trove of Bloom County books and some pretty alterna-comics, like Howard Chaykin‘s amazing American Flagg!, which are still among my most cherished possessions, silly as that sounds. I wish I could find these guys and thank them. It’s humbling to think that these guys, not far removed from their own adolescence, would be so generous. I don’t even remember their names, but I’ll always consider them role models.

I kept on collecting comics until around my sophomore year of high school, when I turned to other forms of periodical literature, particularly Andrew Sullivan’s New Republic. It was a less wrenching transition than you might think, as the TNR of that era was full of zany and colorful characters who were only marginally less crazy than the supervillains who had previously captured my imagination. I can’t really overemphasize the lasting impact of comics on my brain. Even now my intellectual obsessions track my old obsessions with obscure comic book characters: I’d read and read, gorging myself on a particular character or set of scenarios, then grow exhausted and move on to another. I later felt the same way about, say, anarcho-primitivism or state theory or the Brazilian terrorist group MR8. So it certainly could be that comic books have permanently destroyed my brain, and my ability to engage in truly deliberative thinking. I don’t think so, though.

Even now I’ll occasionally swing by a comic book store, and I’ll find that preteens and their dads are no longer the main demographic. It’s all men around my age, in part because comics are quite expensive and in part because the medium has steadily grown more "serious" and in part because, well, you know, video games. One of my best friends from high school and college, James, has actually become a very serious collector, and he keeps us appraised of what’s going on. The truth is I’ve grown allergic to most superhero titles. As prudish as this sounds, I’m sort of troubled by the bodies, which are often so distended and misshapen, the women in particular. There’s something dispiriting and lame about the pneumatic bosoms and bulging biceps.

I was thus a little skeptical when James singled out a comic book called Y: The Last Man.

i won’t say that there isn’t a single storyline that sags a little;
there are a couple of slow spells. but in terms of unifying concept,
character, and plot, i just think it’s marvelous. and it was also,
for me, genuinely very moving and thematically whole in a way that
almost no comic books are.

Armed with this high praise, I plowed right in, buying all of the trade paperbacks that have been released thus far. Co-creators Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra have garnered plenty of richly deserved praise within the comics world, but I want to tell you, non-comic readers, the few of you who are still with me, to read this wonderful, affecting, intelligent, humane story.

I have reservations, to be sure. Virtually every woman Yorick encounters seems to be a Sarah Lawrence or Brown grad. Even a cutlass-wielding, heroin-smuggling pirate turns out to have majored in comparative literature. Clearly this reflects Vaughan’s cultural constellation, as well it should, and I imagine there’s some self-parodic, knowing dimension to all of this. It nevertheless seems a bit silly. But that hardly detracts from the fact that the story is amazing, and that it places tough, smart, complicated women at the center.

Without going into too much plot summary, the basic premise is that a strange plague kills all male mammals on Earth with the exception of a capuchin monkey and a sweet-natured yet mostly incompetent unemployed 22-year-old would-be magician. Yes, the fate of humanity is in some sense in his hands. We see the world as it collapses and slowly rebuilds, and as new movements and religions and cultural practices merge to fill the vacuum left by the sudden, grisly death of half of humanity. As an elaborate science fiction scenario, Y can’t be beat, and that’s not even the strength of the series. The real strength is in the strange camaraderie that develops between Yorick and his protectors, a steely secret agent who goes by the name 355 and Alison Mann, a brilliant, insecure, cranky geneticist. Then there are brief comic episodes that follow the adventures of minor characters, and a subplot involving Yorick’s sister, who struggles with murderous madness brought on by the trauma of The Event.

Randall Collins’s Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, a very well-regarded book praised by my friend and colleague Graeme Wood in this here book review, has a fascinating passage on violence perpetrated by young girls, who draw on the (entirely false) received wisdom that girls aren’t violent by nature to shield themselves from reprisals. That women can be as vicious and violent as men is a recurring theme. Yet it’s also clear that women do a better job of rebuilding their world than men ever would.

All this is to say: there is plenty of food for thought. The series is now complete, and you can read it from start to finish.

It turns out that Brian K. Vaughan is also a co-producer on Lost, my favorite television program, and he wrote two of my favorite Lost episodes, including this season’s excellent "Confirmed Dead." I am of course consumed by jealousy, and also very happy to see a true talent flourishing.

Message: I care.

Other message: read Y: The Last Man. Thanks.

by Reihan

I finally saw it a couple of nights ago, and it was excellent. To be sure, I also very much enjoyed Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, so that should give you some indication of my preferences. There are few things I enjoy more than really absorbing character studies, even when the characters in question are stupid and self-absorbed. That’s certainly true of 2 Days In Paris. Adam Goldberg’s character in particular is kind of an insufferable punk. Delpy, the writer and director, made her character something of a badass, great fun to watch, particularly when she lays into a bigot driver and a vile ex-boyfriend, and also when she sweetly negotiates around her slightly dotty soixante-huitard parents. The following scene might make you cringe. If it does, you should skip the movie. But if it resonates, even a little, I’d urge you to check it out. It’s the final scene, so consider this a spoiler alert.

by Reihan

I fully expect that Be Kind Rewind will be the best movie of 2008 and possibly the best movie of the decade. Leaving aside a stellar cast that includes Mia Farrow, screen legend and crusading bohemian supermom, the movie is at its heart about the importance of a free culture, and of actively producing rather than just passively consuming. Don’t believe me? It’s all in the trailer, fools. Check out 1:44 to to 2:03 and you’ll catch my drift.

P.S.- Joe Carter accuses me of turning white. All I’ll say is that I’m browner than a bowler hat.

[Patrick Appel] The Onion has a very helpful glossary of commonly used political terms. Some of my favorites:

ballot-
An object recording a voter’s decision that is frequently counted toward an election’s outcome debate-
A contest to see which candidate can answer the fewest questions.

electoral college-
A process by which the number of states in the Union is narrowed down to the most important seven or eight.

experience-
A quantitative score any politician may increase by slaying foes or solving riddles.

hope-
An intangible object within every American that is destroyed every four years in November.

platform-
A list of the subjects that candidates are willing to discuss.

Rock The Vote-
Something that is, apparently, still happening.

The glossary reminds of me of The Devil’s Dictionary by Abrose Bierce which was first published in the 1880s. A few examples of definitons from the book:

Alliance, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply in each other’s pockets that they cannot seperately plunder a third.

Alone, adj. In bad company.

Future n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

You get the idea.

[Patrick Appel] When the movie Juno hit theaters, many pro-life bloggers appreciated it because Juno takes the baby to term, while pro-choice bloggers argued that it was essentially a movie about choosing whether or not to have an abortion. I don’t think you can superimpose either political viewpoint onto the movie entirely, which is why this interview with Ellen Page (Juno) gave me pause:

I very much am pro-choice, I don’t really get it. People are always going to project.

Of course, who a filmmaker or actor is and what they believe is secondary to the film itself. The beauty of Juno was how it brought together two political extremes. I’d argue that art is always about projection, about melding your own prejudices and opinions with those of the artist. The same is true of writing. Reading happens when you read these words, not when I type them or think them.

(hat tip: Jessica)

by Reihan The following post closely resembles outright hackery. Rest assured, it is very sincere and heartfelt hackery.

The special election to replace the late Tom Lantos is only a few weeks away, and it looks as though former State Senator Jackie Speier has the race sewn up. But a group of free culture enthusiasts, led by Harvard’s John Palfrey, are working to persuade Lawrence Lessig to run for the seat. Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, the leading light of the free culture movement, and now a scholar focused on corruption and the fate of democracy, has a highly unusual pedigree. As a kid, he was a teenage Reaganite and hardcore libertarian. Though he later drifted to the left, Lessig’s leftism (leftishm?) reflects a Millian sensibility that informs his thinking about the uses and abuses of government and corporate power. More encouraging still, he clerked for Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia. His worldview derives from a serious and lasting engagement with conservative ideas. This accounts in part for his decidedly unconventional tack in Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which he made an originalist case against the scandalous Copyright Term Extension Act  of 1998. After losing the case, Lessig offered an insightful mea culpa that’s well worth your time.

The image that will always stick in my head comes from an editorial that ran in The New York Times. While the reaction to the Sonny Bono Act itself was almost unanimously negative, the reaction to the court’s decision was mixed. The press coverage that attacked the decision did so because it left standing a silly and harmful law. That "grand experiment" that we call "the public domain" is over, the paper said. When I can make light of it, I think, "Honey, I shrunk the Constitution." But I can rarely make light of it. We had in our Constitution a commitment to free culture. In the case that I fathered, the Supreme Court effectively renounced that commitment. A better lawyer would have made them see differently.

Call him a crazed egomanic, but there’s something really remarkable about the way Lessig takes a manifest failure of our constitutional system personally. He’s not in public life because he was charming and popular in high school, or to find some lobbying sinecure or because he is convinced the other side constitutes an American Taliban that must be shamed and then destroyed. Rather, Lessig is most concerned with preserving the immune system, the organic intellectual defenses, of a free and open society, something conservatives and liberals alike ought to care about very much.

Of course there are many avenues through which to effect political change, perhaps the most important of which is raising awareness of the issues at stake. Lessig has brilliantly pursued that course. In leaving behind questions surrounding copyright, though, he’s recognized that there are deeper problems with the body politic, and deeper questions concerning the vitality and indeed the viability of representative democracy in a society like our own. The time may now have come for Lessig to bring his considerable rhetorical skills and intellectual prowess to the legislative branch.

I’m not a liberal and I’m not a Democrat. I’ll bet I disagree with Lessig on Iraq and S-CHIP and possibly even net neutrality. Yet I think Lessig, who is very firmly a liberal and very firmly a Democrat, can, in some small but significant way, deliver some of that "change" we’ve been hearing so much about.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with the Cult of Obama, which Patrick Ruffini brilliantly dissected through the lens of corporate marketing in this post, but if the rising tide of interest and enthusiasm can lead one or two Lessigs into public life, perhaps it will end up being more than a mass delusion. I think of Lessig as an almost paradigmatic Obamacrat, a smart and accomplished professional interested in reforming and revitalizing government for the betterment of all Americans through the embrace of disruptive technologies and, um, cherished American principles. If this is the animating impulse behind the new liberalism, the new conservatism that will rise to challenge it will be sharper and more forward-looking still.

There’s more to say about the nature and importance of free culture, about Lessig’s virtues, and about why conservatives and liberals alike have reason to back him. But I guess I’ll leave you with Glenn Reynolds’s characteristically brief take.

LARRY LESSIG FOR CONGRESS?  We could do worse — and probably will!

We’re in a rare and weird moment in which we actually can do better. The voters of California’s 12th Congressional District, and all Californians and all Americans, deserve better. Si se puede! Oh heck, I’ve gone off the deep end. I’ll just add that I never get excited about candidates ever. It’s just not in my DNA. So I’m not used this whole enthusiasm jag. It doesn’t suit me, I’m afraid.

by hilzoy

I have been idly following the fight between the McCain and Obama campaigns on the subject of accepting public financing for the general election, and thinking that at some point I’d probably have to write about it. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this: the laws are arcane and complicated, and going back and figuring out who had said what, exactly, about accepting public financing in the general election isn’t really my idea of fun. I mean, I may be wonky, but even I have limits. So I’ve been hoping that Mark Schmitt, who actually knows a lot about this topic, would write about it, and luckily for me, he has. And he brings up a very interesting point: that John McCain might have inadvertently opted into the system of public financing by accepting a loan that did not exclude any public money he got as collateral.

The reason accepting loans matters is that the campaign finance laws try to force a choice on candidates: either you take the public money and abide by the limitations that go with it, or you don’t. If you don’t actually accept the money from the government, but use the fact that you are eligible to receive that money to secure a loan from someone else, then you can essentially spend the money you’d get through public financing without accepting the limitations that go with it. The consensus seems to be that this would violate the letter of campaign finance laws; it seems to me indisputable that it would violate their spirit.

Today, Schmitt has found the actual loan agreement, and it’s pretty astonishing. On the one hand, it goes out of its way to redefine “collateral” as not including any public money. On the other hand, it contains the following startling passage (p. 22, Schmitt’s transcript and his emphases):

“Additional Requirement. Borrower and lender agree that if Borrower [McCain’s campaign commitee] withdraws from the public matching funds program, but John McCain then does not win the next primary or caucus in which he is active (which can be any primary or caucus held the same day) or does not place at least within 10 percentage points of the winner of that primary or caucus, Borrower will cause John McCain to remain an active political candidate and Borrower will, within thirty (3) days of said primary or caucus (i) reapply for public matching funds, (ii) grant to Lender, as additional collateral for the Loan, a first priority perfected security interest in and to all Borrower’s right, title and interest in and to the public matching funds program, and (iii) execute and deliver to Lender such documents, instruments and agreements as Lender may require with respect to the foregoing.”

You read that right: in exchange for a loan, John McCain gave away his right to decide for himself whether or not to stay in the race for the Presidency. And he did so in order to use his eligibility for future matching funds, rather than the funds themselves, as collateral. Again, I agree with Schmitt:

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is a promise to perpetuate a fraud on the American taxpayers: if he no longer intended to seek the presidency, he made a legally-binding promise to pretend to remain in the race just long enough to collect public money to repay the loan.”

Just remember: he probably suffered while he did this, and according to Nicholas Kristof, that makes it all OK.

Oh, and about Obama’s “pledge”?

“Obama’s precise statement was, and has always been, “If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” That’s an artful statement, and it’s not artful in a “meaning of ‘is'” sense — it’s exactly the right answer. A commitment to “preserve a publicly financed election” would have to mean much more than whether both participate in the system. It would require some significant agreement about how to handle outside money, 527s, “Swift Boat”-type attack groups, party money, etc., and other factors that have undermined the last two publicly financed elections, from both sides. It is hardly an evasion to describe this as an agreement to be negotiated, rather than a simple pledge.

The side story here is why many of the the “traditional” campaign finance reform advocates and the Times and Post editorial boards still seem so hypnotized by McCain-as-reformer, a pose he adopted for a period that ended years ago, that they cannot call him on his evasion of public funds in the primary, and are happy to be used to echo his first partisan attack in the general election, against someone who, unlike McCain, really has been a remarkably consistent and hard-working supporter of public financing, at both the state and national level.”