The Weekly Sift

The Death of the Follow-up Question and other short notes

Here’s the decline of journalism in one exchange: PBS’ Judy Woodruff is interviewing Herman Cain when he says the Chinese have:

indicated that they’re trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.

If you’re feeling generous, you can believe what Cain claimed later, that he meant that China was trying to develop a nuclear capability to rival ours. But the other possible interpretation was that Cain either didn’t know or got confused about the fact that China has had nuclear weapons since the 1960s — an appalling bit of ignorance in a presidential candidate.

Either way, it should be obvious to a trained reporter that some people were going to interpret Cain’s statement as ignorant (as they did). So whether an interviewer feels like nailing Cain or protecting him, his statement cries out for a follow-up question: “What do you mean by ‘develop nuclear capability’?”

But no. Follow-up questions are so 20th century. The 21st century interviewer just lets public figures blather and moves on, so Woodruff’s next question is about Cain’s position in the polls.

If you care about food-quality issues, you should be reading Bruce Bradley’s blog. Bradley is a self-described “food industry insider” (Pillsbury, General Mills, Nabisco) who now is trying to tell the rest of us what the food industry is doing.

He has a down-to-earth manner that comes through nicely in this demonstration of what’s wrong with processed tomatoes. Basically, after you process all the flavor out of a tomato, you have to add a bunch of garbage to make it taste like something.

You know those climate-change “alarmists”, the ones who exaggerate everything and make off-the-wall predictions? Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

Well, CO2 emissions in 2010 turned out to be higher than the worst-case scenario in IPCC’s 2007 report.

Joe Walsh was the only Illinois congressman to get the Family Research Council’s “True Blue” rating for his “unwavering support of the family”. The irony: He doesn’t support his own family. He’s more than $100,000 behind on his child support payments.

Two women’s stunning encounter with starlings

Dilbert creator Scott Adams is only sort of joking when he asks: What if Government Were More Like an iPod? His specific suggestions for reform are mostly unworkable, some of them intentionally ridiculous. But I think he’s got the framing right:

I like to think of the government as a big, complicated machine. We citizens are the users. What we’ve always lacked is a well-designed user interface.

The vote to watch in tomorrow night’s election returns is the Issue 2 referendum in Ohio. Ohio’s Republican-dominated legislature passed SB-5, a union-busting bill similar to the one that started the demonstrations in Wisconsin last spring. Issue 2 puts SB-5 up to popular vote. Polls show a significant majority for repeal.

It’s been 20 years since Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive. At the time, not many people thought he’d be around to celebrate the anniversary.

Who’s to blame for the filibuster making the Senate unmanageable? A simple chart explains: When Democrats are in the minority, they filibuster about as much as the previous Republican minority. When Republicans are in the minority, they take filibustering to whole new level.

What do past elections predict about 2012? Nate Silver is the ideal person to answer that question: Obama is vulnerable, but any perception of an improving economy could save him. Or the Republicans could save him by nominating anybody other than Romney.

And by the way, Obama still has a huge advantage among younger voters. The whole election will come down to how many of them vote.

An electrical engineer explains the importance of the smart grid, an electrical system that can interact with your appliances rather than just fulfill their demands for power. Short version: What power companies do is match supply to demand. The power source that’s easiest to adjust to changing demand is natural gas as opposed to oil, coal, nuclear, or any of the green sources. And more and more, natural gas means fracking. But a smart grid could adjust demand quickly, making gas a less vital part of the system.

As wind becomes a more important electricity source, power surges become a problem to manage. Another way to add flexibility to the power system is to let utilities store excess power in your water heater or some other heat sink.

If you set up your tripod and get an entire thunderstorm on one photo, it looks like this:

November 7, 2011 – 2:02 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

The System’s Game

When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you: pull your beard, flick your face to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is nonviolence and humor.

— John Lennon
[it took me forever to source this;
for the longest time I thought it must be misattributed]

In this week’s sift:

Nonviolence and the Police. If the recent police attacks on Occupy protesters either enrage or discourage you, take some time to remember how nonviolence works, and the important roles the police play in that strategy.
It’s Mitt Romney’s Economy. Vast inequality? Paper profits and no jobs? It’s all part of a revolution in corporate behavior that started in the 70s. And one of the major revolutionaries was Mitt Romney.
Three-eyed Fish and other short notes. Somebody really did catch a three-eyed fish near a nuclear power plant. My Halloween column. Occupy Mordor’s statement. Perry’s flat tax. Some very pretty pictures of the northern lights. Bad Lip Reading does Herman Cain. And more.
Last week’s most popular post. For the third week in a row, Turn the Shame Around, with 352 views (7400 total). The most-viewed new post was Eliminate the Work Penalty (183). (Whenever I report such a low number, somebody reminds me that the blog page views don’t count the readers who get the Sift via email or RSS feeds. That’s around 300 people total, as best I can figure.)
This week’s challenge. Lots of state and local elections are happening a week from tomorrow. These elections are won on turnout, so make sure to turn out. The headline vote is in Ohio, where a No on Issue 2 will repeal the anti-union bill passed by the legislature. They could still use your help.

October 31, 2011 – 12:26 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Nonviolence and the Police

I assume that by now you’ve heard about this week’s police attacks on the Occupy protests — most outrageously in Oakland, but also in Denver and Atlanta. (If not, chase the links and watch some of the video. Descriptions don’t capture it.) These attacks resemble what had happened previously in New York and Boston.

This is a good time to review how nonviolent protest works, because a violent response challenges a nonviolent movement in two ways: First, violence makes protesters angry and tempts them to respond in kind, which hardly ever turns out well. You can’t win physically against the police, and unless it is clear that the violence comes entirely from their side, you won’t win in the media either. “They started it” wasn’t a convincing argument when you were ten, and it still isn’t.

Second, watching your nonviolent allies lose the battle — as they always do when the police are determined and ruthless enough — is discouraging. You might wonder: How can we ever win when they can be violent and we can’t?

And yet, nonviolent movements do cause major change (the Civil Rights movement), have defeated empires (the British in India), and can even overthrow dictators willing to torture and kill (most recently in the Arab Spring). How does that work?

In stages:

Bring a problem to public attention and make its victims visible.
Demonstrate the injustice of the system’s response.
Make explicit the implicit violence that maintains the unjust system.
Turn the servants of the unjust system, including (eventually) the police.

If you make it to stage 4, where the police simply refuse to follow orders, the government either gives in or falls. Governments know this, which is why they frequently give in sooner.

Now let’s go through the stages more slowly.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already succeeded at Stage 1. FDL finds the value of the protest in

its shoving the Overton Window away from the far right end of the spectrum, far enough away to make talk of meaningful solutions possible, which is the first step towards making them politically viable. Putting a surtax on the rich and/or letting the Bush tax cuts finally expire was considered politically verboten as recently as a month ago. Then Occupy Wall Street got started, and suddenly surtaxes on millionaires start becoming very much discussed indeed.

Also, people are finally starting to pay attention to the fact that many of the financial manipulations leading up to the crash were illegal, and that the bankers/criminals are either getting away with it or paying wrist-slap fines far smaller than their ill-gotten gains.

Sometimes stage 1 is all that’s necessary to create change, but usually you need to keep going.

It’s working on stage 2, occasionally popping up to 3. The main response the authorities are making to the protests is to identify broken regulations — there’s no camping in this park — and then say “We can’t tolerate breaking the law.”

The movement hasn’t succeeded yet in making the public see the hypocrisy in this. What the system actually can’t tolerate are little people breaking little laws. When Goldman Sachs commits fraud, or Bank of America illegally repossesses people’s homes, no one is arrested and no heads get broken. But put up a tent someplace you shouldn’t and all hell breaks loose.

The next job is to get people all over America asking, “What’s up with that?”

Here’s the comparable phase in the Civil Rights movement: when ordinary white people started seeing the Whites Only signs differently. At some point, they realized that there were no separate-but-equal facilities for blacks, and that blacks’ absence did not mean that they were happier with their own kind. Instead, whites began to see Whites Only not as an organizing label (like Men and Women signs on restrooms), but as a threat to have blacks carted away by force. Ordinary white people began to see the violence implicit in their apparently peaceful segregated lunch counters.

In order to win this phase, OWS has to stay as peaceful and orderly as possible, while continuing to keep up the pressure. The disproportion between their civil disobedience and the response it draws — and the contrast with the easy law-breaking of the financial elite — is what makes the case.

One NYC protestor had it exactly right (at the 5:30 mark)

Each new depiction of the abuses of the police on the First Amendment, the more people will show up here in New York City, and the more waves of occupation will spread across this country. And you should be proud of that, police, because you are participating in our media publicity campaign. Thank you for attending.

The challenge will be to keep Wall Street in the picture, and not let the financiers disappear behind the police.

Stage 4. Sometimes you establish the injustice of the system and the violence that maintains it, and it’s still not enough. The moral pretentions of the powerful have been exposed, but they’re basically saying, “Yeah, we’re bad guys. So what? We’re still bigger than you.”

That’s when an invisible moral force begins to work in your favor. You see, most people don’t grow up wanting to be evil. Maybe a few become bankers so that they can foreclose on widows and orphans, Snidely Whiplash style, but probably not many. Maybe a few become police so that they can get away with pepper-spraying defenseless young women in the face, but probably not many.

A lot of police joined the force because they wanted to be good guys, not bad guys. Many of them still want to be good guys. That’s why they can be turned.

Turning the police takes incredible courage and persistence on the part of the protesters. Basically, you have to let them beat you up until they can’t make themselves do it any more. One event that spins out of control is usually not enough. Police have to go to bed knowing that tomorrow they will get up and beat innocent people, like they did today.

At some point they’ll just stop. The order will come down and they’ll say no. It sounds incredible, but it happens.

Usually it doesn’t come to that, because the authorities will do anything to avoid it. (In Cairo, the army forced Mubarak to resign rather than see their ranks dissolve. At Tiananmen Square, the government brought in troops from the provinces, because they were afraid local soldiers wouldn’t obey.) But whether things actually go that far or not, the ultimate threat of a nonviolent movement is to turn the police. No government can survive that.

Protesters need to understand this threat from the beginning, and treat the police accordingly: Shame them but don’t insult them, and above all don’t threaten them. They are your ultimate weapon.

This video from Occupy Boston, of protesters chanting “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” is exactly right. Those are the questions we want cops asking each other in the privacy of their squad cars, and asking themselves late at night when they can’t sleep. We want them discussing that topic in their union meetings, and mulling it over when the 1%’s refusal to pay taxes leads to layoffs of good cops.

Who are the 99%, officer? You are. So what are you doing on that side of the barricade?

October 31, 2011 – 12:23 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

Tagged nonviolence, occupy wall street, police |

It’s Mitt Romney’s Economy

One of the major debates of the 2010 election was about whose bad economy this was: Did the mess belong to Barack Obama now, or was he still just mopping up after the disaster that was George W. Bush? Despite the merits of their case, the Democrats lost that argument, and most of Congress along with it.

As we move towards 2012, the cover article in the current New York Magazine (doesn’t young Mitt look like Mad Men‘s Don Draper?) raises an intriguing third explanation: Maybe it’s been Mitt Romney’s economy all along.

That claim seems like a stretch the first time you hear it, but it makes sense. Our 1% economy didn’t just come from government, it’s also the result of a revolution in the way corporations behave. And one of the most decorated veterans of that revolution is Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney is the real thing. He was, by any measure, an astonishingly successful businessman, one who spent his career explaining how business might operate better, and who leveraged his own mind into a personal fortune worth as much as $250 million. But much more significantly, Romney was also a business revolutionary. Our economy went through a remarkable shift during the eighties as Wall Street reclaimed control of American business and sought to remake it in its own image. Romney developed one of the tools that made this possible, pioneering the use of takeovers to change the way a business functioned, remaking it in the name of efficiency.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with efficiency. Whether or not you think a corporation is “efficient” depends on what you think corporations are supposed to do. Romney’s revolutionary cadre of young management consultants believed that the sole purpose of a corporation was to make money for its owners — a view that is orthodox in American business today, but wasn’t in the 1970s. (It still isn’t in many other capitalist countries, like Germany.)

Whenever you change the definition of efficiency, you’re going to look around and discover lots of inefficiency, because nobody has even been trying to be efficient by your new definition. That’s what Romney saw when he came on the scene in 1975. Corporations were inefficient in all sorts of ways: Too many were unfocused conglomerates, assembled more to gratify egos than to make money. They tried to do too many things and failed to make the most productive use of their resources.

But above all, they had too many employees and paid them too much. Efficiency demanded that this be fixed, and vast profits awaited whoever would fix it.

As the Economist points out, Romney can’t claim all the credit for this transformation — otherwise he’d be Buffett/Gates rich — but nonetheless he is typical of the class of people who can. Romney worked for the consulting group Bain & Company and in 1983 led their spin-off Bain Capital.

Every business story begins with a proposition, and the one that launched Bain Capital was the notion that the partners might do better if they stopped simply advising companies and starting buying and running the firms themselves.

One obstacle to efficiency at the taken-over companies was the loyalty that some managers felt towards their workers and middle managers, but Romney had a solution for that.

In 1986, Bain Capital bought a struggling division of Firestone that made truck wheels and rims and renamed it Accuride. Bain took a group of managers whose previous average income had been below $100,000 and gave them performance incentives. This type and degree of management compensation was also unusual, but here it led to startling results: According to an account written by a Bain & Company fellow, the managers quickly helped to reorganize two plants, consolidating operations—which meant, inevitably, the shedding of unproductive labor—and when the company grew in efficiency, these managers made $18 million in shared earnings. The equation was simple: The men who increased the worth of the corporation deserved a bigger and bigger percentage of its spoils. In less than two years, when Bain Capital sold the company, it had turned an initial $5 million investment into a $121 million return.

The poster child here is the paper company AmPad. Romney bought it, took it private, re-organized, and then took it public again.

By 2001, five years after the company had been taken public, it had filed for bankruptcy and liquidated its assets. But Bain Capital made more than $100 million from AmPad for itself and its investors.

In just about every way, Romney and Bain Capital were among the trailblazers of the new economy: They destroyed both blue and white-collar jobs, cut pay at the bottom and raised it at the top, and made money even on companies that failed.

How much further ahead of his time could Romney have been?

In 2002, he became governor of Massachusetts, where he turned his attention to health care. In a rational world, RomneyCare would be his political claim to fame. Working with a Democratic legislature, Romney crafted a program that has resulted in only 4.6% of residents under 65 lacking health insurance (compared to 26.5% in Texas). But RomneyCare was the model for ObamaCare, so now Republicans hate it and Romney can’t take credit for it.

But the choice of health care as Romney’s original issue gives a lot of insight:

But what separates Romney’s plan from Obama’s—and gives some clues about his potential presidency—is its almost-accidental origin. Romney did not begin with a philosophical quest to improve American health care. He began with the idea of himself as a problem solver and asked those around him for a problem that he might usefully solve.

The picture that emerges is a little different from the one his Republican rivals paint: It isn’t that Romney changes his principles when the wind changes. It’s that principles are not fundamental to his thinking. He exhibits

the clinical separation of decision-making from ideology, the detachment of those decisions from moral consequence, a persistent blind spot for people as people.

That makes him an odd choice for a Republican Party that is more ideological and moralistic than it has ever been. And yet (though he is persistently mired in second place in the polls — seemingly behind a different leader each month), the InTrade predictive market is giving him a 70% chance to win the nomination, compared to 5.4% for current poll leader Herman Cain.

The Republican electorate longs for an authentic conservative (Bachmann) who has both charisma (Cain) and gravitas (Gingrich). But given that there isn’t one, they may have to settle for an efficient problem-solver who will say whatever they want to hear.

Next summer and fall, there will be a battle of narratives about the economy. Both parties will say that the economy is bad, but they will disagree about why. Is it bad because it is the Obama economy, hobbled by deficits, taxes, and regulations? Or is it bad because it is the Romney economy — the economy of paper profits and no jobs, the economy of the 1%?

October 31, 2011 – 12:14 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

Tagged 2012, Mitt Romney, Republicans |

Three-eyed Fish and other short notes

It’s a Simpson’s world: Somebody really did catch a three-eyed fish near a nuclear power plant.

My Halloween column A Candy Bar for Death is up on the UU World web site.

The Occupy Mordor movement is getting more serious. The Orcs of Mordor have released a statement charging:

The legitimate government of Mordor has allowed itself to be covertly replaced by a “shadow government” comprised of ‘An Eye’ and ‘Nine Mortal Men’, none of whom were elected.

Wonkblog at the Washington Post examines Rick Perry’s “flat” tax plan, concluding that it will collect less revenue and move towards privatizing Social Security.

How it will collect less revenue becomes clear when ThinkProgress computes the Perry tax for Warren Buffett, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and Perry himself. All are wealthy enough to benefit, but the biggest winner is the richest: Buffett, who might pay as little as two-tenths of a percent of his $62 million income.

Finally Kevin Drum observes that the vaunted simplicity of the system is also only for the rich:

the rich not only pay lower taxes [under Perry’s plan], they also benefit from having simpler taxes. They do so much better under Perry’s plan that they’ll almost all just fill in his postcard without even bothering to calculate how much they might owe under the current regime.

Low and middle-income taxpayers, however, have no such luck. There’s a pretty good chance they’ll do better under the current system, which means they need to fill out Perry’s postcard and fill out a current 1040 to see which one comes out better. No simple taxes for them.

This photo was supposed to be India as seen from space during Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Apparently it isn’t. (Actually it’s an overlay that illustrates India’s increasing brightness from space as its population and prosperity increase.) But it’s still pretty.

Something else that’s pretty: Last Monday’s northern lights, seen across much of the country. This shot was taken near Madison, Wisconsin:

Or you can watch the aurora on video, like this one from Michigan:

Or this one from orbit:

Alabama learned nothing from Georgia’s experience, and so has to repeat the lesson: When you depend on migrant Hispanic workers to harvest your crops, an anti-illegal-immigrant law that motivates even legal Hispanic immigrants to leave your state might not work out for you.

As in Georgia, Alabama’s crops are rotting in the fields. This was entirely predictable, and the logic is simple: First, hand-picking crops really is a skill; you can’t expect a random person off the unemployment rolls to be good at it. So paying by the hour doesn’t work out for the farmers and paying by the box doesn’t work out for the pickers. (An Alabama tomato farmer claimed that inexperienced American replacement pickers who were paid by the box were making $24 a day for back-breaking work. No wonder they quit.)

Second, a skilled American-citizen picker wants more than the no-benefits $8/hour the farmers want to pay. But Alabama produce competes against produce from neighboring states that aren’t hostile to immigrants. So the Alabama farmers can’t just raise prices to pay their workers more.

The week’s stupidest point: Congressman Denny Rehberg argues that a statue of Jesus on public land is not a church-and-state issue because it’s not religious. “Just because it’s maintained and was put up by the Knights of Columbus does not make it a religious statement.”

A Florida high-school teacher breaks the law by helping her students register to vote.

We claim it’s a service economy, so why are we checking out our own groceries? The concept of shadow work.

Jon Stewart: If ClimateGate deserved so much coverage, why doesn’t the final debunking of ClimateGate deserve coverage?

Paul Ryan takes a bold stand for “equality of opportunity” rather than “equality of outcome”. So why does he oppose anything that would actually equalize opportunity? And that point about Americans being more upwardly mobile than Europeans — it ain’t true.

Now Bad Lip Reading has a Herman Cain video:

October 31, 2011 – 12:07 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

Vampires

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

— Karl Marx

In this week’s sift:

Eliminate the Work Penalty. I don’t know why liberals let conservatives dominate the tax-simplification issue. The Right’s regressive flat-tax idea doesn’t simplify anything. But there’s an obvious progressive reform that would.
Koch-Funded Study: “Global Warming is Real”. Climate-change deniers expected a new study by a blue-ribbon group of scientists from outside the usual climate-science circles to show that global-warming statistics were either a mistake or a fraud. Instead, it provided independent verification of their accuracy.
Shoot-out at the MSNBC Corral. Friday, Rachel Maddow looked straight into the camera, addressed the Koch brothers by name, and told them to “man up” and face her rather than go after her staff.
Gracious Statesmanship and other short notes. Why can’t Republicans be as gracious about President Obama’s successes as Democrats were in 2003? We have Blackwater to thank for getting our troops out of Iraq. Meteor Blades says that the Iraq War was a crime, not a mistake. Still no End of the World. A vertical forest in Milan. Bra-burning in Japan. Where Occupy Wall Street has already succeeded. OWS humor. And Bad Lip Reading’s Mitt Romney video.
Last week’s most popular post. For the second week in a row, Turn the Shame Around got the most views (1400 last week, 7000 total). The most popular new post was Suck It Up, with around 350 views.
Expand Your Vocabulary: metaphor shear. It’s the moment when a sudden confrontation with reality makes you realize that you’ve been thinking inside a bogus metaphor. Anybody who takes a serious look at economics is going to experience a lot of metaphor shears.

October 24, 2011 – 12:54 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Eliminate the Work Penalty

Like clockwork every four years, Republican presidential candidates propose to “simplify” the income tax by replacing it with a “flat” tax — an income tax where all income is taxed at the same rate.

As I’ll explain below, a flat tax doesn’t simplify anything, but progressives could respond with a proposal that would: Eliminate the work penalty. Don’t tax dividends and capital gains separately from wages or at a lower maximum rate. Treat all income the same.

Fake simplification. Here’s what’s wrong with the idea that a flat tax is simple. An income tax has two parts:

defining what income is
saying how much tax a person at each income level pays.

If you’ve ever filled out your own tax return, you know that the complicated part is (1). Once you know your taxable income, you just look up your tax on a table.

But a flat tax only changes (2), so it doesn’t make your life simpler at all, and it doesn’t shrink the “three million words of the current tax code” that Rick Perry rails about. It slightly simplifies the formula the IRS uses to compute the tax tables, but that’s about it.

The only purpose a flat tax serves is to cut taxes for rich people and raise them for everyone else. “Simplification” is a just ruse to sell the change to people who aren’t rich.

Deductions. Now, sometimes a flat-tax proposal is coupled with eliminating a bunch of deductions. Depending on how it’s implemented, that could simplify both your tax return and the tax code. And it might or might not be a good idea, depending on which deductions get eliminated and whether or not the corresponding tax expenditures are replaced with subsidies.

But that part has nothing to do with flattening the tax. If getting rid of a bunch of deductions is a good idea, we could do that while continuing to tax the rich at a higher rate than the poor or the middle class. The two ideas are unrelated.

The Work Penalty. However, there is a way progressives can steal the tax-simplification issue, and simultaneously put the plutocrats on defense: We could propose eliminating what Andrew Tobias has aptly called “the work penalty”.

Currently, if your money makes any sizable amount of money for you through dividends and capital gains, you fill out a way-too-complicated worksheet in the instructions for Schedule D. (Check out page D-10.) That’s because we don’t really have one income tax system, we have two: One for people who make money by working, and a different one for people who make money by having money.

Guess which system has the lower rates?

For the last several years, tax rates on wages have started at 10%, jumped to 15% when a single wage-earner’s taxable income got over $8,500, gone up to 25% at $34,500, and kept rising from there to max out at 35%.

Meanwhile, the tax rate on qualifying dividends and capital gains is capped at 15%. So (because of how tax-brackets work) a wage-earner whose taxable income tops $38,750 ends up paying a higher tax rate than an idle billionaire whose income is all dividends and capital gains.

That’s a work penalty. If you work, you pay more than if you had acquired the same amount of money by being idly rich.

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan would make the work penalty bigger by not taxing capital gains at all. Cain would tax dividends at the same rate as wages, but this is mostly a ruse, because corporations would stop paying dividends. Instead, they’d use their excess cash to buy back stock, which raises their stock price and so converts taxable dividends into tax-free capital gains.

Making tax simplification a liberal issue. The work penalty is the reason that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. President Obama has proposed to fix this by adding a new Buffett Rule to the tax code: a higher minimum tax rate for people whose income is higher than $1 million a year, however they acquire it.

But rather than tack on an extra rule, why not go for the heart of the beast? Eliminate the work penalty. Treat all income the same.

If we made this proposal revenue neutral, tax rates on wages could go down. (Whether we need more revenue in general should be debated separately.) The tax booklet would get slimmer. The income tax would get conceptually simpler, and the Schedule D worksheet would go away. Plus, it would eliminate all the games that make astronomical CEO and hedge-fund manager wages look like capital gains. It’s a win all around, unless you make a lot of money off your money and pay somebody else to do your taxes.

And the framing is tremendous. The work penalty captures the part of the Occupy Wall Street message that most resonates with the general public: the feeling that the rich have special privileges. (Robert Reich’s tax proposals address the work penalty, but he buries it at the end of his article, not realizing the power of the idea.)

It also follows the pattern of the marriage penalty, a concept the Right has put a lot of effort into publicizing. (Marriage and work are both traditional American values that don’t deserve to be treated badly by the tax code.) It associates liberals with working people and conservatives with the idle rich. It steals the tax simplification and tax reform memes from conservatives.

And finally, it’s just the right thing to do. Income is income. There’s no moral justification for favoring the idle rich over people with jobs.

October 24, 2011 – 12:43 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

Tagged framing, income tax, work penalty |

Koch-Funded Study: “Global Warming Is Real”

A new study begun by skeptics from outside the climate-science community, funded in part by the climate-change-denying Koch Foundation, has published four papers supporting one of the key global-warming hypotheses.

To put this in context, there are three distinct ways to deny that we should take action on global warming.

Claim the planet is not getting warmer. Rick Perry has taken this approach, claiming that there is in fact a “cooling trend” that scientists have “manipulated data” to cover up.
Claim that the warming trend is a natural fluctuation unrelated to greenhouse gases or fossil fuels. Debunked here.
Claim that possible actions are too expensive. This is the hardest point to resolve, because it depends not just on climate science, but on economic projections, speculation about future technologies, and your tolerance for catastrophic risk. See the discussion here.

Shifting from one form of denial to another (depending on how much the audience knows) is a sure sign of a charlatan. Such speakers will grant that the planet is warming in one discussion, then talk about a cooling trend in the next.

The new research is a devastating blow to type-1 denial. The work was done by the Berkeley Earth Science Temperature Study (BEST), prominent scientists from outside the usual climate-science research circles (the Economist article on this mentions and physicist and an astro-physicist, including a Nobel Prize winner), who were open to the idea that climate scientists were either misguided or dishonest. So they came up with an independent way to process raw temperature readings going back 200 years. Their conclusions matched the orthodox climate-science results (warming one Centigrade degree since the 1950s) within 2%.

As BEST scientist Richard Muller wrote in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.

I think Muller is too optimistic, as shown by the comments WSJ’s climate-denier readership appended to his article. In a rational truth-centered world, we would stop hearing type-1 denial. But in our world type-1 denial will continue, because the new study does not change the relationship between global-warming denial and fossil-fuel-company profits (diagrammed here).

ThinkProgress’ Joe Romm examines the particular case of type-1 denier Anthony Watts. Watts was supportive of the BEST study before he knew what it would say, calling their technique “a better method” and “a novel approach that handles many of the issues that have been raised”. In March Watts pledged: “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.”

But now that he’s seen the result, he’s not budging. Right now he’s saying: wait for peer review. In a few months peer review will be in, and I predict he’ll come up with another excuse.

If the public debate does eventually progress to type-2 denial, here’s a handy fact to keep in mind: The hypothesis that greenhouse gases make a planet hotter isn’t some ad hoc thing left-wingers came up with to justify a government takeover of the economy. Originally, it was developed to explain a completely non-political mystery: why Venus is so hot. (I mean: why the planet Venus has a surface temperature over 800 degrees, not why the Roman love goddess is so attractive, which should be obvious. Sorry for the ambiguity.) Only later did people begin to wonder how the same phenomena played out on Earth.

Among astrophysicists, the greenhouse-gas explanation of Venus’ climate is not at all controversial (probably because no corporation owns Venusian oil rights). Given the example of the Earth’s closest cousin in the solar system, type-2 deniers need a stronger argument than mere skepticism. They need to explain why the same processes that make Venus a furnace don’t work here on Earth.

I like the way a commenter on TPM responded to type-2 denier:

Sooooo . . . help me out here. Which part is it that you doubt, the “theory” that CO2 is transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared, the “theory” that the Earth absorbs visible light and reradiates it in the infrared spectrum, or the “theory” that burning fossil carbon emits CO2?

The complete humans-cause-global-warming hypothesis may be hard to test in one experiment, but the pieces of it are simple and well-established.

October 24, 2011 – 12:17 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

Tagged global warming |

Shoot-out at the MSNBC Corral

This Rachel Maddow segment is a classic let’s-take-this-outside challenge to the billionaire Koch brothers.

Some background: First the Maddow show used the Koch brothers as an example of a failure of trickle-down the-rich-are-job-creators economic theory. The Kochs get richer and richer while destroying jobs, as shown here:

Then the show made fun of Koch Industries for touting its 1,240 job openings as if it demonstrated that a government jobs program is unnecessary. (And how many current employees will those 1,240 replace? Less than 1,240 or more?)

Then Koch Industries shot back — not at Rachel directly, but at the staff person who wrote the blog post.

And that brings us to Friday’s segment, in which Rachel refuses to refer to the Kochs as “industrialists” or “businessmen” or any of the other respectful titles they are usually given. Instead, she talks about “Daddy’s company” and “their enormous inherited fortune” before closing with this:

Charles Koch, David Koch, you are trying to intimidate the wrong people. This kind of thing is as pitiful from billionaires as it is from anyone. So I reiterate my many earlier invitations to you: Come sit for an interview. I would love to have you. Come sit for an interview and let’s talk this out. Rather than have Daddy’s company attack my producers one-by-one by name, feel free to man up any time.

Your beef is with me.

This is the point in the Westerns where the bartender ducks behind the bar and the poker players dive under their table. But I bet the Kochs wimp out and the on-air showdown never happens.

Still, when a skinny little female looks you in the eye and tells you to “man up”, that’s gotta hurt. Charles, David — they’ll never admit it to your face, but the fewer-and-fewer people you employ are passing Rachel’s link around and laughing at you.

October 24, 2011 – 12:10 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

Tagged koch brothers |

Gracious Statesmanship and other short notes

Reflecting on the Republican response to Muammar Qaddafi’s death, following so soon after the death of Osama bin Laden, The New Yorker’s David Remnick wrote:

If a Republican had been responsible for the foreign-policy markers of the past three years, the Party would be commissioning statues. In Tripoli, Benghazi, and Surt, last week, Obama won words of praise; on Republican debate platforms, there was only mindless posturing.

And, noticing the same phenomenon among the Party’s Congressional leaders, Jon Stewart asked: “Is there no Republican that can be gracious and statesmanlike in this situation?”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Apparently not. But that’s just ordinary partisan politics, right? Democrats who were running against an incumbent Republican president would be the same way. Wouldn’t they?

Well, no. About 30 seconds with the Google led me to what Howard Dean said after Saddam Hussein was captured in December, 2003:

This is a great day of pride in the American military and a great day for the Iraqis and a great day for the American people. President Bush deserves a day of celebration.

So the American war in Iraq is finally going to end on December 31, when our last troops leave.

Juan Cole explains why things turned out this way, even though hawks in the administration and elsewhere clearly wanted to keep thousands of American troops in Iraq indefinitely: When the UN Security Council’s resolution recognizing the US as the occupying power in Iraq expired at the end of 2008, the Bush administration negotiated a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) with the new Iraqi government. The Iraqis insisted on some deadline, so President Bush accepted 2011, confident that the US could renegotiate later.

When President Obama tried to negotiate an extension, the hang-up was the issue of “extraterritoriality” — American troops’ immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. It would have been political suicide for the Iraqi government to grant that.

Why? Because all Iraqis remember the Nisoor Square massacre when Blackwater security guards killed 17 Baghdad civilians in a mistaken shooting spree. Extraterritoriality meant that Iraqi courts couldn’t touch them, and then an American court let them go. No Iraqi politician is going to let that happen again.

Personally, I’ll be glad to have our troops out of Iraq. But if you’re not happy, put the blame where it belongs: on Blackwater’s trigger-happy mercenaries.

Meteor Blades objects to wrap-ups that call the Iraq War a mistake.

Planning for invasion, the concoction of evidence, the ignoring of counter-advice, and the lying to Congress, to the United Nations and to the American people were not “mistakes.”

The war, he writes, was a pre-meditated crime, not a mistake. In a just world, the perpetrators “would some time ago have arrived in shackles at The Hague.”

Harold Camping’s prediction of the Rapture last May got a lot of attention, especially when it didn’t happen. (Or maybe it did, and there were just a lot fewer real Christians than everybody thought — and Camping himself wasn’t one of them.) But the Rapture was always just a prelude to the End of the World, kind of like when “last call” is announced before a bar closes. The real EotW was scheduled for last Friday.

Still here? Back to the drawing board.

Can’t decide between living in a forest or in an urban high-rise? Why not move to Milan and do both?

American feminist bra-burning is a historical myth, but Japanese environmentalist bra-burning is happening now. It even sounds like a pretty good idea.

Hunter on Daily Kos explains Occupy Wall Street to pundits who refuse to understand it.

Thom Hartmann explains the way in which OWS has already succeeded: It forced the media to remember the unemployed, who had been almost completely forgotten during the manufactured “debt-ceiling crisis” last summer.