Tag: Premium

Americans are starting to feel better about the economy:

Zachary Karabell wonders how the good economic news will affect politics next year:

With rising consumer confidence (not a good proxy for behavior but not a bad snapshot of attitudes) and all economic metrics reflecting stability and growth, it may be that the narrative of failure and coming implosion will weaken in 2015. That will change the landscape for the presidential election campaign. If that campaign pits Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush, it might mean a more nuanced (nuance in an election year?) debate about what government can or should do to accelerate and smooth the transition away from a manufacturing economy and towards a service and technology economy.  But it is still hard to see the Republican primaries revolving around anything other than a litany of Democratic economic and national security failures, along with alleged usurpations of power.

After last week’s strong GDP report, Nyhan predicted that Obama’s numbers will improve:

The lesson of history is that Mr. Obama will get credit if growth continues, but we should not be surprised if public opinion lags objective measures of the economy. The political scientists Peter Enns and Gregory McAvoy write, for instance: “For the most part, public opinion does not react instantaneously to changes in economic information. It takes time for economic news to make its way from government reports into news reports so that ordinary citizens can absorb and respond to this information.”

Reihan hopes Republicans will get their act together:

In 2010 and 2014, reminding voters that “we are not currently in charge and things are bad” basically worked for Republicans, particularly with older white voters favorably disposed toward conservative candidates. In the next two years, this strategy is unlikely to work quite so well. It will get harder to deny that the economy is picking up a head of steam, that unemployment levels have gone from high to halfway decent, and that the federal budget deficit is getting smaller. Should Republicans congratulate President Obama on a job well done and leave it at that? Well, no. They need to do what they’ve failed to do for the past half-decade and explain why they can do a better job than the Democrats of steering the American economy.

But Waldman thinks that Republicans are in a bind:

The most important fact of the American economy in the past few decades may be its failure to produce rising wages, but that’s not something Republicans are particularly concerned with. Their economic focus is usually on business owners — the taxes they pay, the regulations they have to abide by, and so on. Even if you believe that helping those owners is the best way to help the people who work for them, you’re going to have a hard time finding Republicans who want to talk about something like wage stagnation.

 

 

Lastly, Jordan Weissmann curbs some of the excitement:

What makes this moment of the recovery seem promising is that it looks sustainable. As Matt O’Brien puts it at the Washington Post, the last year of growth hasn’t been the fastest since the recession ended, “but it has been the best.” Namely, it’s being driven by domestic spending, instead of exports (which, given the weakness elsewhere in the world, you can’t always count on), and the housing market hasn’t even fully rebounded yet. I would add that, after years of paying down their debts and buying cars with better gas mileage to deal with fuel prices, consumers are on slightly stronger footing should something unexpected go wrong in the economy, such as another sudden rise in oil prices (you never know).

In short, the U.S. economy is getting hot enough to keep chipping away at the unemployment rate and eventually push up wages a bit—at least until the Federal Reserve feels compelled to raise interest rates. It’s a good place to be. You can call it a comeback. But I wouldn’t hold your breath for a boom.

Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise, the House whip, has admitted that “he spoke at a gathering hosted by white-supremacist leaders while serving as a state representative in 2002.” Dreher is unimpressed by the excuses:

I think it is possible that Scalise didn’t know what he was getting into when he agreed to appear at this thing, but once you get there and realize that you are at a David Duke event, you leave. Period. There is no excuse for staying there — and it’s impossible to believe that Scalise remained ignorant of Duke’s sponsorship of the event until after he left. Did he send out a press release repudiating the group and saying he had been hoodwinked into speaking there? Doesn’t seem like it.

Do I think Scalise is a white supremacist? No, not at all. But he was insufficiently disgusted by associating with the most notorious racist and anti-Semite in the country. I don’t see how he stays in GOP leadership with this on his record.

Erick Erickson moved out of Louisiana because he was disgusted by David Duke:

By 2002, everybody knew Duke was still the man he had claimed not to be. EVERYBODY. How the hell does somebody show up at a David Duke organized event in 2002 and claim ignorance?

Weigel digs into the story:

Scalise was on the record attacking Duke for that 1999 race. “The novelty of David Duke has worn off,” Scalise told Roll Call‘s John Mercurio. “The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected.”

That phrase—”who not only believes in the issues they care about”—seemed innocuous enough at the time. In 2014, after Scalise has won five easy elections to the House (he took Governor Bobby Jindal’s vacant seat in a 2008 special), it’s being read as evidence that Scalise did not condemn Duke nearly enough.

Ezra weighs in:

Scalise might well have ended up at the David Duke-backed European-American Unity and Rights Organization without knowing who they were or really bothering to find out. He might well have been trying to destroy Duke by questioning his electability rather than his views. But that’s only because he was practiced at appealing to the kind of people who really did support David Duke and really were sympathetic to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization. And, now that Scalise has risen through Louisiana politics to become a nationally influential figure, that’s the problem.

The biggest question for Scalise’s future is whether there’s anything else. Now that Scalise’s speech to EURO has been found, and his comments about David Duke unearthed, political reporters are going to go looking for more. If this is the end of it, Scalise might be fine. If it isn’t, then his career is in jeopardy.

PM Carpenter is enjoying the circus:

One can believe whatever one wants to believe about Scalise’s defense of know-nothingness, but one cannot deny the hilarity of the Washington Post’s magnificent understatement: “The news [of Scalise having addressed a white-supremacist, Neo-Nazi, KKK-associated, David Duke-founded group] could complicate Republican efforts to project the sense of a fresh start for a resurgent, diversifying party.”

Nearly as funny and equally unhelpful to Scalise’s defense is the amicus brief uttered by Iowa’s Rep. Steve King, who blathered to the Post that “Jesus dined with tax collectors and sinners. It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, it’s the sick.” A lofty comparison indeed, however the point of King’s parable is that Jesus knew he was dining with sinners (unless, of course, he was inadequately staffed).

Alison Griswold finds that, over “the past five years, ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit and Allegiant have consistently outperformed their peers in terms of operating profit”:

That airlines like Virgin America and JetBlue can’t turn a strong profit while maintaining a better level of service speaks to the odd tastes of the American air traveler. As Matt Yglesias put it in Slate two years ago, “the basic moral of the story is that airline service is bad because customers want bad airline service. Or, rather, they don’t want to pay a premium for better service.” As far as consumer preferences go, this attitude is an outlier. The restaurant industry, for example, is well aware that diners are willing to spend more for what fast-casual Chipotle and Shake Shack serve up than for the stuff at Taco Bell and McDonald’s. “There’s a lot of customers who believe that every airline is the same,” says Paul Berry, a spokesman for Spirit Airlines. “They don’t think that way when it comes to restaurants … but they think the airline industry is different. And really, it isn’t.”

Also commenting on airfare economics, Tim Wu ponders the airlines’ increasing reliance on extra fees:

If fees are great for airlines, what about for us? Does it make any difference if an airline collects its cash in fees as opposed to through ticket sales? The airlines, and some economists, argue that the rise of the fee model is good for travellers. You only pay for what you want, and you can therefore save money if you, for instance, don’t mind sitting in middle seats in the back, waiting in line to board, or bringing your own food. That’s why American Airlines calls its fees program “Your Choice” and suggests that it makes the “travel experience even more convenient, cost-effective, flexible and personalized.”

But the fee model comes with systematic costs that are not immediately obvious. Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.

 

In an interview about his new book, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age, James Carroll points to the most essential element of what he believes it means to live like Jesus in today’s world:

The biggest single thing I can think of is nonviolence. The thing that I most value about Jesus was his clear commitment to nonviolence in a very violent world. That message has never had more importance, especially for me as an American. The United States of America threatens the world with violence in ways that no other country does, and that boils down to our refusal to disarm after the end of the Cold War. This unchecked, monumental national security establishment that is defining our nation in terrible ways—the nonviolence of Jesus speaks directly to the American condition.

Obviously, this is defining for me because of my life history. I’m the son of a military man; I see everything through his eyes in some way.

More about that “life history”:

I was part of the anti-war movement. I was a Catholic priest and chaplain at Boston University, which was a center of the anti-war movement, and those were defining years for me. My father was an Air Force general, very much involved in the administration of the Vietnam War. He was the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, charged, among other things, with picking targets for our bombers in Vietnam. The war was the occasion of my break with my father. But my dad gave me my love of this country and he gave me my love of the Church, and those two things remain defining for me.

I’ve been working all these years to rescue, to protect my faith as a Catholic, and “Christ Actually” is the latest effort to do that. I’ve been working all these years to rescue my love of America, despite my dread of its unchecked militarism.

Walter Laqueur asserts that for a “considerable time the element of fantasy in Russian political discourse has been strong (and growing stronger), not only at the popular level but in official statements.” Not surprising, exactly, but the details he marshals are remarkable:

A Russian citizen watching television in the evening will be exposed to the historical programme of Nikolai Starikov (to mention but one representative of this genre) which “prove” in convincing detail that the Russian revolutions of 1917 were engineered by the British secret service (the question of whether Somerset Maugham played the decisive role in this context is left open), and that Hitler too was an agent of MI5 or MI6 but did not really want to attack the Soviet Union. He was egged on, however, by Churchill and Roosevelt.

This will be followed by a documentary demonstrating that Trotsky was the father of German Nazism (this also happens to be the title of the series).

If the viewer still has an appetite for sensational revelations, he can switch to yet another series dealing with the connection of the “German patriot Martin Heidegger” and the Balfour Declaration. Retiring to bed with a good book he may well chose the immensely popular Maxim Kalashnikov (no relation of the weapon designer) maintaining that while the present Russian generation is pretty hopeless, a new generation of heroes could be produced in record time, following the pioneering work done by the SS Ahnenerbe in the study of the Aryan race which will put right everything that is wrong or imperfect in contemporary Russia.

The Stalinist system came to Russia 90 years ago and with it the frequent belief in manifestly untrue assertions. This practice has been more pronounced in some periods than in others. It has been denounced on various occasions by experts, but it has by no means been rejected. If in recent years there has been increased sympathy, even a certain longing, for the Stalin period in Russian history, it should not be surprising that this includes the readiness to believe manifestly untrue assertions. President Putin himself argued not long ago that Stalin was no worse than Oliver Cromwell.

John Elder Robison believes it’s about time:

Research into the genetic and biological foundations of autism is surely worthwhile, but it’s a long-term game. The time from discovery to deployment of an approved therapy is measured in decades, while the autism community needs help right away. If we accept that autistic people are neurologically different rather than sick, the research goal changes from finding a cure to helping us achieve our best quality of life.

One way to do so, he suggests, is to “put autistic people in charge”:

The fact is, researchers have treated autism as a childhood disability, when in fact it’s a lifelong difference. If childhood is a quarter of the life span, then three-quarters of the autistic population are adults. Doesn’t it make sense that some of us would want to take a role in shaping the course of research that affects us? If you’re a researcher with an interest in autism—and you want to really make a difference—open a dialogue with autistic people. Ask what they want and need, and listen.

Meanwhile, Stephen S. Hall examines how genetic mutations appear to contribute to autism spectrum disorders. He consults researcher Evan Eichler, who suggests “it’s like autism is the price we pay for having an evolved human species”:

Copy number variations in one specific [genetic] hot spot on the short arm of chromosome 16, for example, have been associated with autism. By comparing the DNA of chimpanzees, orangutans, a Neanderthal, and a Denisovan (another archaic human) with the genomes of more than 2,500 contemporary humans, including many with autism, Xander Nuttle, a member of Eichler’s group, has been able to watch this area on the chromosome undergo dramatic changes through evolutionary history known as BOLA2 that seems to promote instability. Nonhuman primates have at most two copies of the gene; Neanderthals have two; contemporary humans have anywhere from three to 14, and the multiple copies of the gene appear in virtually every sample the researchers have looked at. This suggests that the extra copies of the BOLA2 gene, which predispose people to neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, must also confer some genetic benefit to the human species. …

In other words, the same duplications that can lead to autism may also create what Eichler calls genetic “nurseries” in which new gene variants arise that enhance cognition or some other human trait.

In a must-read Atlantic cover-story, Fallows biopsies America’s public, political and economic understanding of its military:

Outsiders treat [the US military] both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.

An essential point about military spending:

America’s distance from the military makes the country too willing to go to war, and too callous about the damage warfare inflicts. This distance also means that we spend too much money on the military and we spend it stupidly, thereby shortchanging many of the functions that make the most difference to the welfare of the troops and their success in combat. We buy weapons that have less to do with battlefield realities than with our unending faith that advanced technology will ensure victory, and with the economic interests and political influence of contractors. This leaves us with expensive and delicate high-tech white elephants, while unglamorous but essential tools, from infantry rifles to armored personnel carriers, too often fail our troops.

He estimates that overall national security will cost more than a trillion dollars this year, noting that “the United States will spend about 50 percent more on the military this year than its average through the Cold War and Vietnam War.” And the political will to combat such excess remains highly unlikely:

A man who worked for decades overseeing Pentagon contracts told me this past summer, “The system is based on lies and self-interest, purely toward the end of keeping money moving.” What kept the system running, he said, was that “the services get their budgets, the contractors get their deals, the congressmen get jobs in their districts, and no one who’s not part of the deal bothers to find out what is going on.”