The Monday Morning Teaser

The theme of this week’s Sift is “Don’t Panic”. Yes, I know that the outcome of the election is still uncertain and could herald The End of Democracy as We Know It. And the FrankenStorm is just off the coast, sweeping inexorably towards New York like the villain of a Marvel Comics crossover or Godzilla on his way to Tokyo. But things often don’t turn out quite as badly as we fear. Your odds of survival are excellent.

Anxiety is a symptom of pent-up energy, and the best use of that energy is to channel it towards averting the disaster that called it up. People who are doing something — donating to a blood bank, volunteering for the Red Cross, making phone calls or canvassing for their chosen candidates — tend to be less anxious than people who nervously watch minute-by-minute news coverage while doing nothing.

If you can’t come up with something constructive to do, at least don’t make things worse by whipping yourself into a frenzy. Don’t panic, and try to stay mostly harmless.

So this week I’m going to minimize the amount of who’s-going-to-win coverage in the Sift (that’s next week’s election-eve topic) and instead focus on two things: What closing arguments  you should know if you’re going to have any last-minute conversations with persuadable voters, (Parallel advice to “Don’t Panic” is “try to avoid conversations with unpersuadable voters”), and what’s really annoying about those Richard Mourdock comments on abortion.

Plus, you really have to see two endorsement videos: Lena Dunham for Obama and Joss Whedon for Romney.

October 29, 2012 – 8:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Women’s Issues

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

— Gloria Steinem

This week everybody was talking about binders full of women

This endless campaign needed a good laugh, so thank Mitt Romney for providing one in Tuesday’s debate. Asked what he would do about gender pay inequity (women making less than men) in the workplace, Romney instead talked about gender diversity (hiring women) in his administration in Massachusetts. He apparently didn’t meet any women at Bain Capital, so …

We took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, can you help us find folks? And they brought us whole binders full of women.

It was a typical Romneyism: equating people with objects, like viewing companies as spreadsheets of assets to be captured and liquidated, rather than seeing American workers and the communities where they live. (Also typical: Mitt’s story is complete fiction.) The Internet lit up immediately with biting satire and more biting satire. But we shouldn’t let the unintentionally humorous form of Romney’s answer hide the fact that the content is truly hideous:

I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce, that sometimes they need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can’t be here until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. I need to be able to get home at 5:00 so I can be there for — making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said, fine, let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you. We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I’m going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women.

So if you’re going to have women in the workforce, you need to let them go home to cook dinner for their kids, because job flexibility is a women’s issue, not a family issue. (God forbid Dad should tell his boss he has to come home early and order pizza.) And (unless the Man in Charge is as magnanimous as Mitt Romney) employers will hire those less-flexible women only in boom times when they’re “anxious” about finding enough qualified men. That’s the Romney vision for working women and their families. President Obama struck back with his “Romnesia” speech, which I thought was hilarious.

… and why the polls don’t make sense

At the same time that Gallup’s tracking poll showed Romney opening up a huge lead nationally, state polls had Obama moderately ahead. Nate Silver grappled with the conundrum, while his model shows Obama with a 68% chance of victory — up from 63% last Monday. Two x-factors could lead to Obama doing better on election day than the polls (or Nate’s model) predict. (1) Likely-voter models don’t really know what to do with young voters, or anybody else who doesn’t have a voting history. And (2) most polls interview only in English, so they might miss the size of the Hispanic vote. Obama typically leads in polls of all registered voters, while Romney does better in polls that restrict themselves to likely voters. But if turnout is high — and early-voting numbers hint that it might be — then a lot of unlikelyvoters are going to cast ballots.

… but I wrote about liberals and capitalism

The debate question that struck me was:

What do you believe is the biggest misperception that the American people have about you as a man and a candidate?

President Obama addressed the misperception that he believes in a government-centered economy rather than free enterprise. That gave me a news-hook for an issue I’ve been wanting to discuss for a while: Why do liberals sound so inauthentic when we defend capitalism, and what can we do about it? Hence this week’s main article: Take a Left at the Market.

… and you might also find this interesting

Romney still hasn’t made his budget numbers add up.

Remember when a new version of Windows was a big deal? Windows 95 was like a million years ago. And while we’re talking about Bill Gates: It’s hard to keep a straight face while writing about his quest for the toilet of the future.

Rosie Perez answers Romney’s “joke” that he’d “have a better shot at winning” if he were Latino.

One inevitable consequence of manufacturing horror stories about your opponents: The people on your side start doing horrible things to “catch up”. I think that’s why we’re seeing such outrageous voter-registration fraud among Republicans. Up and down the line, Republicans have talked themselves into believing that Democrats are doing worse.

E. J. Dionne has put his finger on something important: Romney isn’t running as a candidate, he’s marketing himself as a product. What seems like flip-flopping in the political arena is just normal advertising for products like Coke or Tide. As Tom Waits puts it: “It’s new. It’s improved. It’s old-fashioned.” Why not?

If only there were such a network of celebrity super-heroes.

Lately I’ve seen a slew of articles from progressives that I characterize as: “I can’t condone what Obama’s done, but Jesus! The Republicans have gone out of their minds!” In the recent Harper’s article “Why Vote?” (which you can’t see unless you subscribe) Kevin Baker explains that “your vote counts for nothing”, and complains that “what we are witnessing right now in America and throughout the Western world, is not compromise with the opposition but something else entirely: the use of democratic institutions to disassemble democracy itself.” So he thinks you shouldn’t participate in this farce, right? Not exactly:

Go vote for Barack Obama, and whatever other Democrats or progressives are running for office where you live. To vote for a Mitt Romney — to vote for the modern right anywhere in the West today — is an act of national suicide.

Daniel Ellsbergsays: “I don’t support Obama, I oppose the current Republican Party.” He elaborates:

a Romney/Ryan administration would be no better — no different — on any of the serious offenses I just mentioned or anything else, and it would be much worse, even catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran, Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women’s reproductive rights, health coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.

Antiwar activist Tom Gallagher titles his column: “Vote for the War Criminal — It’s Important!” Noam Chomsky agrees. He believes that Obama’s targeted assassinations (i.e. drone strikes) are “war crimes“. But:

If I were a person in a swing state, I’d vote against Romney-Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other choice.

October 22, 2012 – 9:28 am Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Post a comment

The Monday Morning Teaser

This week’s main article will be a little long, but I think it’s important. “Take a Left at the Market: Liberal praise of capitalism doesn’t have to ring hollow” says we don’t have to talk about capitalism in either Marxist terms (like exploitation) or Libertarian ones (like freedom).

A liberal view of capitalism should revolve around access: How can we create a market economy that everyone can get into? When access is your focus, liberal economic policies make sense, and aren’t just a hodge-podge of taxes and regulations.

In the weekly summary, everybody has been talking about binders full of women. (You knew that already, right?) But we shouldn’t let Romney’s unintentional humor distract us from just how awful his answer really was. Also: the polls are contradicting each other and may be overlooking two important factors.

And George McGovern died. He lost one of the most lopsided elections ever, but history has been kind to him.

October 22, 2012 – 8:19 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Take a Left at the Market

Liberal praise of capitalism doesn’t have to ring hollow

The final question at Tuesday night’s debate asked each candidate to debunk what he considers “biggest misperception that the American people have about you”. Predictably, Governor Romney used the time to distance himself from his 47% quote, saying “I care about a hundred percent of the American people.”

I couldn’t guess which slander President Obama would try to refute. There have been so many, pushed with so much energy by the right-most fringe of the media: His birth certificate is a fake, so he isn’t really an American citizen or legally president at all. He’s secretly a Muslim. Taxes have gone up, and government is growing. His wedding ring bears an Islamic inscription. He began his term with an apology tour. He instituted death panels. He’s a Communist. He’s gay. He’s the Antichrist.

I’m sure I missed a few. Which would he pick out as the “biggest misperception”? This one:

I think a lot of this campaign, maybe over the last four years, has been devoted to this notion that I think government creates jobs, that that somehow is the answer. That’s not what I believe. I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world’s ever known. I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk-takers being rewarded.

I have two reactions.

  • I totally empathize. I consider myself a liberal — left of Obama on most issues — but that doesn’t mean I consider the Soviet Union a model worth emulating. I think competitive markets usually allocate scarce resources much better than centralized bureaucracies. I think people should be free to take economic risks and profit when they win. Capitalism vs. Communism? I’m glad capitalism won.
  • I don’t think it will work. Like Romney’s compassion for the 100%, Obama’s love of capitalism (and mine) just sounds false. “Sure, you say the words,” I imagine viewers responding, “but you don’t really mean them.”

Yeah, I do mean them, and I think the President does too. (Romney and the 100% I’m not so sure about.) But I think Barack and I both need to take this question seriously: Why don’t we sound convincing? Why do conservatives — who I see as a bigger threat to capitalism than liberals — seem to own markets and free enterprise?

The answer, I believe, is that their pro-capitalism story hangs together better than ours. I don’t think it’s more true, but it is simpler and has more internal structure. Let’s look at it.

The conservative capitalism story. Conservatives can boil their story down to one word: freedom. Capitalism, Milton Friedman told us, was all about being “free to choose“. Consumers choose what to buy. Retailers choose what to sell. Manufacturers choose what to make and who to hire. Workers choose what jobs they’ll apply for. Borrowers choose to borrow, lenders choose to lend, and the magic of the marketplace makes it all work out.

You don’t have to understand some complicated economic theory to value such freedom. We all want to make our own choices.

It’s just as obvious that regulations and taxes restrict freedom. Regulations keep you from doing things you want to do. (There’d be no point in regulating against something nobody wants to do.) Government collects taxes so that it can buy things in your name that you wouldn’t buy on your own. (Again, there’s no point in taxing and spending if people would buy the same things on their own.) We can all see that in our own lives.

So the conservative capitalism story is: Get rid of regulations and taxes so that we can all be free together. You make your choices, I’ll make mine, and the market will sort it out in a way that makes us all prosper.

Before you start arguing with that vision — I’ll argue with it myself later on — take a moment to appreciate how well it works: It’s easy to hold in your head. It’s rooted in everyday experiences. And by now (thanks to billionaire-funded think tanks and news networks and political campaigns) we have heard it so many times that they don’t even have to spell it out any more. Just say “free market” or “free enterprise” and the rest comes to mind automatically.

The inauthentic liberal. So when a liberal or moderate like Obama says, “I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world’s ever known” he’s walking into a conversation already in progress, and his words get forced into the frames that are active in that conversation.

“Oh? So you believe in freedom too?” the skeptics ask. And when the conversation gets down to details, the answer is “Not exactly. Or at least not in the same way.”

Liberals, for example, don’t think businesses should be free to hire only men, or sell their products only to whites. (Rand Paul disagrees.) Businesses also shouldn’t be free to merge into monopolies or create bottlenecks in the supply chain. (Ayn Rand disagrees.) Food packers shouldn’t be free to sell botulism or salmonella, or to lie about or not disclose what’s in their products. Coal companies shouldn’t be free to send workers into unsafe mines. Sweatshops shouldn’t be free to pay less than the minimum wage, even if workers are desperate enough to volunteer for those jobs. If you want to take a chance on a cheap ticket on an uninspected airplane, or go without health insurance and hope you don’t get sick — sorry, I don’t want to let you.

So no, I don’t believe in the same kind of freedom a conservative does. If capitalism means freedom, and freedom refers only a very special type of economic freedom, then my advocacy of capitalism rings hollow, because I do want government inspections and regulations.

Liberal freedom. What’s more, I want taxes, because I also want freedoms that the market doesn’t offer.

I want to be free to drive from coast to coast without hitting a red light, which I can do because the government built the interstate highway system. I want to be free to plan a picnic Saturday, because the government put up weather satellites and runs a National Weather Service that can assure me it won’t rain. I want my wife (or your daughter) to be free to tell her boss to go to hell if he wants sexual favors, because if he fires her the government will provide unemployment benefits and let her keep her health insurance.

I could go on, but you get the idea: Conservative freedom is not the only kind. Some other kinds of freedom demand government intervention, because often in our history the market has failed to provide them.

Access. But even that reframing misses the point: Freedom is not a one-word description of my highest economic value, and it’s not what I value about markets. So if the contest is just my favorite freedoms against theirs, I’m still eventually going to sound inauthentic and lose.

While I totally sympathize with the people who claim the boil-it-down-to-a-word requirement is bogus and unfair, I don’t want to abandon that battlefield to the conservatives. If a conservative says “freedom” and a liberal says “read my treatise on political economy,”the liberal loses, deservedly or not.

I don’t want to lose, so this is my one-word summary of my highest economic value: access.

A short history of access in America. Given that I don’t have my own cable news network or a multi-billion-dollar web of think tanks to prepare the way for my one-word answer, grant me a little space to unpack what access means.

When Thomas Paine looked at the Native Americans, he saw a society that lacked a lot of good things. Already in the 1700s, when the Industrial Revolution was just taking off, there was a profound technological gap between hunter-gatherer cultures and the emerging Western powers. But the Indians also lacked some things Paine wished the West didn’t have, like poverty and unemployment. Any able-bodied Indian who wanted to turn his effort into food or other desirable goods just had to apply himself: There’s the forest, the lake, the prairie. Go hunt, fish, or gather whatever the Earth has to offer. No owner can stop you or make you pay a fee.

Paine, who often had to scrounge for a job, envied that. That’s why (in Agrarian Justice) he called for some rudimentary social engineering “to preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evil which it has produced.” His solution was a one-time grant of capital to each new adult, which he or she could use to get training or buy tools or open a shop. (It was funded by a modest tax on inherited land, which he justified by arguing that ownership of land was artificial. After all, you didn’t build that.)

But Paine’s America would soon be the envy of Europe due to a different government program: Without directly addressing class issues at all, the Homestead Act effectively limited the extent to which the rich could push the poor around. A young family that felt too oppressed could head west and turn its sweat into tillable land. From there, land plus further sweat could produce an acceptable living.

Eventually Karl Marx gave us some terminology to express what the Native Americans, Paine’s vision, and the Homestead Act had in common: easy access to the means of production. If you wanted to consume and were willing to work, you had a way in to the economy. You didn’t need anyone’s permission or approval.

By Marx’s time, though, industrialization had severely restricted access to the means of production in America and Europe alike. If you lived in Factoryville, you couldn’t turn your effort into consumable goods unless the factory owner hired you. The owner was effectively a gatekeeper who controlled access to the means of production. (That’s one reason why he could get so rich: not just his entrepreneurial ability, but because he could effectively charge the workers for access by paying them less than their effort was worth.)

The Communist solution — getting the gatekeeper out of the way through public ownership of the means of production — didn’t work out so well in practice. The Soviet Union may not have been exactly what Marx had in mind, but even so, the Soviet experiment should discourage anyone who envisions a government-centered economy.

Again, you have to wait for a later era before the right explanatory terminology turns up: Running a modern economy requires processing a vast amount of information. Markets that link many privately owned enterprises are a distributed processing system that can bring much more brain-power to bear on the problem than any central bureau can.

But something gets lost in the simple Communism-failed argument: Public ownership was just a means. The end — public access to the means of production — is as valid a goal as ever. But what if capitalism could do a better job of providing access?

Happy Days. In the 1950s, the real “worker’s paradise” wasn’t the Soviet Union, it was the United States. Even if you didn’t own any part of the industrial system, it wasn’t hard to get access (at least if you were white and male). Unskilled men who entered the workforce in the 50s could get secure long-term jobs that paid enough to buy a house and raise a family. Men who aimed higher could fairly easily work their way through college and enter the professional or managerial ranks. It wasn’t even all that hard to accumulate enough capital to open a small business and become an owner yourself.

One source of this bounty was competition within the owning class. A 1950s worker still needed an owner’s permission to access the means of production — someone had to hire him, in other words — but there were lots of owners around and they needed workers. So workers, especially unionized workers, were in a position to get a good deal.

It’s easy to forget how much government intervention was necessary to maintain this high-access situation: High taxes (especially inheritance taxes) kept the rich from getting too entrenched. Anti-trust laws and other regulations preserved competition. Government defended the workers’ right to unionize. Government-funded research created whole new industries. And the government subsidized skill-acquisition: The free K-12 public education system was the best in the world, state universities were inexpensive, and the Cold War military would teach you any number of skills.

The problem with freedom. Since the Reagan Revolution, we’ve been systematically dismantling the programs that created the great American middle class of the 50s, 60s, and 70s — all in the name of freedom. As a result, we’re losing that middle class.

The main problem is that “freedom” has come to mean primarily freedom for owners. And owners left to their own devices will combine into cartels and monopolies that restrict access to the means of production. They’ll insist on low taxes that starve education and other government efforts to keep access open. What regulations they allow will favor big WalMart-style enterprises that leave little space for new shops or small manufacturers.

So today, if you’re a young person who doesn’t have a family fortune behind you or a family business to inherit, you have a lot to worry about. Conservatives will tell you to worry about your freedom: Obama and his minions will force you into a social contract that takes care of the sick and the old, and educates the children of the poor. Your drive to wealth will be slowed by the contributions to the general well-being that liberals will force out of you.

But I think you have a bigger, more immediate worry: How are you going to get access to the means of production? No matter how able or ambitious you may be, how can you be sure that you’ll be able to transform your effort into the goods and services you’ll need to thrive? The pre-Columbian Native American had access to the land. What do you have?

Conservatives like to pretend the access problem doesn’t exist. Competition happens by itself, without any government intervention. Unemployment occurs because people are too lazy to take available jobs, or too short-sighted to get the training they need. It’s government — not big business — that strangles small businesses. And big corporate bureaucracies are more efficient than the Soviet Politburo because … well, they just are, that’s why. All we have to do is cut even more regulations and more taxes, and Americans will have all the access we need.

Health-care and banking. Consider the conservative response to ObamaCare: Let health insurance plans compete across state lines — remove state regulations on insurance, in other words — and competition will produce better care at lower costs. Regulation (to force coverage of contraception, say, or to insure your 20-something children) will be unnecessary, because rival insurers will compete to offer every conceivable kind of policy.

Ignore for a minute the fact that competition between insurers has nothing to do with better care at lower costs. (Actually, they compete to insure healthy people and thrust sick people off on someone else. That’s how a real-world insurance company makes its money.) Can anyone doubt what will happen if the government doesn’t carefully guard that competition? The same thing that happened when government allowed interstate banking: Instead of two or three plans in each state, we’ll have a merger boom that results in two or three national plans — or even just one plan, if the government allows it.

Underneath all the many labels and wrappers, how many credit-card choices do you have now, really? Four: Capital One, Chase, Citi, and Bank of America control 2/3rds of the market. And do they really compete, or do they just jostle within a friendly cartel like Coke and Pepsi? That’s the kind of health-insurance competition you can expect if conservatives have their way.

Financial consolidation after interstate banking.

Liberal capitalism. The liberal vision of capitalism is public access to the means of production through genuine competition among many private enterprises in a transparent marketplace. The government is the ultimate guarantor of access, but not through public ownership or direct government employment.

Instead, government enforces antitrust laws and other regulations that maintain competition among private owners. It helps workers organize unions and consumers organize co-ops so that the owners’ power does not go unchallenged. It protects market transparency by inspecting production, and gathering and publicizing information about products, so that consumers’ decisions are not blind, but add their distributed brain-power to the management of the economy. It underwrites the infrastructure that is too big for a single company to build and too important to allow a single company to own. It sponsors the basic scientific research that, again, could not be sponsored and should not be owned by any private entity. It makes high-quality education available to everyone. It provides a safety net for those who lose access, so that their loss does not become permanent.

In these and many similar ways, government acts to fulfill the promise of the free enterprise system: a modern market-driven economy that nonetheless provides widespread access to the means of production. The goal is simple: With ability and effort, you should be able to produce what you need to thrive, no matter where you were born or who your parents are.

But you can’t achieve that goal without limiting the freedom and privileges of owners.  They remain on top — with more choices and luxuries than anyone else — but they don’t get to do whatever they want. It’s a small price to pay for a high-access society.

October 22, 2012 – 8:16 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

The Retro Campaign

We should not be fighting about equal pay for equal work and access to birth control in 2012. These issues were resolved years ago until the Republicans brought them back.

— Elizabeth Warren

This week everybody was talking about the VP debate

Initial reports were mixed: Biden dominated the conversation, but Ryan seemed to defend his position well enough, and maybe Biden’s aggressive style turned off some voters. Democrats were happy with their guy and Republicans were happy with theirs, so the pundits called the net result a draw.

But it soon became clear that the debate’s most memorable moment didn’t go well for Ryan, who was denouncing “pork to campaign contributors and special interest groups” in the stimulus when he ran into this buzzsaw:

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: He sent me two letters saying, by the way, can you send me some stimulus money for companies here in the state of Wisconsin? We sent millions of dollars. You know why he said he needed —

MS. RADDATZ: You did ask for stimulus money, correct?

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Sure he did. By the way — (inaudible) —

REP. RYAN: On two occasions, we — we — we advocated for constituents who were applying for grants.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.)

REP. RYAN: That’s what we do. We do that for all constituents who are — (inaudible) — for grants.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I love that. I love that.

Then the fact-checkers weighed in. As in his convention speech, Ryan was making stuff up right and left: No, there wasn’t $90 billion of “green pork” in the stimulus. No, six studies didn’t prove Romney’s tax-plan arithmetic works.  (Even Fox News isn’t buying that one.) And how can Mr. Obstruction Himself criticize the Obama administration for its unwillingness to work with Republicans?

After a few days, Republicans were still claiming Ryan did well, but they were behaving as if he had lost: blaming the moderator and complaining about how “mean” Biden was to their boy wonder.

Ryan absorbed another barb when he defended Romney’s tax math:

REP. RYAN: You can cut tax rates by 20 percent and still preserve these important preferences for middle-class taxpayers —

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Not mathematically possible.

REP. RYAN: It is mathematically possible. It’s been done before. It’s precisely what we’re proposing.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.) It has never been done before.

REP. RYAN: It’s been done a couple of times, actually.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: It has never been done before.

REP. RYAN: Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates, increased growth. Ronald Reagan —

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy.

REP. RYAN: Ronald Reagan — (laughter) — (chuckles) — Republicans and Democrats —

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: This is amazing.

And lest you think “now you’re Jack Kennedy” was a cheap shot, New Republic’s Timothy Noah takes the time Biden didn’t have to explain why Romney’s tax cut bears no resemblance to Kennedy’s.

In short, Biden made good on my prediction from August:

The Republican rank-and-file … believe Ryan is really, really smart and expect him to wipe the floor with that doofus Joe Biden.

I think they’ll be surprised.

BTW, from my point of view (and Grist’s David Roberts’), moderator Martha Raddatz’s questions favored conservative frames and talking points: Social Security is going bankrupt. The abortion issue is about religious values rather than individual rights.

And why were there no questions about climate change or increasing economic inequality?

Many people were moved by Ryan’s story about seeing “a little baby … in the shape of a bean” on his wife’s ultrasound. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik said what I was thinking:

Ryan’s moral intuition that something was indeed wonderful here was undercut, tellingly, by a failure to recognize accurately what that wonderful thing was, even as he named it: a bean is exactly what the photograph shows —- a seed, a potential, a thing that might yet grow into something greater, just as a seed has the potential to become a tree. A bean is not a baby.

… it isn’t life that’s sacred—the world is full of life, much of which Paul Ryan wants to cut down and exploit and eat done medium rare. It is conscious, thinking life that counts, and where and exactly how it begins (and ends) is so complex a judgment that wise men and women, including some on the Supreme Court, have decided that it is best left, at least at its moments of maximum ambiguity, to the individual conscience

… and the continuing tightening of the polls

Nate Silver’s model is designed not to over-react to the current headline, so the tightening has showed up gradually. Before the first debate, Nate was giving President Obama an 86% chance of victory, but now it’s down to 63%.

There’s always a lag between events and polls about the public’s reaction, partly because it takes time for people to figure out what they think, and partly because it takes time to assemble meaningful poll results. So we don’t really know yet whether Biden’s performance Wednesday stopped the slide. (This morning’s ABC/WaPo poll, where Obama has a 49%-46% lead, hints that it did.)

Kevin Drum adds an interesting bit of hindsight: If you look carefully at the polling, Romney’s comeback started before the debate. Possibly it began as a bounceback from the public’s pro-Obama reaction to the 47% controversy.

Here’s some wild speculation: I think maybe 2-3% of voters are deciding purely on optics; they don’t want to vote for a guy who looks like a loser. After Romney’s 47% video, they swung to Obama, but after the first debate they swung to Romney.

The fate of the country may hang on those fickle 2-3%.

Meanwhile, the Republican hope to take the Senate is quietly fading. But they’re on course to retain the House.

One reason Democrats might retain the Senate is this hard-hitting ad from Claire McCaskill.

… and the campaign in general

So, Romney voters, which of these two guys are you voting for?

Speaking to the Columbus Dispatch, Mitt Romney repeated one of the “five pretty lies” I identified in August. #2 on that list was “The uninsured can get the medical care they need in the ER.” Here’s Romney’s version:

We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, “Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack.” No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.

By focusing on heart attacks, Romney avoided a direct lie and instead was just grossly misleading. A more illuminating example is high blood pressure: An ER may diagnose you with treatable hypertension and write you a prescription to control it. But if you can’t pay for those drugs, you won’t get them. If that non-treatment leads to a stroke, once again the ER can help you. But (assuming they save your life), if you need post-crisis rehabilitation to regain your ability to speak or walk or use your hands, you’re on your own again.

In short, if Romney convinced you that the uninsured are doing fine, you’ve been tricked. TPM linked to a variety of studies that estimate the number of Americans who die each year for lack of insurance. The estimates vary depending on the technique, but they are all five-digit numbers.

In other words, lack of insurance has a death rate comparable to a major war.

Paul Krugman combines this with Romney’s tax cuts and draws the obvious conclusion:

a literal description of their plan is that they want to expose many Americans to financial insecurity, and let some of them die, so that a handful of already wealthy people can have a higher after-tax income.

Some “job creators” have announced their plans to be job destroyers if Obama is re-elected. But if we do what they say, nobody gets hurt.

About those “six studies” that supposedly back up Mitt Romney’s claims about his tax plan … Bloomberg columnist Josh Barro got the Romney campaign to list them.

Guess what? They aren’t studies. (Some are newspaper op-eds or blog posts.) There aren’t six of them. (Marty Feldstein gets counted twice; once for an op-ed and then again for a follow-up blog post.) And none proves that Romney’s numbers add up. Barro comments:

Finally, I would note one item that the Romney campaign does not cite in support of its tax plan: Any analysis actually prepared for the campaign in preparation for announcing the plan in February. You would expect that, in advance of announcing a tax plan, the campaign would commission an analysis to make sure that all of its planks can coexist. Releasing that analysis now would be to the campaign’s advantage, helping them put down claims like mine that their math doesn’t add up.

Why don’t they release that analysis? My guess is because the analysis doesn’t exist, and the 20 percent rate cut figure was plucked out of thin air for political reasons without regard to whether it was feasible.

Bad talking point: Obama doubled the price of gas.

Average retail gasoline prices have more than doubled under President Obama, according to government statistics, rising from $1.84 per gallon to $3.85 per gallon.

True? As far as it goes, but look at the graph:

Gas prices are pretty much exactly where they were during the Bush administration’s final summer. They crashed with everything else in the fall of 2008, hitting their low in December. But as the economy recovered, people started driving again and gas prices went back up.

So gas prices are a perverse measure of the success of the Obama economic policy, not its failure. If we had gone into the Second Great Depression that seemed to be looming on Inauguration Day, I’m sure gas would be much cheaper now.

… but I wrote about food safety

Or, more accurately, Bloomberg News did. “When the Food Industry Inspects Itself” is a short note that overgrew its space. (It’s still a lot shorter than the original article.)

Free-market dogma says that the market provides all the motivation companies need to keep their products safe and high-quality: A company depends on its spotless reputation, it needs repeat customers, and so on. So government regulators, inspectors, and testers just get in the way.

You may not realize it, but the U.S. has been running a massive experiment to test that notion, and you’re the guinea pig. Over the last 30 years, the government has been withdrawing from its food-inspection role, leaving the job to contractors and to the food companies themselves.

How’s it working? Not so well, actually.

… and you also might find this interesting

I’m considering making “What did Chris Hayes talk about this weekend?” a regular part of the weekly summary. Sunday’s edition of “Up” had a great discussion of polling; not just “Who’s going to win the election?”, but “What is polling about and how does it enlighten or mislead us?”.

The biggest problem with polling is that it can make public opinion seem real when it really isn’t. On a complex issue like cap-and-trade as a way to mitigate global warming, the honest majority opinion might be “I don’t know what that is.” But that’s not what the headline is going to say when poll is published.

Another persistent issue is that questions tend to be abstract, when many people think in specifics. You’ll get one response if you ask “Do you support same-sex marriage?” But you might get a different one to “If two women or two men want to get married, should the government stop them?”, and a different one yet in real life, when the two guys have names and live next door.

SNL skewers geeky critics of the iPhone 5.

The WaPo reports on a follow-up to one of the classic psychology experiments, the Stanford marshmallow experiment. In the original, children got a choice between eating a marshmallow now, or sitting in the marshmallow’s presence for 15 minutes to earn two marshmallows. Years later, researchers determined that the kids who had successfully delayed their gratification were more competent young adults than the others.

The experiment is widely discussed among non-psychologists because it verifies a piece of folk wisdom: There is such a thing as self-control. Some people have it, others don’t, and it determines a lot about how successful you’ll be.

The follow-up undermines that explanation. In this case, the marshmallow offer is preceded by interactions with an adult. Some of the kids interact with a reliable adult, who keeps promises and is organized enough to make things happen on schedule. The others interact with an unreliable adult whose promises and predictions may not pan out.

Well, guess what? The first group of kids are much more likely to wait for the two-marshmallow payoff than the second group. And that suggests an alternate interpretation: Some kids grow up in reliable, predictable environments where the future is worth strategizing over, and some kids don’t. Maybe that reliable environment is what predicts success, rather than a some-got-it-some-don’t quality of a child’s character.

What’s America’s fastest-growing major religion? None of the above.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has been studying religious trends for a long time. Recently the trend towards religious non-affiliation has accelerated:

“Nones” went from 15% of the population in 2007 to nearly 20% only five years later. They now outnumber white evangelicals and are gaining on Catholics. To a certain extent individuals are leaving their churches, but the bigger story is that increasing numbers of young people never develop a religious affiliation to begin with. As their church-going elders die off, young adults are not filling the ranks.

It’s striking how much more political deference white evangelicals get, even though there are fewer of them. Six Supreme Court justices are Catholic, but I can’t imagine a nominee sailing through Congress as a confessed None.

Maybe someday, Nones will develop a sense of identity and demand equality.

And finally, remember to protect your cats this Halloween. Jack-o-Lanterns love cats.

October 15, 2012 – 12:18 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

When the Food Industry Inspects Itself

According to the government-is-unnecessary crowd, the market gives industry all the motivation it needs to police itself. Even without government inspectors, they claim, airlines wouldn’t cut corners on maintenance, because planes falling out of the sky would look really bad for them. In the long run it would hurt profits, so they just wouldn’t do it. Even if nobody was looking. Not even a little bit, in a pinch.

We could have endless what-if arguments about this theory, but we don’t have to, because (unknown to most of the public) we’ve been running an experiment on ourselves for many years now, as the government slowly retreats from food inspection.

This week, Bloomberg News took a look at how it’s going. Not so well, apparently.

Food-borne illness kills about 3,000 Americans a year, which you might think would be a big deal politically, given that most voters eat and don’t want to die. But as I’ve observed before, eaters don’t think of themselves as a special-interest group, so they don’t have a national organization that hires lobbyists and makes campaign contributions. Food companies, though, do all that stuff. So the system works better for them than for us.

One way it works for them is that food inspection is mostly privatized.

In 2011, the FDA inspected 6 percent of domestic food producers and just 0.4 percent of importers.

The rest? Well, they sort of inspect themselves.

The food industry hires for-profit inspection companies — known as third-party auditors — who aren’t required by law to meet any federal standards and have no government supervision. … The private inspectors that companies select often check only those areas their clients ask them to review.

In some cases, for-hire auditors have financial ties to executives at companies they’re reviewing. AIB International Inc., a Manhattan, Kansas, auditor that awarded top marks to producers that sold toxic food, has had board members who are top managers at companies that are clients.

… “There’s a fundamental conflict,” says David Kessler, a lawyer and physician who was FDA commissioner from 1990 to 1997. “We all know about third-party audit conflicts. We’ve seen it play out in the financial world. You can’t be tied to your auditors. There has to be independence.”

As with most privatization schemes, the problem is that even honest for-profit auditors do not have a broad protect-the-public sense of mission. At best, contractors fulfill their contracts. They don’t take a step back and say, “Wait a minute, people could die from this.”  (Another egregious example is privatized juvenile detention facilities. The mission “care for these kids so that they don’t become hardened criminals” is difficult to express in an enforceable contract.)

In the food industry, it works out like this:

Auditors evaluate their clients using standards selected by the companies that pay them, says Mansour Samadpour, owner of IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group in Lake Forest Park, Washington, which does testing for the FDA. The auditors sometimes follow a checklist that the company they’re inspecting has helped write.

“If you have a program for adding rat poison to a food, the auditor will ask, ‘Did you add as much as you intended?”’ Samadpour says. “Most won’t ask, ‘Why the hell are we adding poison?”’

This business-can-inspect-itself stuff sounds so Republican. Surely things changed when the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006. Right? Well, this is one of those cases where industry owns the Republicans, but when that’s not enough they can rent some Democrats too.

The FDA is trying, so far without success, to wrest back control of food inspection from the industry. In 2008, the agency estimated that it would need another $3 billion — quadrupling its $1 billion annual budget for food safety — to conduct inspections on imported and domestic food, the FDA’s former food safety chief David Acheson says.

Instead, the food industry lobbied for, and won, enactment of a law in January 2011 that expanded the role of auditors — and foreign governments — in vetting producers and distributors of food bound for the U.S.

I’ve skimmed the ideas out of the Bloomberg article, but the human-interest stories — of people who died because they foolishly ate cantaloupes or something — are horrifying. Don’t put yourself through it (unless you’re one of those radical pro-eater activists).

October 15, 2012 – 9:06 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week I found so much interesting stuff written by other people that I put my own article off to next week. I am going to separate off a post on food safety, but even that is based on a much longer Bloomberg News article. It’s basically a short note that mushroomed.

As we move towards the election, that’s increasingly dominating the news. This week we had the VP debate, which pundits immediately declared a draw, but which in hindsight looks more and more like a Biden win. We also saw the polls tighten, producing some white knuckles among Obama supporters. Meanwhile, Democrats seem likely to hold the Senate and Republicans to retain the House.

But fortunately, there was some fascinating stuff that had nothing to do with the election. Let me tell you about the fastest-growing major religion in America, about the toilet of the future, and about marshmallows …

October 15, 2012 – 8:49 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

The West Wing and other fantasies

When the Left wanted to escape from the Bush administration, they watched “The West Wing”. They didn’t stop believing that Bush was president or stop believing that any numbers were true, or create their own polls in which John Kerry was up by 15 points. … The Right, I think, has retreated into their own universe in which they are winning, they are the majority, and Barack Obama was never elected president.

—  Joy Reid

This week everybody was talking about the debate Romney won

Or maybe the one that President Obama lost. The New Yorker’s cover expressed the situation pretty well.

The short version is that Romney finally shook the Etch-a-Sketch and brought back Moderate Mitt, who hadn’t been seen all year. Obama seemed unfocused and didn’t make Romney pay a price for either his sudden about-face or his mis-characterizations of both the president’s policies and his own.

Obama’s passivity and moderator Jim Lehrer’s unwillingness to enforce discipline allowed Romney to dominate the debate, getting the last word on every segment. CBS’ snap poll indicated that 46% of undecided viewers believed Romney won the debate, compared to 22% who thought Obama won.

Aside from a pervasive depression about an election that had seemed in the bag before the debate, liberals like me were left with a series of questions:

  • What was wrong with Obama? All kinds of theories cropped up: overconfidence, the altitude, bad strategy, and so on. To me, none of them seem more compelling than the explanation that he just had a bad day. The most optimistic explanation is that he has a four-debate strategy, and that the whole point of the first debate was to get Romney to commit to either Moderate Mitt or Mr. Conservative. Maybe.
  • What are the facts about Romney’s tax plan, pre-existing conditions, and other disputed points? I’ll cover Romney’s tax and budget proposals (such as they are) in a separate post. Once again, Romney claimed to cover pre-existing conditions on national TV, only to have his staff walk it back later. In short, all Romney promises is not repeal the legal protections that have existed since 1996.
  • How big a difference will the debate make in the election? As much as everybody likes a winner, I don’t think anybody goes into the voting booth thinking: “I’m going to vote for this guy because he won the debate.” Rather, winning the debate means creating a moment that will change people’s minds. It’s not clear that happened. Romney’s performance, IMO, will cause viewers to take another look at him. Whether they’ll like what they see is another question. Nate Silver believes Obama’s lead has shrunk from around 4.5% to between 1% and 2%, but sees signs that Romney’s momentum has already faded.
  • Would conservatives let Romney get away with moving to the center? The answer seems to be Yes. Chris Hayes had this absolutely right: “The thing that conservatives care the most about is pissing off liberals. … If you can infuriate liberals by moving to the left and confounding their beloved president, [conservatives] are going to love you. They don’t care. One more thing: They don’t really worry that [Romney] would  actually do what he says.”
  • If his sudden pivot to the center wins the election for Romney, which Mitt will take office in January? My money is on the “severe conservative”. Particularly if the Republicans retain the House and make gains in the Senate (as they probably will if the climate changes enough to elect Romney), only “severely conservative” bills will come to his desk. Can you really picturing him vetoing them?

Finally, the most memorable moment of the debate may hurt Romney: his threat to Big Bird. Romney’s promises to cut taxes and raise defense spending, while protecting Medicare and Social Security for current and near-future retirees leaves him with a credibility problem on the deficit: What is he going to cut to make the numbers work?

Needing some kind of example, Romney picked PBS, whose subsidy amounts to one ten-thousandth of the federal budget. “I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too” he told moderator Jim Lehrer (from PBS), “but I’m not gonna keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.”

That prompted a huge save-Big-Bird response on the Internet, some serious, some tongue-in-cheek. The visuals said it best.

… and new jobs report

Romney’s Wednesday-night momentum was blunted by Friday morning: The new jobs report puts unemployment below 8% for the first time since Obama took office. The drop was not dramatic, but continued the generally improving pattern of the last two-and-a-half years.

Conservatives reacted to the news the way they react to any facts they don’t like: It can’t be true. Either Obama has a method (which no one identified) for manipulating the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which has no political appointees), or Democrats are lying to the survey-takers about having jobs, or something.

… and you also might find this interesting

A behind-the-scenes battle is going on in news organizations around the country about what to call people who enter the United States illegally and/or stay without a visa or other official documentation. Are they illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, or what?

The argument gained a little attention when it appeared in the blog of the New York Times’ Public Editor, who defends The Times’ usage of illegal immigrant as “clear and accurate”. Jose Antonio Vargas, whose NYT Magazine article “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant” touched off a furor in 2011, is campaigning for undocumented, which  NYT standards editor Phil Corbett considers a “euphemism“.

A good discussion of this topic appeared on Sunday’s Up with Chris Hayes.

Illegal vs. undocumented is a very instructive example of framing, which can seem arcane in the abstract. Even if the illegal and undocumented refer to the same people, each term favors a particular course of action. If immigrants are illegal, the obvious thing to do is arrest them. But if they are undocumented, the simplest solution is to issue them papers. A reporter who doesn’t want to advocate either approach still has to call these immigrants something.

When I’m trying to be neutral, I think I’m going to use unprocessed, which doesn’t specify whether resolution requires a criminal or a bureaucratic process.

Want to reduce the number of abortions? Then you should be advocating for ObamaCare’s contraception mandate.

A new study of women in St. Louis found that counseling about contraception combined with free access to the contraception method of their choice led to dramatically lower rates of unintended pregnancies and abortions.

Will anti-abortion activists seize on this new information and demand the contraception mandate be upheld? Of course not. As worked up as the religious right gets about ultrasounds of fetuses, abortion is actually a screen for other issues, most notably promiscuity. The sky will fall if women can enjoy sex without consequences, and even if contraception could eliminate abortion entirely, traditionalists would find the price too high.

In 2010, climate change was a losing issue. Republicans who were on record supporting cap-and-trade or other action had to quickly recant (like John McCain) or lose a primary (like Rep. Bob Inglis). Democrats didn’t do much better with it, and most were happy if the topic never came up.

Democrats have mostly stayed silent in 2012 as well, but that may be a mistake. Mother Jones’ Chris Mooney (author of The Republican War on Science) argues that public opinion on climate change has shifted recently, and for a very interesting reason.

If you remember the mid-2000s, the icon of global warming was the polar bear. From a public opinion standpoint, this was a disaster: It rendered the issue remote, in both time and space. The fear was about future devastation, in a place where most people have never been and will never go.

The new face of global warming, though, is extreme weather: droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, skipped winters, and so on.

Global warming is now … about something that is just not right in your surroundings, and in the rhythm of your own life.

Mitt Romney played to the old framing in his convention speech: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.” His audience laughed.

Obama struck back with the new frame: “More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They are a threat to our children’s future.” Unfortunately, that was a single-news-cycle exchange. So far, there’s no indication that Obama or Democrats in general recognize climate change as a winning issue.

October 8, 2012 – 1:09 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

What do we know about Romney’s tax and budget plans?

The first Obama/Romney debate on Wednesday had a playground quality to it: One contestant would say “You did X”, the other would say “No I didn’t”, and then either Obama would let it drop or Romney would repeat “Yes you did!”. Jim Lehrer refused to play teacher, so it was left to fact-checkers and other pundits to determine the truth afterwards.

On no subject was the truth less obvious than on Romney’s budget plans. President Obama laid it out like this:

Governor Romney’s central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut — on top of the extension of the Bush tax cuts — that’s another trillion dollars — and $2 trillion in additional military spending that the military hasn’t asked for. That’s $8 trillion. How we pay for that, reduce the deficit, and make the investments that we need to make, without dumping those costs onto middle-class Americans, I think is one of the central questions of this campaign.

And Governor Romney flatly denied it:

I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.

Fact-checkers tried to apply their usual categories — true, false, misleading — but often they just added to the confusion. CNN, for example, said Obama’s charge was false, but graded Romney’s denial as “incomplete”, whatever that means.

Here’s what’s going on: The press is afraid of bias accusations, so it hides behind rules of objectivity that have gotten increasingly technical. Campaigns have gotten good at manipulating those rules, so the objective press has a hard time announcing simple judgments. Judgments, then, are left to the partisan voices, who just increase the noise.

The Weekly Sift makes a lesser claim: I’m not objective, I just try to be honest and give you enough links to check my accuracy. So let’s see if some common sense can cut through the confusion.

The $5 trillion tax cut. Mitt Romney has proposed a tax plan, sort of. On his web site, the full plan to “create 12 million new jobs” has four “economic pillars”, one of which is:

Reform The Nation’s Tax Code To Increase Growth And Job Creation.

o Reduce individual marginal income tax rates across-the-board by 20 percent, while keeping current low tax rates on dividends and capital gains. Reduce the corporate income tax rate – the highest in the world – to 25 percent.
o Broaden the tax base to ensure that tax reform is revenue-neutral.

The idea is that people pay a lower tax rate, but that more income gets taxed (“broaden the tax base”), so the government winds up with the same amount of money (“revenue neutral”).

There’s no reason that can’t work in theory, but notice that the marginal-tax-rate cut (the attractive part of the plan) is specified at 20%, while “broaden the tax base” (the unattractive part) is left vague. Elsewhere, Romney promises to eliminate the alternate minimum tax (which falls almost entirely on the wealthy) and the federal estate tax (which only applies to multi-million-dollar estates).

So if you evaluate Romney’s plan by what he has specified — the tax cuts — it’s a $5 trillion tax cut over the next ten years. Now, that’s not entirely fair, because whatever plan he eventually proposes to Congress would also specify the base-broadening part. The rate-cut is part of a “revenue neutral” tax plan in the same way that Cocoa Puffs are “part of this complete breakfast”.

So Romney is technically correct in saying “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut.” But let me flesh that out by putting true words in Romney’s mouth: “I don’t have a plan to cut government revenue by $5 trillion. I have a revenue-neutral plan, but the only part of it I’m willing to spell out before the election cuts federal revenue by $5 trillion.”

So he still needs to specify what currently untaxed income will be taxed in order to raise the $5 trillion that his plan needs to fulfill his revenue-neutral pledge.

Growth or funny money? If you read the details on the web site, a big chunk of that previously untaxed income is money that just wouldn’t exist otherwise. Romney’s plan estimates that the economy will grow at a 2.5% rate with the current tax system, but that under his plan (including his similarly vague plan to de-regulate business and other plans he considers growth-inducing) the economy will grow at a 4% rate.

When you compound that over ten years, the difference is huge. Current GDP is around $15 trillion per year. Ten years of 2.5% growth get you to $19 trillion, but ten years of 4% growth get you to $22 trillion, which is almost 16% bigger. So in the tenth year, the 20% rate cut is almost balanced by the growth alone. The extra income you need to broaden the tax base is almost entirely manna that fell from Heaven.

The question is whether you believe any of that. The idea that tax cuts create growth is dogma among conservatives, but recent history doesn’t bear them out. We were promised the cornucopia of growth when Bush cut taxes in 2001 and 2003, but it didn’t arrive. Even with a bubble-based illusion of growth, median household income declined. Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein reports:

When Bill Clinton left office after 2000, the median income — the income line around which half of households come in above, and half fall below — stood at $52,500 (measured in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars). When Bush left office after 2008, the median income had fallen to $50,303. That’s a decline of 4.2 per cent. That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms, notes Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

In the debate, Romney refused any historical comparison. (“My plan is not like anything that’s been tried before.”) But his web site justifies the growth assumptions by looking at the recovery from the 1981-82 recession during the Reagan administration. The problem is that this recession (like the one before it) looks nothing like the 1981-82 recession. The Reagan recession was brought on by the high interest rates (over 20%!) that the Fed imposed to kill off the inflation plague of the 1970s. As the Fed cut rates back to more normal levels, the economy could resume a normal growth pattern, plus make up for lost time.

The last two recessions were set off by popping bubbles: the dot-com bubble of the late 90s and the housing bubble of the Bush years. Recoveries from bubbles are slower, because the previous level was illusory. Let me repeat that: The Obama Recovery is slower than Reagan’s because the level we are trying to recover to was a mirage.

Even if we grant Romney’s 4% growth assumption, the difference in the first year would be small, while the tax-cut hit would be as large as ever. Would the Tea Party types in Congress really accept a budget where the deficit continued to climb for several years while we waited for growth to catch up?

I personally have no confidence in Romney’s growth assumptions. If he’s really going to broaden the tax base, he’s going to have to extend taxes to real income, not imaginary income from the growth fairy.

Deductions. The one real base-broadening idea Romney has floated is to cap deductions. In the debate he said:

But in order for us not to lose revenue, have the government run out of money, I also lower deductions and credits and exemptions, so that we keep taking in the same money when you also account for growth.

One trial balloon suggested that deductions be capped at $17,000, though in the debate Romney refused to be pinned down to any specific number:

what are the various ways we could bring down deductions, for instance? One way, for instance, would be to have a single number. Make up a number, $25,000, $50,000. Anybody can have deductions up to that amount. And then that number disappears for high-income people.

That approach has a problem: If you don’t accept Romney’s growth assumption, eliminating all deductions for upper-income people doesn’t replace the $5 trillion in revenue. So he’s forced to break his pledge not to raise taxes on middle-income people — not all middle-income people, but quite a few. When you add up mortgage interest, state and local taxes, medical expenses, and so on, it’s not hard for a household of slightly-above-average income to hit a $17,000 cap, and even easier to hit some much-lower cap that would really raise $5 trillion.

I know because I did my parents’ taxes last year. In 2011, my parents were in “the 47%” of people who paid no federal income tax. My mother died that year, and both parents spent time in nursing homes, so their medical expenses wiped out their $50,000 of income. Under the Romney plan, with a $17K deduction cap, they’d have owed thousands.

So Al Sharpton is right: “This election isn’t about Obama, it’s about your momma.”

Tax fairness. Romney’s pledge not to favor the rich in his tax plan is very carefully worded: “I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.”

This echoes a common conservative framing of taxes. Over the last 30 years, the share of the national income that has gone to the very rich has skyrocketed. Under Romney’s policies, it would presumably continue to skyrocket, because of de-regulation, non-enforcement of antitrust laws, and so on. But all he pledges is to keep their share of taxes the same.

Think about it this way: Imagine a two-person economy that makes $10, with $6 going to the richer guy and $4 to the poorer guy. Imagine their government collects $2 in taxes; let’s say $1.50 from the richer guy and 50 cents from the poorer guy, so that their after-tax incomes are $5.50 and $4.50.

Now imagine that inequality increases, so that the rich guy makes $8 and the poor guy $2. But suppose the government keeps their taxes the same: The rich guy still pays $1.50 and the poor guy 50 cents, so that their after-tax incomes are $6.50 and $1.50.

That system would fulfill Romney’s tax-fairness pledge: the rich guy still pays 75% of the taxes.  But it isn’t fair at all. The rich guy’s tax rate goes down from 25% to 18.75%. The poor guy’s goes up from 12.5% to 25%.

In short: When the rich make more of the money, their share of the taxes should increase, not stay the same.

Spending cuts. The situation on the spending side of Romney’s plan is similar: He has spelled out his spending increases — defense, mostly. And he has pledged not to cut Medicare of Social Security benefits for anyone currently over 55. In other words, even if he serves eight years, he will never submit a budget that shows a spending cut in either of those two giant entitlements.

But he also pledges to get federal spending down to 20% of GDP by 2016, which (even with his optimistic 4% growth assumption) means $500 billion of annual cuts. The only sizable cut he identifies on his web site is $95 billion by repealing ObamaCare. But repealing ObamaCare also repeals the cost savings and tax increases it contains, and so increases the deficit rather than decreasing it. And “I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare.” not use it to decrease the deficit. And he was open to retaining the improved drug benefits ObamaCare adds to Medicare.

So the ObamaCare cut is illusion. It won’t cut the deficit.

Romney’s other specified cuts are Amtrak; the national endowments for art, humanities, and public broadcasting (bye-bye, Big Bird); the Legal Services Corporation; family planning; and foreign aid. By Romney’s own account, the total savings (other than ObamaCare) is only $2.6 billion of the $500 billion he says he needs.

So he has specified about half a percent of the cuts his budget needs under his optimistic assumptions. And the biggest parts of the budget — defense, Social Security, Medicare — are off limits. The non-ObamaCare cuts he has specified are insufficient even to cover the increase he wants in defense spending.

That’s why Obama accused him of “gutting our investments in schools and education”, and how Romney was able to deny it: “I reject the idea that I don’t believe in great teachers or more teachers. … I’m not going to cut education funding. I don’t have any plan to cut education funding and — and grants that go to people going to college.”

“I don’t have any plan to cut …” is a universal dodge for Romney. Because he doesn’t have any plan to cut spending, Romney can deny any specific thing you imagine must be cut to plug the huge hole in his budget. The Ryan budget is a little more specific about cuts, but Romney disclaims that as well. His campaign says “as president he will be putting together his own plan.” And Romney has emphasized that he, not Ryan, is “the guy running for president.”

In short, what Romney has given us is a lot of specifics that cut taxes and raise spending, coupled with vague promises to make it all come out right somehow. So electing Romney is sort of like hiring a trainer who promises you can eat more and lose weight. He has pictures of the lavish meals his plan will let you eat, and a graph of how your weight will go down.

How does it work? “Exercise” he says. What exercise? When? How much? “We can work all that out later.”

October 8, 2012 – 12:29 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I’m still in the Midwest, putting the Sift together at a Panera rather than at home in my office. That adds an element of unpredictability to the day (plus an hour of time change), so if the Sift isn’t showing up as quickly as you expect, have patience.

The big news this week, of course, was the presidential debate. Why was Obama so listless? Were any of the charges and counter-charges true? How has Romney’s good showing affected the race? And so on. I’m trying not to get completely absorbed by the hype, but there is also some actual newsworthiness in there.

The weekly summary will be called “The West Wing and other fantasies”, after something Joy Reid said Saturday on Up with Chris Hayes. The short notes include some fascinating stuff about how the public discussion of global warming has changed, new data on how effective free contraception can be at reducing the abortion rate, the battle within newsrooms about whether immigrants are “illegal” or “undocumented”, and more.

The only separate article will address the question: What do we really know about Mitt Romney’s tax and budget proposals?

Previous teasers have told you the reason I’ve been in the Midwest: my father’s health. He died last Monday night and the funeral was Saturday. I’ll be going back home tomorrow, so I expect the Sift to return to normal next week. Life, I suppose, will find a new normal.

October 8, 2012 – 8:41 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (4)