South Dakota Politics

Hold The Mayo on the Health Care Sandwich

Implementation of the Affordable Care Act continues to deliver bad news to the Administration. President Obama argued for health care reform chiefly on the grounds that it would "bend the cost curve downward," i.e., save public money by making healthcare delivery less expensive. This was never a realistic promise. It requires an altogether unjustified optimism to think that the program can break even.

One of the ways the ACA is supposed to make money is by the creation of ACO's, Accountable Care Organizations. Here is a bit from Kaiser Health News back in March.

An ACO is a network of doctors and hospitals that shares responsibility for providing care to patients. In the new law, an ACO would agree to manage all of the health care needs of a minimum of 5,000 Medicare beneficiaries for at least three years.

Yet the concept has been short on details. ACOs have been compared to the elusive unicorn: everyone seems to know what it looks like, but no one has actually seen one. But the health care industry has already embarked on a frenzied quest to create them as quickly as possible. Today, after many delays and false starts, the Obama administration proposed guidelines on how ACOs will work.

A Concept Short on Details would make a good title for a book on the Obama Administration. The idea seems to be to encourage institutions like the Mayo Clinic to become units in a national network of efficient healthcare organizations. The Mayo Clinic seems to be the best example of a system that not only delivers high quality care, but does so at relatively low cost. The ACO program would, in theory, encourage the Mayo model to be replicated all across the country.

There's only one problem (among thousands of others), the government will be running the program. Here is a bit from Kaiser Health News on Sept. 14^th:

During the health care debate, the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Geisinger Health System and Intermountain Healthcare were repeatedly touted as models for a new health care delivery system.

Now, they have something else in common: All four have declined to apply for the "Pioneer" program tailor-made by the Obama administration to reward such organizations.

When the poster children for this program refuse to show up for the group photo, there might be a problem. And it isn't only the poster children.

Hospital and doctor groups complained that the program created more financial risks than rewards and imposed onerous reporting requirements. The American Medical Group Association, which represents nearly 400 large provider organizations, responded with a letter to CMS warning that more than 90 percent of its members would not participate because of the reporting requirements and financial disincentives. In particular, the proposed rule would impose penalties for ACOs that do not achieve savings.

And here is another bit:

The American Hospital Association estimated that starting an ACO could cost a hospital $11 million to $26 million in the first year. The proposed regulation put the cost at $1.8 million.

The ACO program is supposed to save Medicare $430 over three years. Those are pretty meager savings by Medicare standards. It will cost each participating hospital a minimum of $11 million dollars in the first year. The first 40 hospitals that sign up, assuming any are foolish enough to do so, will eat up all the savings and then some.

I am guessing that every Rube Goldberg twist in the Affordable Care Act will work pretty much like this. A penny saved will be a penny taxed, plus $337 in reporting expenses. That, gentle readers, is what the Obama, Reid, and Pelosi mean by "affordable care."

Hat tip to Meagan McArdle.

Energetic Energy & Unenergetic Energy

I almost feel the need to apologize for talking about policy. It is pretty clear that the President isn't concerned with policy any more. His recent plans were issued in the full knowledge that they would not pass the Democratic Senate, let alone the House. They were produced as campaign artifacts.

As I have been on the radio frequently talking about Keystone XL, I will persist in talking about policy. Here are a couple of charts that illustrate the case for KXL.

Those tell a tale. The U.S. imports about half its oil. A lot of it comes from Mexico, but Mexico is no longer reliable. Its government is marginally functional and is threatened by its war with criminal gangs. Investment in Mexican oil fields has declined precipitously. It is well on its way to being a failed state.

Canada, by contrast, is a very reliable source of everything Canadian, including oil. That is a very good reason for the U.S. to tap the Canadian tar sands.

I continue to think that opposition to Keystone XL is at bottom an opposition to oil. This opposition is cushioned by the fantasy that if we stop relying on oil (or break our "addiction" to oil) we can move to renewable sources of energy. Well, here is another chart.

That tells another rueful tale. The U.S. Government subsidizes almost all forms of energy. The President keeps talking about ending subsidizes for the great fossil fuels, but this seems to be just more talk. I could be talked into it, if he were serious. That would mean ending all such subsidies, and the chart above tells what that would do to the breezy and brilliant forms of energy.

A megawatt hour, I gather, will power about 330 households for, well, an hour. Uncle Sam shells out about a quarter for every megawatt hour of power produced by natural gas and petroleum, and 44 pennies for the same from coal. Nuclear power is relatively expensive at a buck and a half, though most of that is research and insurance. It could be argued that nuclear power would not be viable without government protection, though that is a legal and political burden rather than a purely economic one. What is clear is that these forms of power would continue without subsidies, for these are the sources of energy on which the economy depends.

By contrast, wind and solar power are subsidized at a rate of more than twenty three and twenty four dollars a megawatt hour. That is a hundred times what natural gas and petroleum are costing the fed. No one would be generating power by wind or sun without massive federal subsidies. These "renewable" energy sources are not producing energy or wealth, they are soaking it up. These industries exist because wealth is transferred from viable enterprises to maintain them. They are not adding to the energy supply, they are depleting it. Likewise, green jobs are not jobs created, they are jobs absorbed at a loss. Paying workers for unproductive work eliminates jobs elsewhere at a rate of about two to one.

The jobs created by the Keystone XL project will be real jobs. The oil that flows will pay for them in energy produced.

Republicans Raising Cain

I seem to recall that someone here thought that Mitt Romney couldn't be elected because he is a Mormon. The implication, apparently, was that Waspish prejudice wouldn't allow it. That is nonsense, of course. Romney has two basic problems. One is that a lot of Republicans are not convinced that he is authentically conservative. The other is that a lot of voters across the spectrum are not convinced that Romney is authentically anything. The latter, I suspect, is Romney's biggest problem. Romney's religion has been of zero interest so far because that kind of prejudice just isn't a factor among Republicans.

Nor is racial prejudice a factor among the Republican electorate. The contrary is a matter of faith among Democrats. Here is an excerpt from an interview with actor Morgan Freeman on CNN.

PIERS MORGAN, HOST: Has Obama helped the process of eradicating racism, or has it in a strange way made it worse.

MORGAN FREEMAN: Made it worse. Made it worse. Look at, look, the Tea Partiers, who are controlling the Republican Party, stated, and what's this guy's name, Mitch O'Connell. Is that his, O'Connell?

MORGAN: Yeah, Mitch McConnell, yeah.

FREEMAN: Mitch McConnell. Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What's, what does that, what underlines that? "Screw the country. We're going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we're going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here."

MORGAN: But is that necessarily a racist thing?

FREEMAN: It is a racist thing.

MORGAN: Is it not Republicans, wouldn't that say that about any Democrat president?

FREEMAN: No, they would have gotten rid of Bill Clinton if they could have.

Freeman doesn't seem to know enough to have opinions about any actual Republicans, but he does demonstrate his own prejudice. He thinks Republicans are racists despite recognizing that, in fact, they aren't treating Obama any differently than they did Bill Clinton. That's precisely the kind of self-imposed confusion that indicates prejudice.

Freeman would doubtlessly be unimpressed by the fact that Herman Cain won the Florida straw poll.

Cain, who has never held elective office, received nearly as many votes as the three next finishers combined. A big cheer went up from the delegates in the cavernous convention hall when Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced Cain's winning total: 986 votes out of the 2,657 that were cast, for a percentage of 37.1 percent.

The Florida straw poll has been a very reliable predictor of Republican nominees, but it's hard to take Cain seriously just yet. We are still talking about a man who has never held elective office even if, unlike Obama, he at least has successfully run something. Godfather's Pizza is something.

What this surely indicates is that the bloom is off Rick Perry and that there is no rush back to Romney so far. Okay, but let's imagine for a moment that Herman Cain was Governor Cain from, I don't know, Tennessee. Let's say he was as good at running a state house as he was at running Burger King and Godfather's. Say he was an authentic conservative.

I say, making those assumptions, that Herman Cain is the Republican nominee by a mile. The Tea Party people would love him. The Christian Right would love him. The Republican rank and file would love him. Independents would love him. I say, making those assumptions, he'd be the next President.

Prejudice is part and parcel of the human condition. Republicans are no freer of it than any similarly large group of Americans. I think we can say that Republicans are less prejudice than Morgan Freeman.

Keystone Addendum

Here is an addendum to my recent post on Keystone XL. It is taken from my next column for South Dakota Magazine.

Once the pipeline is in operation, it will provide much needed relief to governments in the form of state and local taxes.

According to the State Department's Final Environmental Impact Statement, the pipeline project would add an additional $15.4 million to the annual property tax revenues of nine South Dakota counties.

Meade, Lyman, and Perkins counties would see annual revenue increases ranging from 38 to 48%.

Tripp County would see an increase of 150%.

Haakon and Jones Counties would enjoy three times the annual property tax revenues that they brought in over 2006.

The grand prize winner will be Harding County. Its revenues would nearly quadruple, from $876,254 to $3,346,244!

Nor is Pierre left out. The state will rake in about eight and a half million from the project development.

 

Obama No Better Than Bush

There's a tongue-twister for you. USAToday couldn't quite get it out. Here is how they open their piece:

Americans tend to rate Barack Obama a better president than predecessor George W. Bush, but not as good a president as Bill Clinton, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

In fact, that is not what their poll showed. It showed this:

According to Gallup, 43% rate Obama a better president than Bush, while 34% rate him as a worse president; another 22% say the two presidents are "about the same."

That's fifty-six percent who think that Obama is no better or worse than Bush, exactly the opposite of the tendency USAToday announces.

Keystone XL

The arguments against the Keystone XL pipeline range from unconvincing to unreasonable. One objection is that Keystone requires the public seizure of private property. That is so, but I have pointed out that the same is true of interstate highways and National Parks. I once spent an evening around a campfire with a man who had to give up the land he was born on for the creation of the Buffalo National River. I rather doubt that any opponent of Keystone XL would be on his side.

Another complaint is that tar sands oil has a larger carbon footprint than many other sources of oil, which is true. It doesn't, however, amount to much. Robert Bryce has this:

The reality is that the global issue of carbon dioxide is no longer about the United States. Over the past decade, U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions fell by 1.7 percent. During that same time, period global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by a stunning 28.5 percent.

The most reasonable objection to KXL is that the pipeline will leak (it will) and that it will cross a lot of very important aquifers. The proper response to that is to do everything possible to make the pipeline safe. Cars will crash. The remedy for that is to build the safest cars possible, not to outlaw automobiles.

The most unreasonable objection to KXL is that the oil it transports will be sold abroad rather than consumed in the U.S. There are terms for this kind of thing. They are manufacturing and export. Importing a raw material (crude oil) and then refining it and selling it abroad are what a robust economy does. Value added here enriches us. Critics of Keystone XL are very bothered by the fact that some of the pipeline product will go to China. Well, we have a very large trade imbalance with China. Selling something back won't hurt. In fact, the Gulf refineries will produce gasoline or diesel as the market demands for whomever demands it.

The arguments for Keystone are dispositive. Ron Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason magazine, has a nice piece that I just read on my Kindle. Keystone XL is projected to add $775 billion to the U.S. economy by 2035. That, dear readers, is real, live stimulus. The project will produce about 600,000 jobs. Yes, some of these are temporary, but just right now who cares?

During this economic funk that we are currently suffering, jobs right now is what everyone agrees we need. Well, TransCanada will need to hire about 10,000 people right away if the pipeline is improved and 34,000 folks by 2014. This, gentle readers, is a shovel ready project. Consider that in June of this year Alberta (where the oil is coming from) saw 22,000 jobs created. In that same month, the entire US of A managed to generate 18,000 jobs.

There is also the issue of property taxes to consider. TransCanada ain't gettin' the land for free. We are looking at ten million in state and local taxes in South Dakota.

I'm sorry, but I just can't see the downside. Unlike solar power startups, TransCanada isn't going to go belly up with a half a billion of our gold in its hold. Unlike wind power, the oil isn't going to poop out during the hot season. Unlike previous stimulus bills, allowing TransCanada to spend its own money digging trenches will really stimulate the state and national economies. I'm all in.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Expires

The military policy known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", instituted under President Clinton, quietly ended on the first minute of Tuesday morning. It was overdue and it will stand to President Obama's credit.

DADT was Clinton's way of weaseling out of a promise. He had pledged to end the ban on homosexuals in the military by means of executive order, but under fierce opposition he lost his nerve. Under DADT the military was not supposed to initiate investigations of alleged homosexual activity on the part of service members. That was the "don't ask" part. However, service members who announced their homosexuality or openly admitted to homosexual conduct could be discharged. That was the "don't tell" part.

DADT was a reform of sorts, but it never made much sense as policy (as opposed to politics). If there was a good reason to exclude homosexuals from military service, then why not work to exclude them? If not, then why require them to hide?

I have yet to hear a good reason why homosexuals should not be allowed to serve in the American military. The most common argument is that openly homosexual soldiers, sailors, etc., would disrupt unit cohesion. This is based on the reasonable premise that a lot of heterosexual service members will feel uncomfortable with the presence of gay comrades. The reasonable and, I think, dispositive reply is that they will have to get over it.

The U.S. military is the muscle of the Republic, a Republic that is politically, racially, religiously, ethnically, and sexually diverse. There are any number of reasons why one soldier might feel uncomfortable with the man or woman standing attention next to him. I have not served in the military but I am guessing that it requires putting up with a lot of discomfort.

One of my favorite WWII jokes goes like this.

A young man in a trench on some Pacific island is unsure whether he can actually kill someone. His sergeant says: "sure you can. Just yell "Tojo is a son of a bitch. When a Jap jumps up to reply, you shoot him."

So the marine does what he is told and yells out "Tojo is a son of a bitch!" He aims his rifle and waits. Up from the opposite trench a Japanese soldier pops up and yells "FDR is son of bitch!" The young man does nothing for a second and then sits back down.

"What the Hell is the matter?" his sergeant asks. "I ain't shootin' him," the poor fellow replies. "He might be the only other Republican on the island."

That more or less tells the story. What should count for military service are loyalty and the ability to discharge one's duties. That is what service members must look for from each other.

Obama Loses Brooks

President Obama dropped below 40% in approval in the recent Marist poll. It is interesting that his jobs proposal, as the pollsters describe it, is a lot more popular than he is. As with the recent CBS/NYT poll, his favorability rating is now in negative territory.

If all that weren't enough, Barack Obama has lost David Brooks. Brooks is the mild mannered pundit who passes for a conservative at the New York Times. He is a specialist at being thoughtful and reasonable. In a recent column he explicitly backed the President's new jobs program. Here is how he feels now.

I liked Obama's payroll tax cut ideas and urged Republicans to play along. But of course I'm a sap. When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill…

Being a sap, I still believe that the president's soul would like to do something about the country's structural problems. I keep thinking he's a few weeks away from proposing serious tax reform and entitlement reform. But each time he gets close, he rips the football away. He whispered about seriously reforming Medicare but then opted for changes that are worthy but small. He talks about fundamental tax reform, but I keep forgetting that he has promised never to raise taxes on people in the bottom 98 percent of the income scale.

Brooks is hardly a man with a large following behind him, but if the President could win over anyone even vaguely conservative or Republican, it would be someone like Brooks. Now Brooks is utterly disgusted with Obama.

Much the same is true of Ross Douthat.

Last week, in the wake of President Obama's jobs speech, I wrote that the president seemed poised to campaign for re-election on an essentially centrist policy agenda: A short-term payroll tax stimulus, a plan for tax reform that would close loopholes while lowering corporate rates, and a long-term plan for deficit reduction modeled on the grand bargain that the White House and John Boehner were supposedly close to striking during the debt ceiling negotiations. The president's goal in 2012, I suggested, would be to try to paint himself as the moderate bipartisan grownup, and dismiss the Republicans as extreme, intransigent, and hyper-ideological.

Based on the actual details of the deficit plan that the administration just released, though, I would like to retract that analysis. Between the size, scope and design of the tax increases and the skimpiness of the entitlement reforms (nothing on Social Security, minimal tinkering on Medicare), it seems that the president will be running for re-election as Nancy Pelosi instead.

These aren't flaming right wingers. Neither are the more moderate Senate Democrats, who seem very unlikely to vote for his proposed tax increases.

It is not clear what the strategy is behind the President's moves of late. The most coherent explanation is that he has largely abandoned the middle and will concentrate on rallying the Left. This isn't necessarily crazy. He may be hoping that he can win the middle back later by painting the Republican nominee, whoever he is, as a flaming extremist. Meanwhile he is raking in lots of money. But that means giving up a lot of ground in the meantime. It looks like a sign either of desperation or disarray. Of course, those aren't mutually exclusive.

The Invincible Ignorance of the European Dream

One of the best bloggers on the scene today is Walter Russell Mead, whose blog is carried by The American Interest. It is one of the most thoughtful and informative posts available on the web, which may just mean that it gratifies my sentiments. See for yourself. Mead is also astonishingly prolific. To find a post I read just the other day, it seems, I had to go back several pages. But here is the nugget I remembered, from Europe Slips as Greece Fails.

The current crisis is the result of a decade of policy failure. Greece should never have been allowed into the euro; prudent leaders would have checked its statistics, discovered the blatant frauds with which the Greeks sought to conceal the true state of their affairs, and told the country politely but firmly to come back when it was ready.

Following that initial blunder, Europe failed to take note in any serious way of the serious distortions that were caused by suddenly reducing interest rates in Greece and other peripherals to near-German levels.

Beyond that, alarm bells should have been ringing as it became clear that Greece and a number of other countries were treating their suddenly lower interest costs as found money. They were spending the windfall rather than taking advantage of the once in a lifetime opportunity to reform their economies in preparation for life under a monetary union with countries like Germany.

If Europe's institutions were up to the job, the warning signs would have been noticed and corrective steps taken years ago.

That single paragraph (I broke it up for easier reading) is the best thing I have seen on the Euro-crisis. Europe is now tottering on the edge of disaster. This situation was long in preparation. It required the Eurocrats to ignore warning after warning, to constantly reinforce a self-imposed ignorance against any insult from reality.

Mead is no doubt right to speak of a failure of Europe's institutions, but institutions are just a bunch of people. Europe's ruling institutions have long been peopled by dreamers. Janet Daley at the British Telegraph has this.

The European federal dream was devised by its architects to be a definitive repudiation of the ideological conflicts of the 20th century. Pragmatism, consensus and regard for the greater supra-national good would reign where once wicked nationalism and zealotry had prevailed. But what strikes me when I hear the surreal statements emanating from those emergency summits and absurd Franco-German-Greek conference calls is that this is precisely a continuation of the old ideological delusions of the European past. The EU leadership and the Greek prime minister announce implacably that Greece will not leave the euro (ever), as if their uttering of the words made them indisputable. In fact, this is simply a statement of political will that dares the world to defy it.

It seems that the European political class still thinks that an assertion of its mystical belief can alter reality: that what it insists is so, will be so. If its idea of itself and its design for the future are in conflict with the facts of economics or life as it is actually lived, then it is those facts that will give way.

James Joyce famously wrote, in his seminal short story 'The Dead', that "the snow is general over Ireland." Well, the snow job is general over all of the European Community and, so far, they show neither the desire to dig out nor the possession of a shovel.

Well, the snow is general over here as well but here, let us be hopeful, there is a difference. Our citizens are rather less impressed by the authority, let alone the dreams of the elite. The rise of the Tea Party movement, whatever you think of it, made it impossible for Congress and the White House to simply ignore the fiscal crisis. Only last February President Obama submitted a budget that completely ignored the problem of unsustainable public debt. Now he is about to present a deficit reduction plan. That is proof that self-imposed ignorance on the part of government is more difficult in these United States.

ObamaCare’s CLASS Act

File under: we passed it, now we get to find out what's in it. While bad news continues to strike the Obama Administration like sunlight on a defunct solar panel factory, it bears remembering that ObamaCare is barely online yet. ObamaCare emerged from about as chaotic a legislative process as it is possible to imagine. No one really knows yet what is in it. But we are finding out. From the AP:

Even as leading Democrats offered assurances to the contrary, government experts repeatedly warned that a new long-term care insurance plan could go belly up, saddling taxpayers with another underfunded benefit program, according to emails disclosed by congressional investigators…

A longstanding priority of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program, or CLASS, was spliced into the health care law despite nagging budget worries…

CLASS was intended as voluntary long-term care insurance plan, supported by premiums, not taxpayer dollars. Workers would pay an affordable sum of around $100 a month or less. In exchange, they would receive a modest daily cash benefit averaging no less than $50 if they become disabled later in life. Beneficiaries could use the money for services to help them stay at home, or to help with nursing home bills. The Health and Human Services Department is supposed to set the final premiums and benefit levels in the coming months.

But the program is on a collision course with powerful demographic and economic forces. How to pay the exorbitant cost of long-term care remains a major unmet need for an aging society. On the other hand, many economic experts believe the government has already promised seniors more than it can deliver, and now is not the time to launch another program likely to need a taxpayer bailout or new mandates.

Everyone could see that CLASS was unworkable. So why did it make it into ObamaCare? Meagan McArdle is on the case.

From the point of view of someone who is primarily concerned with the Congressional Budget Office's 10-year scoring window, it was great. In the first decade of its existence, the program collects a lot of premiums, but doesn't pay a lot of benefits, so it looks like a fiscal gold mine. It's only in later years, when the beneficiaries start demanding their long-term care, that the problems begin.

It seems like it might have been wiser to skip it. But if they had, ObamaCare wouldn't have had much deficit reduction; the last score of CLASS that I'm aware of put the net deficit reduction at $72 billion. CBO's final score of ObamaCare said it would reduce the deficit by $118 billion over the same period. Without CLASS, the deficit reduction would have been less than half the figure they eventually touted. Somehow, $46 billion of deficit reduction on a nearly $1 trillion bill doesn't sound too impressive, does it?

So let's sum this up, shall we? The Administration was warned, repeatedly and by a lot of experts, that this program was a really bad idea. It ignored the warnings. Why? It needed to make ObamaCare look fiscally responsible. This was an outright con job. CLASS was the very opposite of fiscally responsible, as policy.

So the Administration ignored warnings and went with a bad policy for reasons of political strategy. Do I detect a pattern here? Since he announced his jobs bill, President Obama's approval ratings have continued their decline. His personal approval is now in negative territory for the first time in the CBS/NYTimes poll. Barack Obama isn't just a con artist. He is a really bad one.

Public Compassion, Personal Responsibility, & the Tea Party Debate

  Jacob Weisberg at Slate, Paul Krugman at the New York Times, and my esteemed colleague Emeritus Professor David Newquist, all drew the same conclusion from a now infamous moment the Tea Party Express debate in Tampa, Florida. Of the three, only Professor Newquist did not lie about what happened.

Wolf Blitzer asked U.S. Representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul a very good question.

You're a physician, Ron Paul, you're a doctor so you know something about this subject. Let me ask you this hypothetical question. A healthy, thirty year old young man has a good job, makes a good living, and decides, you know what, I'm not going to spend two hundred or three hundred dollars for health insurance 'cause I'm healthy, I don't need it. But something terrible happens and all of sudden he needs it. Who's going to pay for it he goes into a coma…

After Paul's initial response, Blitzer pressed the question again. He doesn't have health insurance. Who pays? Paul responded:

That's what freedom is all about: taking your own risks. This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody…

In the middle of that statement, after the word "risks", the crowd erupted in applause. Then Blitzer forcefully restated the question:

Are you saying that society should just let him die?

At that point a couple of people shouted "yeah"! It sounds like one or two more may have cried out in agreement. It is simply false to state that "the crowd," as Krugman puts it, or "the rabble" as Lord Weisberg puts it, cheered the prospect of this man's death. What the crowd applauded was Paul's forceful insistence on personal responsibility. In Weisberg's case, the lie distorts his otherwise reasonable argument

Ron Paul is a libertarian. Personal responsibility is the bottom line of that school of thought. Freedom means that you get to do pretty much what you want with whatever is yours, but you can't expect anyone else to shield you from the consequences of your choices. Libertarians believe that any attempt to protect people in spite of themselves will result in serious curtailments of liberty. Weisberg agrees and he is just fine with that. But is this really an either/or decision?

I don't think we should let the hypothetical man die, but that is a moot point. We don't, in fact, let such people die. Hospitals don't turn away the uninsured. We aren't going to start letting such people die, even if Libertarians are right that we should.

That, however, is a public choice and the public ought to take full responsibility for it. We the people will have to pony up for what we the people insist doing. Since it is our decision and not the decision of Blitzer's hypothetical man, it does not justify any interference with his liberties. It does not authorize us to force him to purchase health insurance for the same reason as it doesn't authorize us to compel him to stop smoking or start exercising or go on a diet.

Libertarians think that if we were all given the maximum liberty possible and had to take full responsibility for our choices, we would all be better off. We would all be healthier, happier, and more prosperous individually and collectively. That is either true or false, but it is not immoral to think it.

Liberals think that we sometimes have to let vicious killers go free if their Miranda rights have been violated. What if they go on to kill again? Are we just going to let their innocent victims die? Yes. That is what we are going to do if we want to preserve the Miranda rule. Contrary to the logic of my colleague Dr. Newquist, I don't think that makes Liberals the moral counterparts of pro-slavery Democrats.

Solyndracal Reasoning

The Obama's Job Bill

The unbearable emptiness of the Obama Administration is evident in his jobs bill. He proposes to spend a half a trillion and pay for it with taxes on the rich. As I have pointed out, there is no economic theory according to which this makes sense. The stimulus theory holds that we should spend a lot now in order to "stimulate" economic growth. Once the growth gets going, we can pay for it later with increased revenues. Raising taxes now to pay for the spending will simply depress one part of the economy to stimulate some other part, at least if you buy the Keynesian or pseudo-Keynesian theory.

The President's proposal isn't economic policy at all. It is merely political strategy. The spending part is designed to make it look like the President has an economic policy when he obviously doesn't. The tax part is designed to make the President look fiscally responsible (maybe Voldemort could pull that off) and make the Republicans look like irresponsible meanies (who needs magic when you have the New York Times). Moreover, the taxes the President is proposing couldn't pass Congress even when the Democrats held the House and a veto-proof majority in the Senate. It doesn't look more viable now. Congressional Democrats have been almost as critical of the proposal as Republicans.

Solyndra

Concentrating on political imagery at the expense of any attempt at genuine policy is an Administration specialty. The recent bankruptcy of Solyndra illustrates this. From the Washington Post:

The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company's factory, newly obtained e-mails show.

There are two possibilities here. The White House pushed the Office of Management and Budget, over their reasonable objections, to approve the loan to Solyndra because they wanted the deal as evidence that their green jobs policy was working. Obama staged visits to the company on several occasions.

The other possibility is that the Administration exerted no such pressure and the OMB reviewers just screwed the pooch. It isn't the Administration's fault at all. That is what they are now claiming, but it doesn't help much, does it? Who, precisely, is in charge of the Executive Branch? Anyway, they're lying, according to ABC News:

The company's solar panel factory was heralded as a centerpiece of the president's green energy plan -- billed as a way to jump start a promising new industry. And internal emails uncovered by investigators for the House Energy and Commerce Committee that were shared exclusively with ABC News show the Obama administration was keenly monitoring the progress of the loan, even as analysts were voicing serious concerns about the risk involved.

If the Administration was "keenly monitoring" the loan application, then they can't blame the debacle on anyone else.

Not content with blaming his own OMB, the Obama Administration resorts to one of its top ten favorite tunes: blaming the Bush Administration. But that music doesn't play so well either.

The White House also noted to ABC News that the Bush administration was the first to consider Solyndra's application and that some executives at the company have a history of donating to Republicans. The results of the Congressional probe shared Tuesday with ABC News show that less than two weeks before President Bush left office, on January 9, 2009, the Energy Department's credit committee made a unanimous decision not to offer a loan commitment to Solyndra.

Even after Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, analysts in the Energy Department and in the Office of Management and Budget were repeatedly questioning the wisdom of the loan.

So the Energy Department had the good sense to say no, at least while George W. Bush was still President. It tried to do the same after Obama took office, but resistance was futile. Whose fault would that be?

The Obama Administration is not without content. Green jobs and stimulus spending fill its collective mind. Where it comes to actually grappling with reality and making coherent policy, there it has neither interest nor competency.

Republican Victories in New York & Nevada

When I went to bed last night, the results were just coming in from New York 09. A number of commentators had nonetheless called it for Republican Turner. Weprin was holding onto Queens, but just barely. Turner was running away with Brooklyn.

This morning, with some precincts waiting to report, Turner looks to have won by eight points, 54/46%. That's a landslide. Turner lost Queens by 3%, but flattened Weprin in Brooklyn 67/33%.

Meanwhile out west, Nevada 2 was a blowout. Republican Mark Amodei defeated Democrat Kate Marshall by a whopping twenty-two points (58/36%). Like NY09, that result was a little larger than expected.

As I noted before, the results in New York feel a lot like Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts. The Democrats took the seat for granted until the eleventh hour and then rushed in cash and celebrities in a panic. They were explaining how a lack luster candidate was all to blame days before the actual vote.

New York 09 became referendum on Obama. That is all you can call it when a Catholic Republican beats an Orthodox Jew largely on the strength of Orthodox Jewish votes. The district is, to be sure, very atypical. It has been trending more conservative over time. Still, voter registration favors democrats almost 3 to 1 and it hasn't elected a Republican since the 1920's. Neither Anthony Weiner nor Barack Obama had much trouble there before.

Nevada 02 is much more representative. It is Republican, but Obama nearly carried it. This is the kind of district that a Democrat should at least be competitive in. That 22 point victory suggests that the same forces evident before 2010 are still at work. They may be stronger. From the National Journal:

Look at the congressional generic ballot, where Democrats traditionally hold an advantage even in lean years. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Republicans holding a 47 percent to 41 percent edge, the largest margin for Republicans since 1996, when the question was first asked. When Republicans picked up 63 House seats in 2010, Democrats actually held a 46 percent to 44 percent advantage on the poll's generic ballot.

I make no predictions. It is possible, however, that Barack Obama will turn out to be a bigger disaster for the Democrats than Jimmy Carter.

New York 9

The PPP poll (affiliated with the Democrats) has finally been released. It shows the same thing the Siena poll did: a six point lead for Republican Bob Turner. Turner is probably going to take NY9.

Late Night Thoughts about 9/11

It is altogether appropriate to commemorate the fallen of 9/11 and the spectacular acts of courage that happened on that day. Whether the tsunami of sentiment that washed over the print and electronic media today was the best way kind of memorial is not so clear to me. I won't press the point. Let America have its day.

I will comment on the past decade. The destruction of the Twin Towers resulted in two wars, neither of which is over. The first was unavoidable. Al Qaeda was deeply entwined with the Taliban government of Afghanistan when it launched its attack against the United States. It would have been a sign of deplorable weakness and a miscarriage of justice not to do to that regime what we earlier did to the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich. The invasion of Iraq was another matter. I will leave it at this: it would never have happened without 9/11.

The national security apparatus that the Bush Administration developed and deployed after 9/11 has frequently been criticized as an overreaction and a threat to American liberties. Neither is true. By any reasonable historical comparisons, what we did after 9/11 was a measured response. No newspapers were shut down nor were any editors arrested. No books were banned nor was anyone thrown into the slammer for criticizing the government. A lot inconvenient security protocols were instituted and the National Security forces started monitoring international communications with a lot of attention. One may certainly criticize some of the security measures that Bush put in place, but I note that President Obama has seen fit to keep pretty much all of them.

Muslim Americans had good reason to be afraid after 9/11, but the anticipated wave of national hatred against Muslims was conspicuously missing in action. To be sure, there were conflicts and controversies. That is what happens in an ethnically and religiously diverse republic, especially during a crisis. American Muslims immigrants are still much safer here than they would be in any of their countries of origin.

We should be on guard against any oppression of any minority or any individual. It is dangerous, however, not to recognize how well we handled the shock of 9/11. Paradoxically, it gives us too much credit. The destruction of the World Trade Center was a traumatic event for Americans, but it did not involve existential fear. To hurt us, our enemies had to borrow our own airliners. What if Al Qaeda had managed or does manage to set off a really nasty weapon in Manhattan? I submit that our reaction might be much less gentle, less tempered by concerns for civil liberties and diversity, than anything we have seen over the last ten years.

The lesson of the last ten years is misleading in another way. Al Qaeda was able to strike at us because of the assets they enjoyed in Afghanistan and international banks. That provided us with a target. We responded by destroying those assets. As for Al Qaeda itself, we killed it—one cutthroat after another.

The event that should be really terrifying is not 9/11 but the Oklahoma City bombing. That two men could act out their fantasies by destroying a federal building with hundreds of people in it tells us more than 9/11 did about the vulnerability of modern civilization.

The unthinkable hasn't happened yet. If you really care about civil liberties and minority rights and all the other things we treasure in this free republic, you might want to think about that.

New York 9: the Canary in Obama's Coal Mine? Update

Don't look just now, but the pattern that emerged in 2007-2008 may be about to repeat. Remember Weiner-Gate? The Congressman who resigned from office after his bulging boxers went viral? A special election to replace him is scheduled for Tuesday. From the New York Times:

Panicked Democrats are releasing a barrage of negative television advertising, turning to the national party for a cash infusion and pleading with President Obama's network of supporters for help as they confront what seemed impossible two months ago: defeat in the heavily Democratic House district last represented by Anthony D. Weiner…

A new poll released on Friday showed Bob Turner, the Republican, with a six-point lead over [Democrat David] Weprin.

Now it's hard to know how much stock to put in the Siena College poll. A sampling error would explain all of its provocative findings. The Democrats certainly seem to believe it.

Party leaders say the president's flagging popularity and defections among Jewish voters have left them facing the embarrassing possibility that their candidate, Assemblyman David I. Weprin, could lose New York's Ninth Congressional District to a little-known Republican businessman who has never held elected office…

Steven A. Greenberg, a pollster from Siena College, which conducted the survey, said the special election, though it was taking place in a traditionally Democratic section of Brooklyn and Queens, had become a chance for voters to register their unhappiness with the national economic and political climate. The poll, which had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points, found that 54 percent of likely voters in the district had an unfavorable view of Mr. Obama, and nearly three quarters said the country was headed in the wrong direction.

I have a hard time believing that a heavily Democratic district, including parts of Brooklyn and Queens, is really that down on Obama, let alone that it is ready to vote Republican. Are Jewish voters really about to jump ship? That would occasion another of those 'what color is the sky now?' moments. But then I had a hard time believing that Scott Brown would replace Ted Kennedy.  There are signs that the sky is changing color. 

Mr. Weprin's campaign has been hurt by his lack of charisma, a handful of campaign gaffes and, most surprisingly, his position on Israel. He is an Orthodox Jew and staunch supporter of Israel, but former Mayor Edward I. Koch urged Jewish voters to reject Mr. Weprin as a way of protesting Mr. Obama's suggestion that pre-1967 borders of Israel should form the basis of a Middle East peace agreement.

Some prominent Orthodox Jewish leaders — citing not only Mr. Obama's position on Israel but also Mr. Weprin's support of same-sex marriage — have endorsed Mr. Turner, a Roman Catholic who has aggressively courted observant Jewish voters. A group of Jewish Republicans sent voters postcards featuring a Holocaust survivor attesting that, despite being a lifelong Democrat, she would vote for Mr. Turner.

It's hard to think of a demographic other than African Americans who have been more reliable Democrats than Jewish voters. If Orthodox Jews in Queens and Brooklyn are really ready to vote for a Catholic Republican over an Orthodox Jewish Democrat, we are way down the rabbit hole. The above paragraphs surely do suggest that this is possible.

The Democrats are taking this very seriously. According to the Times, they are already pointing fingers at each other. Who lost NY-9? They have their own internal polls and this may indicate what those polls are really showing.

What makes this all the more interesting (read 'enticing' if you're a Republican and 'existentially terrifying' if you're a Democrat) is that it seems to mirror what Gallup is finding across the land. The President's approval has dropped eight points among African Americans, from 92 to 84%. It has dropped precipitously among another solid Democratic voting bloc, Hispanics, from 75 to 48%. Among White voters, it has gone from 58 to 33%.

If actual turnout and choices in November of 2012 are remotely close to those numbers, there is no way that Obama gets a second term. A Ron Paul/Michelle Bachmann ticket (or vice versa) beats him. Of course, Bachmann/Paul would very probably change those numbers and maybe Perry/whoever may do the same. The Obama team has to be hoping that the Republican ticket will be loathsome enough to change the numbers enough. What other hope do they have?

If Bob Turner really wins New York 9, let alone by six points, he will become the Scott Brown of this election cycle. It will demonstrate what opinion polls can only estimate: that the loss of confidence in the President is nationwide and bedrock deep. It will show in real terms that he is a drag on Democrats across the board.

"Weprin has lost the campaign," said Bruce N. Gyory, a Democratic political consultant who was not involved in the race. "Now it's about who wins the turnout."

That it has come down to turnout tells the story.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight provides a very good analysis of the NY9 race.  He certainly gives reason to question the Siena poll.  But here is his bottom line:

Over all, Mr. Weprin’s advantages are more tangible, which is why I would consider him a modest favorite given the ambiguity in the polling.

But a victory by Mr. Turner would hardly be surprising. I always caution against drawing national implications from special election results, and would certainly do so here given the idiosyncrasies of the district. But it would represent a nice little notch in Republicans’ belts and a troubling data point for Democrats.

Nate doesn't know and I don't know. 

Dr. Who & Alphas

A quick break for a little TVSciFi commentary. I am way behind on watching Doctor Who. My DVR says I have 15 episodes. Can there really be that many? Anyway, I am finally ready to make a definitive statement: of the three actors who have played the Dr. since the series rebooted, Matt Smith is clearly the best.

This is so despite the fact that David Tennant is probably the finest actor who ever starred in the series at any point. Like the first new Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, Tennant could certainly do comedy. I remember one scene where the Doctor is giving a speech to a room full of belligerent aliens and his rhetoric begins to soar. Suddenly he stops and says "wait a minute, that's the Lion King!" Tennant had perfect timing. I fell out of my chair.

Tennant did comedy out of pure skill. Matt Smith has what Tom Baker from the original series had, a natural, childlike, sense of humor and wonder. Baker's Doctor could watch a snarling demon image rise in front of him and then turn, his face lit up with delight and say "I know what that is!" Matt Smith can, at a critical moment, with complete self-amusment, exclaim: "I have no idea what to do. That's a new feeling!"

I also have to say that the Doctor's current companions, Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) are very fine. Gillan is the best companion since Billie Piper's Rose Tyler, whom I will always love. This might be the most successful revival in the history of TV.

Meanwhile I have been watching SyFy's new series, Alphas. It is an even more obvious knockoff of the X-Men than Heroes. Alphas are people with superhuman abilities. The series focuses on a team of alphas working as federal agents. They hunt down rogue alphas who keep turning up here and there and causing mischief. The team includes a super-strong guy (with, guess what, anger issues), a super-precise athlete (with, guess what, insecurity issues), a woman with a jaded past who can do Jedi mind tricks, and an Indian-American women trying to escape a dominant family whose sense of smell is precise enough to detect and identify trace molecules. Not a bad set of talents for a team of special investigators.

One more member of the team is a mildly autistic young man named Gary. He can see and surf electronic signals, listen in on cell phone conversations, etc. He is constantly waving his hands as he rides the waves, which is a very clever Sci-Fi interpretation of autistic behavior. Best of all, he is constantly talking and saying things out loud that a lot of us think but would never give voice to. That is a delightful device for the writers and it makes Gary the most entertaining member of the cast.

The team leader is Dr. Lee Rosen, "a preeminent neurologist and psychiatrist" with a special interest in alphas. David Strathairn is superb in this role. The soft spoken, always caring makes him an excellent Dr X (or Dr. A, as it were). So far he shows no signs of being an alpha, but I doubt that the writers will be able to resist a surprise for very long. Otherwise, it's very X-manly. 

Unlike Heroes, Alphas is clearly being produced on a shoestring budget. The powers are toned down accordingly. The writing is what has kept me watching. It's much better than you would expect. Check it out.

CORRECTION & UPDATE

I wrote that the Alphas character Rachel, who has a superhuman sense of smell (and in recent episodes, hearing and sight as well) was Indian-American.  She is Iranian.  Her name is Rachel Pirzad.  She is played by the lovely and very talented Azita Ghanizata. 

The episodes continue to be fine.  Don't miss this one. 

More of the Same Medicine

Obama addressed a joint session of Congress Thursday night and presented his jobs bill. First the good news: the proposal wasn't horrible. David Brooks, who is what passes for a conservative at the New York Times, has this:

Personally, my bottom line is this: I think the president has earned a second date. He's put together a moderate set of stimulus ideas. His plan may not be enough to jolt prosperity, but it might maintain its current slow growth.

Meagan McArdle has a nice breakdown of the President's proposal. It's about $250,000,000,000 in tax cuts and another $200,000,000,000 in infrastructure spending and direct assistance to governments.

I think that it's generally solid on the spending/tax cut side. The targeted employment stuff is basically a decent plan--we should be aggressively looking for ways to keep the long term unemployed from turning into the permanently unemployed. At worst, we put a little extra money into the pockets of taxpayers.

The bad news, as both McArdle and Brooks acknowledge, is that this proposal is more of what has already been offered and what we have already been doing. The Washington Post Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, had the same impression that I did.

The speech mostly gave us a sense of déjà vu. From the president's language, you would never know that Congress already has acted under his watch to save jobs — the $800 billion stimulus plan passed shortly after he took office.

Kessler provides a nice stump the reader exercise. He has a list of 11 quotes and challenges you to guess which is from Thursday's speech and which is from his 2009 speech urging the first, larger stimulus bill. I am betting that the President himself couldn't pick the right answers.

The President's bill is more of the same medicine. The best you can say about the first stimulus bill is that things would have been worse without it. That may be true, but it is what you can say about any medicine that the patient took and didn't die, even if his arms and legs fell off. Does anyone really think that more of the same medicine will suddenly start working? Employers don't.

The bit about infrastructure spending sounds good. At least we get repaired roads and safer bridges. Unfortunately, there is no reason to think that the President can find more "shovel ready" projects today than he did after the first bill was passed. It turns out that there are big bureaucratic obstacles to increased infrastructure spending. Congress is unlikely to remove all the labor protections and environmental rules that would allow a surge in such spending in the short term.

The bigger problem with the speech and the proposal is that it seems to be so obviously designed to allow the President to purse his lips. Congress should pass this bill right now. To do otherwise is irresponsible. It would be putting party ahead of the country.

That would be fine if the President were acting responsibly. He isn't. He piously proclaimed that "everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything." That is an extensive, obese, inexactitude, otherwise known as a big fat lie. He has asked the "Supercommittee" that is responsible for finding cuts in future federal spending of $1,500,000,000,000 to find another $450,000,000,000 in cuts to cover his new stimulus. This is a committee over which neither he nor the legislation he is proposing can have any control. Its job is difficult enough as it is. To toss this burden on the committee is blatantly irresponsible. To pretend that asking the committee to pony up amounts to paying for his bill is lying.

The whole point of stimulus spending is not to pay for it right now. If it is to work, you borrow on the future in the hopes that you can trigger economic growth that will turn a surplus sooner or later. We don't have to ask whether that can work because that is what we are already doing. We are running deficits of well over $1,000,000,000,000 a year. We are spending, and running deficits, and running up the federal debt, on a level not seen since WWII. If that doesn't work, will another $450,000,000,000 really turn the trick?

The Administration is in an unprecedentedly difficult situation. It is hardly Obama's fault. A half century of fiscal irresponsibility has led to this moment. We should have seen that coming. The massive spending increase of Bush 43 and Obama have brought about the current fiscal calamity, which no one could have imagined only a few years ago.

What is desperately needed is a plan to put the U.S. on the course to fiscal stability. Only in the context of such a plan would more stimulus spending look feasible. The President is going to announce such a plan in a few days. Maybe it will be genuine and serious, though it is very hard to imagine that right now. Maybe it will be another opportunity for the Hyde Park Hamlet to purse his lips.

The Post Office Looks Into the Abyss

My father's job depended heavily on the U.S. Post Office. He was a salesman for Merck, Sharp & Dome (later, just Merck), the giant pharmaceutical firm. I remember going with him to pick up the most wonderful packages. Mostly they contained samples of drugs (no, that's not the wonderful part). A lot of the brown boxes contained plastic models of bones, organs, and other body parts. The life-sized brain and skeletal hand were put to good use on Halloween, I can assure you. When I was still very young, the gorgeous old Post Office building blew the heck up. Gas leak, if I remember it right.

That old Post Office is my earliest memory of a Federal building. The U.S. Postal Service itself is one of the oldest expressions of the Federal idea. It is mentioned in the Constitution. It is one of the rare examples of a Federal institution that has been part of ordinary American life from the very beginning of the Republic. I like looking in the big box next to our front door every day. Nor will I ever forget the role of the Post Office in rescuing Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34^th Street.

The Post Office is going belly up rather fast. From the Washington Post:

"I'm operating right now with a week's worth of cash," Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe warned senators Tuesday. The Postal Service's weekly costs total about $1 billion, he said. USPS could post a $10 billion loss for its fiscal year, Donahoe said, as mail volume continues to drop.… [General Donahoe] warned again Tuesday that it is teetering on the brink of financial collapse and likely to go broke by fall 2012.

The USPS is a great study in the awesome strengths and debilitating weaknesses of government. Right now the latter have taken center stage. The biggest problem the USPS faces is the precipitous decline of traditional mail. I have a PO Box on campus and it used to be stuffed on a regular basis with catalogs from publishers. Now most of the latter try to tempt me to adopt their texts by alluring email attachments. The Zen Mountain Monastery used to mail me a nice slim catalog of incense, Buddha statues, and retreat notices. Today I got an email with a link. Here is how the New York Times puts it:

Mail volume has plummeted with the rise of e-mail, electronic bill-paying and a Web that makes everything from fashion catalogs to news instantly available. The system will handle an estimated 167 billion pieces of mail this fiscal year, down 22 percent from five years ago.

It's difficult to imagine that trend reversing, and pessimistic projections suggest that volume could plunge to 118 billion pieces by 2020.

That is only part of the problem. Private firms have to respond to market changes by changing their business model. As Meagan McArdle points out, the USPS has no such flexibility.

Congress has given the Post Office two incompatible mandates. It is to make money like a business . . . but it is not to have any of the freedom that businesses have to, say, close branch offices, cut its delivery area, or change delivery schedules. This is, to put it mildly, lunatic.

Let's cut to the chase. What does General Donahoe need if he is to have any chance of saving the Post Office? From the Washington Post's Federal Diary:

Donahoe, a 36-year-veteran of the Postal Service, wants Congress to allow the USPS to bust the anti-layoff provisions in its union contracts. He also wants permission to pull his 563,000 employees from the health and retirement plans that cover federal employees so the USPS can provide less generous programs…

The Postal Service says it needs to trim 220,000 career positions from its workforce by 2015, with attrition expected to take 100,000 of those jobs. For the remaining 120,000 slots, "it is imperative that we have the ability to reduce our workforce rapidly. . . . It is not likely that the Postal Service will be able to eliminate these layoff protections through collective bargaining," says a USPS white paper.

I am a state government employee and not an idiot. This sort of thing scares me excrement-free. Who's next? My discomfort doesn't change the facts. The USPS cannot survive in its present form. Whether it can survive at all is an open question, but one that can be answered only if it is allowed the kind of flexibility that private firms often (but not always) enjoy.

So what is the White House and Congress thinking? The White House wants a PO bailout as part of its deficit reduction package. Think about that for a moment. And then there is this:

In addition to structural reforms, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) suggested that USPS should mount a national advertising campaign promoting the value of printed mail.

"You cannot get money by text message," McCaskill said. "I really think that there is a longing out there right now, especially in these uncertain times, for some of the things that have provided stability over the years."

Well, there you have it. The solution is an ad campaign to sell people who have cell phones on the idea of writing out letters by hand, a campaign that will be funded by someone who doesn't know about online banking.

Obama’s Very Bad No Good Jobs Record

Okay, here is the bad news. From the New York Times:

Here is the comment on the chart:

The chart above shows economy-wide job changes in this last recession and recovery compared with other recent ones, with the black line representing the most recent downturn. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on balance, about 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that does not even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession.

And here is a bit more:

There are now 14 million workers who are looking for work and cannot find it; the figure nearly doubles if you include workers who are in part-time jobs but want to be employed full time, and those who want to work but have stopped looking. A broader measure of the unemployment rate that includes these underemployed workers is 16.2 percent.

There isn't any good news. Allow me to state the obvious: since President Obama took office the bottom fell out. Job loss during recessions is not unusually. Job losses of this magnitude are very unusual. Worse still is the fact that, this time, there has been virtually no recovery. We are stuck in a very deep hole.

Is this all Obama's fault? Hardly. The economic policies he instituted when taking office were extensions of those that Bush authored as his tenure approached an end and the current recession was under way.

However, Obama has been President for almost three years. His economic policies, whatever they were, have failed spectacularly. That is the record he has to run on next year. I don't think that economics determines the outcome of elections, but it surely has a really big effect.

Obama's campaign will consist of nothing other than demonizing the Republican nominee. What else does he have? He had better hope that it works. The rest of us, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, had better hope that it doesn't. If Obama is reelected, he will limp back into office and be just as clueless as he has always been. Maybe the sun will rise and he will be blessed. Don't count on it. Job growth isn't going to recover in the next Presidential term.

Late Night Thoughts on Science & Civilization

Science enjoys the kind of unique authority in modern civilization that religion once enjoyed. It is the one source of wisdom that is all but immune to challenge. To be openly "anti-science" is to be discredited in modern eyes. The only viable resistance to the authority of science that remains is to attempt to construct protected enclaves. Yes, science can tell you about physical nature but it can't tell you about morality, or the soul, or your relationship with God. That is largely a strategic retreat, as the enclaves are mostly shrinking over time.

Science, however, is in a radically different position than the authority that it displaced. Religion spoke directly to every human heart. The idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibeneficent God may be in large part the work of brilliant theologians and bilingual church fathers, but any street worker can love it. Science, by contrast, speaks directly to the hearts and minds of a rather smaller group of persons, persons with certain aptitudes, inclinations and, I dare say, leisure. That difference underlies much of the modern situation.

It is conventional wisdom that the right is anti-science. Conservatives frequently reject the theory of evolution. They don't bow to the consensus on global warming. Those are trump cards of the chattering classes. The same is true, however, of persons on the left.

Steve Hayward, who has been posting fine pieces at Powerline, raises this provocative question:

Which ideology is it that throws a hissy fit over genetically modified organisms and childhood vaccinations? Or files lawsuits to stop de-listings of recovered species (like the gray wolf) even after the government's science advisory bodies say "the science" says they should be de-listed? Who's not respecting science now?

But rather than stopping with the simple observation that ideology or politics drives acceptance or rejection of certain domains of science, it is worth pressing on to ask why liberals dislike some kind of science, and conservatives other kinds. Liberals in the case of childhood vaccinations and GM organisms dislike certain forms of authority (especially private sector, for-profit authority—does anyone think the liberal outcry against GM foods would be as loud if it were a government lab rather than Monsanto that was leading these innovations?).

Conservatives have a symmetrical view, about which I have been trying to persuade liberal environmentalists (but I repeat myself) who will listen: even if catastrophic global warming were proved, we do not consent to being governed by Al Gore.

Steve is right, of course. I would add one item to the list. E. O. Wilson was viciously attacked for suggesting that human behavior could be interpreted by biologists. His persecutors (that is the right term) included many scientists. All of them were attacking from the left. That was in the 1970's. Today the discipline he gave birth to, sociobiology, flourishes on college campuses and research centers across the modern world. Add that also to the list of shrinking enclaves.

Science is born out of a curiosity about the world and how it works. It is always shaped by the suspicion that things aren't always what they seem and that what we are inclined and want to believe is often an obstacle to seeing things as they really are. It necessarily runs afoul of our conceits and for that reason is always susceptible to corruption. How would I feel if I encountered solid, scientific evidence that Asian immigrants are just smarter on average than Daughertys, Martins, and Blanchards?

I can offer no remedies to this modern conundrum. I can say that the view of science and philosophy much richer, more open ambiguity and awe, than those who fear it usually recognize. Timothy Williamson has an excellent piece on naturalism at the New York Times.

Many contemporary philosophers describe themselves as naturalists. They mean that they believe something like this: there is only the natural world, and the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. I am sometimes described as a naturalist. Why do I resist the description?

Williamson, who confesses atheism, raises the obvious question.

Why can't there be things only discoverable by non-scientific means, or not discoverable at all?

That sounds a little like enclave entrenchment. Fortunately he goes on to argue that naturalism is not as restrictive as it seems.

What is meant by "the scientific method"? … For naturalists… it involves formulating theoretical hypotheses and testing their predictions against systematic observation and controlled experiment. This is called the hypothetico-deductive method.

One challenge to naturalism is to find a place for mathematics. Natural sciences rely on it, but should we count it a science in its own right? If we do, then the description of scientific method just given is wrong, for it does not fit the science of mathematics, which proves its results by pure reasoning, rather than the hypothetico-deductive method.

Yes. Mathematics is solidly in the camp of rationalism, whereas most scientists carry the card of empiricism. Empiricism means the exclusive focus on observable data. Yet the empirical sciences depend on a vast realm of mathematical knowledge that is itself not derived from observation. It is generated by pure reason. What does that mean?

Science opens up a domain that is rich and wonderful, but it opens up only to those who have the means and inclination to pursue it. These will always be few. Those few are no less immune to corruption than anyone else. Yet science remains the chief authority of modern civilization. That is our peculiar situation.

Keystone Cops do Energy Security

Keystone Cop Cory Heidelberger announced an arrest recently on his blog. He has thrown the Keystone pipeline project in the slammer, on charges of marketing and fraud.

Keystone XL could indeed help American national security… if the oil it carried were intended for use in America… We won't burn a drop of Keystone XL oil in the U.S. Pipe the Bakken oil into the mix, and that shale oil too will go straight to tax-free Port Arthur and eager Chinese buyers.

I must admit some surprise here. After all that Cory has told us about leaks in the existing Keystone pipeline, can they really get "every drop" of the new crude out of the country?

While we are waiting for the pipeline to make bail, let me consider the complaint. Cory claims that all the Keystone oil will go abroad and provides a link as evidence. I followed the link to Treehugger.com.

Treehugger is a quaint little site with a green wine guide and a fashion and beauty page sporting vampish young women wearing black gloves and sitting next to luggage. They were also sitting very close to each other. Being a fan of fashion porn, I liked it well enough.

I followed the Treehugger link to some folks who call themselves Oil Change International. Here is how they describe themselves.

Oil Change International campaigns to expose the true costs of oil and facilitate the coming transition towards clean energy. We are dedicated to identifying and overcoming barriers to that transition.

Maybe I was harsh in describing Keystone opponents as opposed to energy. They are only opposed to viable and ample sources of energy. Anyway, these OCI folks are surely opposed to oil. It's no good very bad stuff.

From that page I read the report that provides the sole support for Cory's claims. It is very big on declarative statements, bullet lists, and charts. As for actual evidence, that seems to amount to a handful of quotes. I am underwhelmed.

There is no way to determine from the report how many drops of oil will end up where, but let's assume that the claim is right. All the oil arriving at Port Arthur, Texas, is intended for export. What does that mean? Here are my own thoughts, in bullet list form as if they were as authoritative as the OCI report.

1. "Oil is a fundamentally global market," says Mr. Heidelberger. He is right, of course. Increased demand resulting from economic development in India and China has driven the price of energy upwards recently. That hurts everyone. If the Keystone oil is sold on the world market to whoever needs it, that will increase the supply and so decrease the pressure on energy prices. That helps everyone, including the U.S., no?
2. Whoever buys the refined fuel, it will be refined in the U.S. by American workers. That is better for the latter than if it is refined in some other country, isn't it?
3. OCI seems to think that the U.S. doesn't need any more energy, because "higher fuel economy standards and slow economic growth mean declining U.S. oil demand." Wouldn't it be nice if our economic growth sped up a little? OCI probably doesn't think so, but I think so. If it does, might it not be nice to have more oil to fuel that growth with? If demand in the U.S. increases, the business model of the refiners will change.
4. The Keystone pipeline will be a secure source of a lot of crude for the Gulf Coast refineries. Should there be a disruption in the oil supply from abroad, the pipeline will help make up for it. That oil will be available to supply the American market, regardless of the business plans of Valero Energy Corporation, which anyway will be happy to make the change. That makes us less dependent on "foreign oil".

Having a pipeline that connects an oil field in Canada with refineries in Texas increases the security of the U.S. in the same way that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans increase our security. It is stupid to suggest otherwise.

With Friends Like These, Does Obama Need Me?

Jonathan Chait at the New Republic suggests a campaign strategy:

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Cenk Uygur at the Left Wing Salon is wondering how Obama could have done worse.

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I have to say that Jeffrey Toobin's New Yorker essay on Clarence and Ginni Thomas is a remarkable piece of work. It may be one of the most remarkable pieces of court journalism I have ever read. On the one hand, it is clearly a hit piece. Toobin works assiduously to portray Clarence Thomas as a vaguely sinister figure, "probably the most conservative Justice to serve on the Court since the nineteen-thirties." He describes the conservative activism of Ginni Thomas in terms that would certainly convince any good liberal that the Tea Party has a seat on the Supreme Court.

Had Toobin confined himself to that, he would have written a dime-a-dozen diatribe. As Michael Barone points out:

It's possible to read Toobin's article as a partisan hit job, echoing the demands of 74 Democratic congressmen that Justice Clarence Thomas recuse himself from sitting on a case challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare because of his wife's involvement in the tea party movement.

Never mind that this is a standard neither Toobin nor the Democrats apply to other public officials with spouses active in public affairs -- or that they're not asking Justice Elena Kagan to recuse herself because of her work in the Justice Department on the issue.

Toobin knows that that strategy is very unlikely to succeed in preventing Thomas from voting, say, on ObamaCare. Instead, he argues that it is Thomas' judicial philosophy and influence on the Court that is the real threat. But there is a real problem with that strategy.

If there is one thing that every good liberal knows, it is that Clarence Thomas is an idiot. After all, he is really quiet from the bench.

The conventional view of Thomas takes his lack of participation at oral argument as a kind of metaphor. The silent Justice is said to be an intellectual nonentity, a cipher for his similarly conservative colleague, Antonin Scalia.

By "conventional", read, "the New York Times." The left has chattered ad nauseam that Clarence is a cross-eyed lion. Who cares then what his judicial philosophy is, even if such a dunce can have one?

So Toobin makes one of those moves that, in a chess movie, will cue up the big music.

But those who follow the Court closely find this stereotype wrong in every particular. Thomas has long been a favorite of conservatives, but they admire the Justice for how he gives voice to their cause, not just because he votes their way. "Of the nine Justices presently on the Court, he is the one whose opinions I enjoy reading the most," Steve Calabresi, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law and a co-founder of the Federalist Society, said. "They are very scholarly, with lots of historical sources, and his views are the most principled, even among the conservatives. He has staked out some bold positions, and then the Court has set out and moved in his direction."

Thomas's intellect and his influence have also been recognized by those who generally disagree with his views. According to Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School, Thomas's career resembles that of Hugo Black, the former Alabama senator who served from 1937 to 1971 and is today universally regarded as a major figure in the Court's history. "Both were Southerners who came to the Court young and with very little judicial experience," Amar said. (Thomas is from Georgia.) "Early in their careers, they were often in dissent, sometimes by themselves, but they were content to go their own way. But once Earl Warren became Chief Justice the Court started to come to Black. It's the same with Thomas and the Roberts Court. Thomas's views are now being followed by a majority of the Court in case after case."

Now he tells us. After two decades of Clarence the dunce, suddenly we get Clarence the evil genius. He is suddenly admired not just by the forces of darkness but even by the good guys. He is recognized for his brilliance and…cue bass and drums…the startling truth that he is in fact the intellectual leader of the U.S. Supreme Court. On issue after issue, the Court has moved in a direction staked out by Justice Thomas.

Toobin is alarmed by Thomas and he does not like him. He knows that the "conventional view" about Thomas has always been a lie but it was a lie that bothered him little in the past. He belatedly came to realize that the lie, while emotionally gratifying to the left, was disarming. Thomas has been shielded from the kind of scrutiny to which Antonin Scalia was subject. For twenty years the left has been firing at the wrong guy!

That is one of the costs of being a liar. You sometimes end up deceiving yourself. Whatever you think about the jurisprudence of one Clarence Thomas, he is in fact a brilliant and, even more important, a persuasive high court judge. He has been subject to a campaign of vilification such as no other justice ever had to endure and he not only survived it but exploited it and showed his enemies to be fools. Toobin's piece is a must read.