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Creepy on so many levels. ... 1) He just died; 2) He wasn't that important. This isn't Winston Churchill. (The vacuity of David Gregory just makes him seem like Winston Churchill); 3) They've recreated the way his office looked on the day he died. Morbid! 4) It's like they're trying to build some kind of cult of the personality, with the family willingly invading its own privacy to help out ('Look, there's Luke's childhood drawing'); 5) Making a big deal of Russert's I-love-the-Bills schtick assumes it's shocking that a high-level Washington news guy would be an ordinary middle class American. Bureau chiefs, they're just like us! 6) Does the exhibit include an animatronic NBC butler?** 7) Will it include Lloyd Grove's famous, damning profile of Russert-on-the-make? 8) Self-important, dying industry attempts to fetishize its prominent members before it is completely forgotten. 9) NBC News in particular seems to be living in the past. ...
Coming soon: Luke Ford's Grotto! Kids will love it. ...
P.S.: I'm sure Gawker goes to town on this, but I haven't read Gawker yet. Update: They do. Jack Shafer beat me to mockery too. By hours. Lucky for me speed isn't important in this business. [The contrarian thing would be to defend the exhibit--ed Defending Russert can't be contrarian. That violates a law of physics.]
**--Ali. Maybe he gets a whole new wing! ... 3:15 P.M.
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Dan Kennedy and Oliver Willis have never heard of absentee ballots (not to mention the fun you can have with same-day registration). ... 3:16 P.M.
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The most striking statistic in Mark Kleiman's terrific Zocalo crime lecture (about his new book, When Brute Force Fails) concerned the benefits of sending nurses "into the homes of poor and undereducated first-time teenage mothers to coach them through their children's difficult first two years." From the book:
In a well-evaluated experiment in upsate New York, nurse home visitation for expectant mothers whose demographic profiles put their children at high risk of poor outcomes reduced the arrests among the children of those mothers by 69 percent compared to the matched control group. If that result is even close to correct, nurse home visitation focused on high risk mothers is surely cost-effective as crime control ... [emphasis added; footnote omitted]
This is one of those social science advocacy stats that sets off too-good-to-be-true alarm bells, as Kleiman's own reaction suggests. The number's so spectacular, though, that he thinks its clearly worth a large scale trial. "Given how important parenting is, and given how intensive the intervention is, and given how rocky some of the moms are to start out, I don't find the big numbers implausible," he writes in an email to kf. Even James Q. "Lock-'Em-Up" Wilson is on board. ... Call it something like Pinpoint Liberalism, in which a consensus forms for at least going after what looks like low-hanging fruit, while avoiding a general subsidy for, say, "community development" (which won't be as easy as you'd think). ... Lead reduction, which Kleiman (a bit surprisingly) thinks helped contribute to the recent crime drop, is another obvious targeted effort. ...
P.S.: I'd link to Kleiman's book on Amazon, but then the I might be putting myself at the mercy of a man named Richard Cleland, or someone like him. [I have no idea what, if any, arrangement Slate has with Amazon these days. **] ... Oh, all right. It's here. Come and get me, copper! [That's the lead talking-ed] ...
**-- My previous elaborate conflict-of-interest disclosures have already failed to pass muster even with Howie Kurtz, the man with the biggest conflict of interest in all of journalism, so I'd better be careful where the FTC is concerned. ...
P.P.S.--Still Digging: I just linked to Zocalo, which is kind of doing them a favor. I like their lectures, which fill a local civic need. Unfortunately, they also invited me to their fundraiser on Saturday, which I think means free dinner. Yikes. ... And now I've linked to their fundraiser. That must be worth millions. I'm a cesspool of corruption today. ... 4:50 P.M.
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More: The FTC's new blog disclosure regs seem to be governed by the established First Amendment principle of "Oh, don't worry, we'll never go after you. We like you." Don't Olson, Shafer, Althouse, et al. realize this?. ... P.S.: I don't think blogging or twittering is like talking at Denny's (Jeff Jarvis' analogy). At Denny's you talk to the guys across the table. You blog or twitter to the whole world. That means something. What it means, I think, is that bloggers are on the same constitutional footing as conventional MSM journalists. They're all publishers. That's why it's so absurd and self-contradictory for the FTC to then exempt the most important, powerful (and occasionally corrupt publishers)--the MSM itself. ... P.P.S.: These regs are so doomed. ...
Backfill: Years ago, Michael Kinsley wrote an eerily prescient reductio ad absurdum of what an actual, full conflict-of-interest disclosure would look like. I haven't been able to find it. Think it was in his Curse of the Giant Muffins. ... Update: Kinsley suggests it's this 2000 piece, which is very funny. But I remember another one. What does he know? ... 6:49 P.M.
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I've always been sympathetic to Paul Kirk since a Los Angeles reporters' breakfast in 1985 where he proposed "means-testing" Social Security benefits--that is, scaling them back for those who didn't need them. This was, and is, a forbidden thought among mainstream Democrats, who argue that the strength of New Deal entitlements is that they're available equally to rich and poor.*** Senator Edward Kennedy, whose seat Kirk has just been named to fill, had a few months earlier gone out of his way to subtly denounce the idea as an attempt to "repeal the New Deal and the New Frontier."
Kirk's subsequent s**t-eating recantation was comically, almost self-defeatingly, transparent. By bedtime on the same day, he put out a statement declaring: "I was wrong. Our party ... is unalterably opposed to any cuts in Social Security benefits. I should not have mentioned the subject of a means test. I plan to undergo electroshock therapy to insure that this idea never again appears within my cerebral cortex without producing immediate nausea and revulsion." [E.A.]
OK, he didn't say that last sentence. But he said the one before it. ...
The incident is reported in a 1985 L.A. Times story. ...
***-- A fine sentiment, until you go broke. ... 1:02 P.M.
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BREAKING: The person who was the Former NEA Director of Communications has resigned (after being reassigned) in the wake of the conference call scandal. But this person, if in fact he ever existed, wasn't the worst offender on the call. That was Buffy Wicks, who works for Valerie Jarrett in the White House. Wicks was the one who gave her squishily grandiose idea of "change" and "service" an ideological cast by urging arts types to "connect" with "labor unions, progressive groups." Bet she stays. ... 3:49 P.M.
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Friday, July 24, 2009
Not All Juiceboxers Are Alike: A secret conversation on "JournoList" apparently produces eerily similar arguments against the filibuster from Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias. Except Yglesias goes on to make some quirky and sophisticated points about the effects of filibusterless democracy on campaigning and on the welfare state, while Klein's reads like a prize-winning high school essay. (Also, Klein hides the JournoList connection, while Yglesias is transparent about it.) I predict this scientific experiment will be replicated in the future. ... 4:10 A.M.
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From AP yesterday:
"We have to do what businesses and families do. We've got to cut out the things we don't need to pay for the things we do," Obama said at a town-hall style meeting Thursday in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. The meeting followed a prime-time news conference the night before in which Obama sought to rally public support for his health plan. [E.A.]
From Boston Globe, earlier this month:
WASHINGTON - Sweeping healthcare legislation working its way through Congress is more than an effort to provide insurance to millions of Americans without coverage. Tucked within is a provision that could provide billions of dollars for walking paths, streetlights, jungle gyms, and even farmers' markets. ... "These are not public works grants; they are community transformation grants,'' said Anthony Coley, a spokesman for Kennedy, chairman of the Senate health committee whose healthcare bill includes the projects.
4:06 A.M.
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Peggy Noonan is on to something potentially big--the possible alliance between Christian pro-life forces and liberal universal health insurance advocates in favor of broadly available life-saving care ... and the potential fight between that alliance and the cost-saving Orszag end-of-life-rationalizing would-you-please-die-now crowd. ... Prediction: The sneering Dem majority position in the Schiavo case will get a second, skeptical look from at least some liberals. .... 4:04 A.M.
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Always trust content from kausfiles .. even when it's on Twitter. 4:02 A.M.
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Thursday, May 21, 2009
The Chrysler Bailout is "capitalism at work," writes private equity macher Scott Sperling in the WSJ. Here are some of the more questionable sentences in his essay:
Without a drastic restructuring neither Chrysler nor GM would have a chance for long-term success ...
These decisions include "right sizing" industry capacity by cutting many union and white-collar jobs and closing numerous manufacturing plants and dealerships; making the unions accept lower wages and benefits so that these companies can compete ... [E.A]
The cuts current union members were forced to accept were not impressive. Before the deal, Chrysler's UAW workers made $28 an hour. After they deal, they'll make $28 an hour. They gave up a scheduled increase in wages, plus a couple of scheduled bonuses. That explains why Chrysler's Belvidere, Illinois workers told TV station WIFR that "the plan is not nearly as drastic as they expected." ...
As for Chrysler's "chance for long-term success," it appears vanishingly small. Italian manufacturer FIAT is supposed to save Chrysler with new products, but according to a recent Automotive News article, "four of the six new vehicles from Fiat will enter the small-car segment," which is highly competitive but "covers only 14 percent of the entire U.S. light-vehicle market."
"The volumes need to be big for Chrysler to survive," [market analyst Tracy Handler] said. "Will they be? I have doubts about that."
See also this BBC article ("it's madness"). Pathetically, Chrysler hopes that even if they don't save the company the new small cars will "[b]urnish the environmental image of Chrysler brands," says Automotive News. Unfortunately, the pipeline for those brands' other, larger, products--burnished or not--is pretty much empty.
If Chrysler workers were paid, say, not $28 an hour instead of $24--still not bad--the firm might actually have a "chance for long term success" through charging lower prices. But that wasn't a sacrifice Obama was ready to ask (even if Belvidere workers were apparently willing). ...
Final obvious point: I don't want to sound like Veronique de Rugy here, but who will pay the price if when this half-baked "restructuring" fails? In normal "capitalism at work," those who would pay the price will be those who made the deal and put up their money--the capitalists. (Query: Would Scott Sperling invest his firm's money in this dubious proposition?) If When Obama's plan fails, the monetary loss will fall not on Obama, but on the taxpayers. It will likely be made up somehow by the taxpayers (via higher tax assessments or inflation). That's not "capitalism at work." It's something else at work. But I'd be all for it, if I thought it really would work. It won't, and it will be Obama's fault. (He'd certainly get credit if it succeeded.) ... 6:05 P.M.
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Buried Lede of the Day: Thomas Edsall, summarizing a new Pew poll, notes the Dems have gained some support recently! While Republicans have lost ground! And voters care more about the economy than "moral values."
We knew that. What we maybe didn't know is this:
Conversely, public support for labor unions appears to be weakening: the percentage of people agreeing that "labor unions are necessary to protect the working person," has dropped from 74 percent at the start of this decade to 61 percent this year. The decline was sharper --- from 76 to 53 percent, a 23 point fall -- among independent voters than among either Democrats or Republicans. [E.A.]
Some 61% say labor unions are "too powerful," a big jump from 52% in 1999. ... Support for unions, says Pew, is at an "all-time low.". ... Also, perhaps counter-intuitively, "'the overall balance of public opinion on the government's responsibility to provide for the needy has shifted to the right' despite the onset of a severe recession." This rightward movement appears to be the result of growing fear among the above $75K set (a big set) that the poor have become too dependent on government programs. ...
Hmmm. Democratic. But skeptical of unions. And worried about welfare dependence. ... What kind of Democrats are these? ... 6:04 P.M.
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Arianna's secret weapon: Are you running a political site and worried about reversing the "inevitable post election traffic decline"? Arianna Huffington has the solution. ...
There are things Don Graham won't do, and this is probably one of them. Which is why Huffington Post will always have an edge on WaPo (and the rest of the MSM). She's not scared to go there. ... 5:49 P.M.
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Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Some conservatives are troubled that the UAW is getting a huge ownership share in GM (about 40%) and Chrysler (over 50%): For example, Larry Kudlow:
What is going on in this country? The government is about to take over GM in a plan that completely screws private bondholders and favors the unions. Get this: The GM bondholders own $27 billion and they're getting 10 percent of the common stock in an expected exchange. And the UAW owns $10 billion of the bonds and they're getting 40 percent of the stock. Huh? Did I miss something here?
The union's ownership so does not seem a problem. It seems a virtue. Let the UAW, as new owner of GM, pay the price for the overgrown work rules of its locals. Let the UAW demand above-market raises from itself. Let the UAW try to raise money from new lenders after the previous round of lenders has been royally screwed (thanks, in part, to the UAW). And then let the UAW try to sell the cars that result.
The most efficient way to balance competing interests, as Michael Kinsley noted years ago, isn't an adverserial system where various singleminded interests duke it out--either in court or on picket lines--but in the head of a decisionmaker who will feel the relevant consequences. As long as the government steps out of the financing picture, the UAW will feel the consequences of its own excesses. Just don't bail them out again! ...
P.S.: One sign that the WSJ's Holman Jenkins may actually be impressed with Obama's "apparent willingness to drive a hard bargain with the UAW" is that in order to attack the union Jenkins had to write a column about the government's hidden subsidies for Detroit in previous decades. ...
Update: The Cult of Bartley complains that
At the next labor contract bargaining session, the union would sit on both sides of the table.
And the problem with that is ...?
The otherwise estimable Paul Ingrassia applies a blanket condemnation of worker-ownership derived from his study of the University of Wisconsin student store. "There's an inherent conflict between the cost discipline required of owners and the understandable desire of employees to make more money for less work (hey, why not?)" There is. It's a conflict we freelancers face every day! Somehow we manage. A "clean and well-run union such as the UAW" should be able to do it too. ...10:26 P.M.
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I meant "benign" in a good way! Jeez, you call Atlantic owner David Bradley a "benign sucker" and all sorts of people want to rush to his defense! Here's what I meant: Practically every magazine I've ever written for has lost money.** That usually doesn't bother the owner, who is typically rich and willing to take a loss in exchange for the prestige or enjoyment of owning a magazine, or the access and influence it brings. It's an ancient and honorable arrangement. Hence "benign." But at various times, Bradley has sounded as if he actually intended to make The Atlantic and its website a going business concern (noises that are still being made). From a 2003 piece by David Carr:
["]There has been a 50-year tradition at the magazine of older male businessmen like myself managing The Atlantic as a philanthropy,'' Mr. Bradley said. ''It was largely subsidized and dependent on finding the next Mort Zuckerman. I think it's possible I may be the last member of that generation, and we have to find a way to make this wonderful magazine support itself.''
I suspect he is disappointed. Also, he's overpaying his writers.*** Hence, "sucker." I'm all for it. (I could use someone like that.) ...
**--Original text left out the "Practically." I forgot about Newsweek, which probably was making some money when I was there. But not a lot.
***--"as high as $350,000 ..." 10:14 P.M.
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John Judis predicts that Obama's stimulus and budget will "lift overall government spending from the 30s to well over 40 percent of GDP," maybe even to 45 % of GDP in 2009-- a percentage
more like that of France and Sweden, whose non-crisis budgets total over 45 percent of GDP.
Hmm. If you put it like that, doesn't the Obama presidency begin to look a bit like a ripoff? If we're going to spend 45% of GDP like Sweden, I want a cradle-to-grave welfare state! It doesn't seem like much of a bargain to spend Swedish-style tax dollars for what will remain at bottom an American style fend-for-yourself society (even one with guaranteed access to health care). ... 10:01 P.M.
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Wednesday, March 25, 2009
One in 50 Children Homeless? Here's a question from President Obama's press conference, asked by Kevin Chappell of Ebony--
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. A recent report found that, as a result of the economic downturn, 1 in 50 children are now homeless in America. With shelters at full capacity, tent cities are sprouting up across the country.
In passing your stimulus package, you said that help was on the way. But what would you say to these families, especially children, who are sleeping under bridges and in tents across the country? [E.A.]
This is one of those statistical assertions that you know is BS before you even set out to show it's BS. If you just live here and go around with your eyes open you know it's BS. Sure enough, it's BS! Chappell's question is based on this study by an anti-homelessness advocacy group with every incentive to maximize the estimate of the problem. 1) The report apparently counts all people who are "homeless" even one night over the course of a year. That's very different from saying that one-in-50 are homeless at the same time--e.g., "now." 2) More significantly, the report counts as "homeless" families who've "doubled up"--e.g., moved in with relatives--apparently on the grounds that while these children in these families do have a home, they don't have "a home of their own." That's not what most people mean by homeless, and not the image Chappell conjures (tent cities, sleeping under bridges). Will I be "homeless" if Fire Mickey Kaus succeeds and I have to move in with my brother's family? Don't answer that. ... The study also counts families living in motels and trailer parks--again, lousy living arrangements, maybe, but not what we usually mean by "homeless."
P.S.: "Doubling up" counts for fully 56% of the "1 in 50" estimate. (See page 9). "Hotels/motels" counts for 7%. In other words, right off the bat almost two-thirds of the study's once-a-year "homelessness" isn't actually homelessness. ...
Update: Taranto, who called out the "National Center on Family Homelessness" weeks ago, has more detail. It turns out they also count children in "substandard housing"! The numbers may also have been inflated the year chosen, which coincided with Hurrican Katrina. As Taranto notes, if you "spent a single night ... staying with cousins in Houston or Shreveport as a result of Katrina" you counted as "homeless." ...
P.P.S.: This study uses every trick in the liberal antipoverty advocacy playbook: Focus on children, not adults? Check. Gin up inflated numbers? Check. Include state-by-state breakdowns to interest local reporters? Check. Appealing pictures of tots? Check. Hyped-up language? ("A storm is moving across the country ... ") Check. Gloss over all the moral and policy dilemmas involved in giving cash to single mothers who aren't working? Check. It's a formula well-designed to get lots of mentions in the MSM. But it works less well in terms of actually getting policies enacted. You're not going to bowl over the American political system by engineering a wave of naive, guilt-tripping compassion. Did Marion Wright Edelman prevent welfare reform? I don't quite understand it. It's not as if homelessness isn't a real problem. An organization that gained a reputation for not hyping it might have real impact on legislation. But that doesn't seem to be what the world of non-profit grantsmanship rewards. ... 3:46 A.M.
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Twitterola? Driving in Texas recently, I heard two radio DJ's bantering with at least the pretense of spontaneity about the joys of forming a local twitter-based group. One said it was great. The other said it sounded great! No way this is actually spontaneous--it must be some kind of marketing campaign, no? Presumably a paid (or bartered) marketing campaign. Which leads to the realization--hasn't there been a whole lot of seemingly spontaneous and semi-mindless mentioning of Twitter lately? And attention-getting celebritweeting? Hmmm. You don't think that a lot of it might be the result of a paid mentioning campaign? Tough times make people easy to buy. forge a consulting relationship with. I'm not naming names, or even linking (I'd have to talk to the lawyers, and who needs that).
But do any of you know someone who's getting what would amount to Twitterola? ... 2:21 A.M.
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Starving Stuffing the Beast: Ross Douthat thinks he knows what Obama is up to--he's pursuing the opposite of Bush's "starve the beast" policy, which sought to limit future spending by denying government revenues. Obama, the theory goes, is trying to cram as much spending as possible into the budget, knowing full well it's not paid for:
Obama's spending proposals would ... create new spending commitments and run up large deficits, in the hopes that the dollars poured into health care and education will create a new baseline for government's obligations, which in turn will create the political space for tax increases on the middle class. Like the starve-the-beast approach, the Obama strategy puts off the hard part till tomorrow: Give them tax cuts today, conservatives said, and they'll swallow spending cuts tomorrow; give them universal health care, universal pre-K, subsidies for green industry and all the rest of it today, liberals seem to be thinking, and they'll be willing to pay for it tomorrow. ...
[I]f you can change the baseline of social spending that Americans expect from their government before that day of hard choices arrive - and once created, government programs are awfully hard to get rid of, whether they're actually effective or not - then you've tilted the landscape of negotiation in liberalism's favor, and ensured that a post-Obama entitlement compromise will look a lot more like social democracy than a pre-Obama compromise would have.
What would be wrong with a "stuff the beast" strategy? It's disingenuous--but what of that, if the end result is progress? And if the result of Obama's strategy would be only a) universal health care, unversal pre-K, and green industries and b) higher taxes to pay for them, maybe near-unalloyed progress is what it would bring. But there are three obvious questions for the beast-stuffers:
1) What parts of government are expanded--the effective parts or the BS parts? If you read the MSM or commentators like Jon Chait, you get the impression that long-suppressed Dem "priorities" are satisfied by mindlessly in a Congress-pleasing manner expanding all agencies of government by, say, 15%. That certainly seems to be the animating philosophy of the just-passed stimulus and about-to-pass "omnibus" spending bills. There was, for example, this chilling sentence in a recent WaPo piece on the stimulus:
Processing the rush of money is complicated by requirements unique to the stimulus act. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is getting $1.5 billion for "homelessness prevention," a task in which it has never explicitly engaged.
Do you have any confidence that HUD, an agency that has done more to destroy American cities than crack cocaine, will spend this $1.5 billion, without toxic side effects, in a way that significanty reduces homelessness--as opposed to sustains myriad HUD grantees, and community organizations, and (of course) bureaucrats? True, all spending is stimulative--and those grantees will in turn be spending the $1.5 billion somewhere. But if you were actually prioritizing government programs, as opposed to giving every agency its due, is this $1.5 billion you'd budget? I doubt it. It's not "waste," exactly. It's just inefficient and ineffective (at best). Mulitiply this problem across the Veteran's Administration and the Agriculture Department and the Labor Department and you get the picture.
2) If the spending isn't effective, is the spending at least reversible? Tax cuts may be less stimulative than direct spending, as Paul Krugman and others argue (in part because taxpayers may save the cuts instead of spending them). But tax cuts have one obvious virtue--unlike spending, they are relatively easy to reverse when the economy recovers and Keynes-style stimulus isn't needed. Indeed, Obama is in the process of rescinding a bunch of tax cuts--Bush's--now. Actually cutting spending on specific programs, once it's been incorporated into the budget, is excruciatingly difficult at best. In particular cases it may be possible. But a large across the board reduction over time at the federal level has basically never been accomplished. Not even by Reagan.
There were probably several ways to make the "stimulus" spending reversible. Obama could have started up special, new free-standing programs, as FDR did with the WPA, designating them explicitly as temporary. Then you could kill them before they accreted a big constituency. Or, Robert Samuelson argues, it would have been better if Congress had done most of its spending through "large, temporary block grants to states and localities and letting them decide how to spend the money." Block grants can be cut--in this context they'd be akin to revenue sharing, a Nixon-era program that, unlike HUD, has disappeared.
But that's not what Obama and Pelosi did, Samuelson notes:
Instead, the stimulus provides most funds through specific programs. There's $90 billion more for Medicaid, $12 billion for special education, $2.8 billion for various policing programs. ... "Temporary" spending increases for specific programs, as opposed to block grants, will be harder to undo, worsening the long-term budget outlook.
So a good chunk of the spending increases will be permanent. Why should liberals care? Because they desperately need to make room for necessary new programs like universal health care. Does Obama think he can spend a couple of percentages of GDP on generalized Congressionally-directed federal bloat and then build a huge national health care structure on top of that? At some point, you run out of GDP, no? Every bilion dollars of low-priority government that Obama cements into the federal structure is a billion dollars he won't be able to spend on health care (and Social Security, and supplemental pensions) unless he raises taxes to pay for it. And there are limits, political and economic, to how much taxes can be raised. We don't want to reach them.
3) Does the spending serve the ends of liberalism? Reihan Salam flags a chart posted by Matthew Yglesias showing that other nations have reduced economic inequality more through their spending than through taxation, however progressive. Netherlands cut .1 off the Gini coefficient of inequality! Finland cut .15! If your idea of the goal of liberalism is reducing money inequality, these achievements will be very exciting for you, as they apparently are for Yglesias. But we'll never get rid of money inequality. Democrats probably won't even succeed in reversing the decades-long trend to greater money inequality in the U.S. Is money equality all that liberals are trying for? I've argued no, that economic inequality is only an interstitial goal in liberals' overarching drive to prevent income differences from creating invidious social differences--i.e. the goal of achieving social equality despite money inequality.
If that's the goal, it gives us another reason to think that all federal "spending"--even relatively effective, non-"wasteful" spending--is not alike. I happen to believe there will be a huge social equality payoff if the vast majority of Americans are in the same health care system. Any such system that provides good care--a necessity if the affluent are going to buy into it--will be very expensive. But it will be worth it. The equivalent spending on the Commerce Department or Community Development Block Grants or HUD or the Veteran's Administration or farm subsidies--well, not such a big social equality payoff, even though there might be a money equality payoff in Yglesias' chart. Even valued check-mailing programs like Social Security, beyond a certain point, don't do much for social equality. The checks are a good thing. They even reinforce the common value of work. But they don't erase invidious economic differences the way actually sitting around in the same hospital waiting room does.
Stuff the beast? OK. But I can't help but feel that Obama's been stuffing it with a lot of non-nutritious filler.
[I reserve the right ro revise and extend, including tinkering with tricky beast-digestion metaphor.]
Backfill--Beast on Beast Action: Matt Miller had the basic reverse-beast-starve mechanism pegged a week ago, but tragically called it "Feed the Beauty." (He approves of it.) ... 6:05 P.M.
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Monday, February 23, 2009
Go Geoghegan, Beat SEIU: The liberal magazine writer's favorite Congressional candidate--former liberal magazine writer (turned labor lawyer) Tom Geoghegan--is still in the hunt in the wild, multi-candidate, low-turnout race to succeed Rahm Emanuel in Chicago's Fifth District. Geoghegan's been endorsed by everyone from James Fallows to Rick Hertzberg--and he still has a shot to win. That's in part because he's also been endorsed by influential non-eggheads like ex-Rep. Abner Mikva. ... I like Geoghegan too, not because I agree with him on most issues (though I do) but because it would be great to have him in Congress. I've known and admired him for decades. He's the opposite of a hack--a big-thinking reformer who wants to actually solve the country's problems rather than pass a few little bills and get himself reelected. He knows exactly what's wrong with conventional liberalism, even as he runs to the "left" of the field--maybe that's even the reason he runs to the left. ... He's funny. He's even elegant, in a rumpled, narrow-lapel way--so Sean Penn will be happy. ... My main dispute with Tom concerns his fierce defense of traditional American labor unionism--he supports "card check"--which is why I'm not completely distressed that his biggest obstacle seems to be the support of Andy Stern's Blagojevichist Service Employees International Union for one of his more conventional opponents, state Rep. Sara Feigenholtz. ... The S.E.I.U. is spending $250,000 in last-minute Feigenholtz ads. The election is Tuesday. The only way Geoghegan can raise money to fight back at this point is on the Web. If you want, you can donate to his campaign here. ...
Update: US News' Michael Barone endorses, but stops short of fundraising. (Ethics!) He says Geoghegan is "intelligent, intellectually honest, idealistic."
He's way, way to the left of me on issues, but, hey! it's a heavily Democratic district, and it would be helpful to have an intellectually honest Democrat in the not intellectually very venturesome House Democratic Caucus.
11:00 P.M.
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Sometimes you have to sell your old car to buy a new one: Robert Kuttner argues
a) there's no need to cut Social Security because "Social Security's accounts are actually near long-term balance." Let's assume that's right (though last time I looked, the accepted liberal "fix" for Social Security, co-authored by current OMB chief Peter Orszag, was more unpleasant than I'd thought). Kuttner also says that
b) what we really need to do is establish "comprehensive universal health insurance." Assume that's right too.
What I don't understand is why Kuttner assumes that (a) and (b) don't have anything to do with each other. Universal health insurance will be expensive. Why can't we get some of the expense by cutting into Social Security--especially Social Security for the affluent? Just because Social Security might be in "near" balance doesn't mean that it's in a watertight compartment sealed off from the rest of the budget. Money is fungible. If liberals can save a few hundred billion from the Social Security pot and use it to fill up their new, much-needed universal health insurance pot, that might be a good thing to do. It's the sort of thing responsible governments, like responsible households, are supposed to do. Why should it be off the table? .... P.S.: I'm not saying we should cut Social Security now. But that's because we'll cut it much more sharply later, if Dems (as I hope) get their health insurance wish, at which point even people like Kuttner will be desperate for any and all forms of revenue. ... 10:15 P.M.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009
As promised, here are the gory mechanics of the liberal conspiracy to expand welfare rolls through an insufficiently publicized provision in the stimulus bill:
Under the welfare reform regime established in 1996, states were basically required to engage 50% of their caseload--mainly single mothers--in some kind of "work activity" (workfare, job search, training, etc.). But there was a problem with this half-the-caseload requirement: What about would-be recipients who got off the rolls entirely when the states found jobs for them--or who were diverted into jobs before they ever signed up for welfare? Shouldn't states be able to count these "successes" toward the 50% requirement? You wouldn't want to give states an incentive to somehow keep these people on welfare in order to count them. Thus was born the "caseload reduction credit," which let states count the net decline in their caseloads against the 50% work requirement.
Fair enough. But because caseloads declined dramatically after 1996--they've gone down by two-thirds--the "caseload reduction credit" effectively absolved many states of the requirement to get half of their caseloads working. When Congress reauthorized welfare reform it updated the baseline to 2005. States could still take the credit for any reductions after that date. Many did so, as caseloads continued to fall.
Now, though, Congressional Democrats want to encourage states to expand their caseloads, offering billions of federal dollars in the "stimulus" package as an incentive to do so. But wait, if states expand their welfare caseloads as the Dems want, they'd lose the "caseload reduction credit," since their caseloads would not, in fact, have been reduced. They might then have to start enforcing the "work activity" requirements on those caseloads. Can't have that! That might discourage states from expanding welfare, for one thing, since enforcing work requirements costs money, and states have no money. And Congressional Money Liberals** never liked work requirements much in the first place. The last thing they want to do is increase them. (Their whole theory is that the many single-mom recipients are "hard-to-employ" types with "multiple problems" who basically need to be supported on the dole.) What's a good Money Liberal to do?
Answer: Rewrite the law, in the stimulus package, to let states expand their caseloads but pretend, for "caseload reduction credit" purposes, that the caseloads have declined. Specifically, the revision would allow states take the credit they would have gotten based on their caseloads in 2007 or 2008 even if their caseloads soar (as the Dems would like) in 2009 and 2010.
In other words, they can expand their caseloads but still use the now-fictitious "reduction credit" to avoid the law's work requirements.
Lots of new people on welfare. Lower work obligations. The best of both worlds for welfare-unreforming Dems.
The major difference between the House and Senate versions of this deeply troubling provision, apparently, is that the Senate allocates only $3 billion to induce states to expand their caseloads, while the House bill might spend more than twice as much.
P.S.: On bloggingheads my colleague Bob Wright routinely ridiculed me as paranoid for worrying that if Democrats got back in power they would unravel welfare reform. Even I thought I was paranoid. If only for political purposes, I figured, Dems would have to wait a few months or years before sabotaging Bill Clinton's major domestic achievement. It took them two weeks. ...
**--By "Money Liberals" I mean liberals who define the equality they seek entirely in economistic terms. Confronted with the indignity of poverty, Money Liberals seek to end it by the simple expedient of sending cash to the poor. Money Liberalism, in this definition, ignores non-material distinctions, like those between those who work and those who don't, that (in an alternative, more Clintonian view) are fundamentally bound up in our ideas of dignity and civic respect (i.e. social equality). Specifically, an able-bodied person who fails to work and relies instead on the dole can't have full respect in our society, and shouldn't. The attempt to confer equal respect by spreading around cash--as opposed to guaranteeing work, and making work pay--is doomed. (More here, esp. the exciting footnote 2 on page 192). 3:05 P.M.
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Shouldn't Republicans be making more of a fuss about the provision in the stimulus bill--both House and Senate versions, apparently--that spends $2-3 billion to the states for "temporary welfare payments"? I initially thought Charles Hurt of the N.Y. Post was being alarmist when he suggested the provision would "drastically undo two decades of welfare reforms." The essence of the 1996 reform was ending the individual legal entitlement to AFDC (cash aid to single mothers, basically) and replacing it with state-run programs that, in theory, require recipients to enter the work force. The stimulus bill doesn't rip up that basic deal, as I understand it. But it is part of a larger liberal campaign** to use the recession to weaken work requirements and let millions of non-working single mothers back on the welfare rolls. Specifically, it would apparently reward states that expand their welfare caseloads--even if the increase is only the product of loosened work requirements rather than a worsening local economy.
Nothing wrong with helping states avoid anti-stimulating cuts in a recession. Nothing wrong with targeting money to the poorest, who are most likely to spend it quickly. But why use the aid specifically to encourage expansion of welfare? This isn't "welfare" as only conservative Republicans would define it--i.e. any means-tested assistance. This is welfare as everyone would define it--cash assistance to able-bodied single mothers (or fathers) who may or may not be working, as in the old, despised AFDC program. Better to use the money (and more) to create public jobs*** for these would-be recipients if private sector jobs have dried up, even if that upsets municipal employee unions (which don't want welfare recipients doing jobs their members might do). Don't revive the old AFDC principle that if you have a child, you can count on the government to take care of you with cash aid even if you don't work.
At the very least the extra aid to the states shouldn't be triggered by caseload expansion. (You could, for example, give states aid in proportion to their local unemployment rate.)
You would think this would be a potential killer issue for the GOPs--"See, the Democrats already want to undo welfare reform"--and Obama, being sensitive to the charge, might quickly back down. It's easiest to whack the camel when only its nose is in the tent, no?
More tk, as I find out more. ...
**--See, for example, Peter Edelman's comments here.
***--These could either be "workfare" jobs (required once you are receiving welfare) or last-resort WPA-style jobs (which pay people for their work without ever signing them up for welfare). ...
Update: Thanks to Rob Neppell, here is the relevant provision in the House bill, and in the pre-compromise Senate bill. The Nelson/Collins compromise language does not seem to be available yet. ... Note that the extra federal money seems clearly tied to increased welfare caseloads, not increased unemployment or poverty or other measure of need:.
A State meets the requirement of this clause for a quarter if the average monthly assistance caseload of the State for the quarter exceeds the average monthly assistance caseload of the State for the corresponding quarter in the emergency fund base year of the State.
If a state somehow succeeds at placing would-be recipients in jobs, it's out of luck under this provision. To get the extra federal money, it has to get more people on welfare (though presumably it could count "workfare" participants if it happens to have a workfare program). ....2:52 P.M.
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Bill Clinton in the Oval Office: "I just love that rug." I wonder if that means the same thing as "nice tie"? ... 12:46 P.M.
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Old lists never die: Will Obama ever stop asking me for money? Or is it all fundraising, all the way out? Here's an excerpt from an email I got recently:
From: Obama tor America....
Subject: Join us at the Inauguration
Friend: ...
You helped shape history, and now you can be a part of it.
Ten supporters and their guests will be selected to come to Washington, D.C. for several days of inaugural events. You could be chosen to fly to Washington, attend the welcome ceremony, the Inaugural parade, the swearing-in, and an official Inaugural ball.
Donate $5 or more now. You could be part of the historic events you made possible.
Not only is he still milking his supporters for money, he's doing it in an obnoxious way, no? "Join us at the inauguration" turns out to mean "pay for other people to party at the inauguration you're not going to"! (Even The Atlantic didn't think of that one.) As if Obama's campaign thinks his supporters are not only suckers, but a particular type of sucker--the type of sucker who contributes because of the tiny chance of striking it rich. ... It's like a crude old-left parody of capitalist ideology (except in capitalism there's a middle class, not just a few winners and millions of gullible chumps). ...
Update: Ambinder agrees, then makes the mistake of listening to the other side. ... 2:15 A.M.
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I submit that if the best evidence of Obama's subservience to the Dem "left" is his appointment of ... Leon Panetta, there's not yet much reason to worry about Obama's subservience to the left. ... 1:37 A.M.
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Why do people seem to think saying
"I don't get ulcers. I give ulcers."
is winning, as opposed to obnoxious? ... It's not like saying "I don't make art. I buy art." ... 2:23 A.M.
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Michael Kinsley used to say that every time journalists use the "from A to Z" form of expression--as in "spans the spectrum from A to Z," or "everyone from X to Y"--it only serves to show how narrow the spectrum being described is, not how broad. There's a good example of this Kinsley iron law** in the press-releasey piece The Big Money ran on Mayor Bloomberg's newfangled poverty measure:
For decades, scholars and policymakers across the political spectrum—from Patrick Moynihan to researchers at the American Enterprise Institute—have argued that [the old poverty] measure is broken. [E.A.]
I submit that the distance between Daniel Patrick Moynihan and AEI is something less than vast. It would be more accurate to say that Moynihan is revered at AEI, especially Moynihan's neoconservative tendencies. Chris DeMuth, AEI's president from 1986 until recently, worked for Moynihan. And here's a Charles Krauthammer showpiece AEI lecture that builds on praise for Moynihan.
It's hard to tell if the Big Money's author, Georgia Levenson Keohane, is credulous or simply thinks her audience is. Are you impressed that in developing his new poverty measure, Mayor Bloomberg "met extensively with Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, who in September introduced the Measuring American Poverty Act of 2008 in the U.S. House of Representatives"? Then you are easily impressed. Keohane doesn't even deal with some of the obvious potential controversies surrounding the new measure (which produced a poverty figure for New York City that is 20% higher). Specifically,
a) Should Medicaid and other government health benefits really be counted at full dollar value? They cost what they cost. But you can't eat fancy health insurance--if it might one day pay for a $100,000 heart operation for you or someone else on the plan, that doesn't mean you're not destitute today.
b) Counting regional variations in the cost of living is a bit fishy, no? If I make enough money to live semi-comfortably in Tennessee, but choose to live uncomfortably in New York City, should I really be counted as part of America's failure to eradicate poverty? Keohane cheers Bloomberg's measure for apparently carrying this to ridiculous extremes by adjusting for varying costs of living "even within the city." It's one thing to suggest that New Yorkers shouldn't be expected to seek cheap rents in Tennessee. It's another to say people in Manhattan can't be expected to move to Brooklyn. And there's an obvious pecuniary incentive for a New York pol like Bloomberg to take into account geographic variations in cost of living--it makes New Yorkers look needier and helps him beg for more federal assistance.
c) The poverty line is just a line--a necessarily arbitrary line. It's mainly useful to show trends--i.e., is there more "poverty" or less? If the line is reformulated so more people fall below it, they are no better or worse off than before. But moving the line serves an obvious propaganda point--if "advocates" can say 23% of the population, not 18%, is officially "poor." Why not avoid the "propaganda" charge by doing what Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution once suggested to me: refine how we measure income, but then set the poverty line so that, for the first year, there are exactly the same number of poor people under both new and old measures. That would make it harder for those on the left to use the new formula as part of a rhetorical scare campaign. Why do I have a feeling that would also reduce much of its appeal to Keohane?
**--Another journalistic iron law: Every time a reporter says a person is funny and gives an example, the example won't be funny. As in yesterday's NYT piece on Bill Richardson--
He is known for his easy sense of humor — during the 2004 Democratic convention, he distributed jars of salsa with his picture on them ... [E.A.]
This rule holds even, perhaps especially, if the person in question really is funny. I do not know whether that's true of Richardson. ... 1:23 A.M.
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Monday, January 5, 2009
A knowledgeable insider notes a source of labor leverage over on Big Business that I hadn't thought of in discussing (below) a possible Big Business sellout of small business on "card check":
Also, don't forget, the Business Roundtable [i.e., Big Business] in particular has a strong incentive to keep the unions happy on card check because of the pressure unions are exerting on capital markets issues such as access to the proxy, "say on pay," precatory proposals etc. - issues that BRT CEOs really care about. If people really want to understand the leverage unions have, despite their small size, they should look to the power of union pension funds and such groups as CII. [E.A.]
CII seems to be the Council of Institutional Investors, whose membership includes lots of union funds. ... P.S.: It's kind of a sad commentary on American capitalists if they aren't scared of what might happen to their actual production process, but are scared of what self-styled do-gooder investors might say at a shareholders' meeting, no? ... After all, they can always ship those union production jobs overseas. They can't do that with shareholders. ... 8:22 P.M.
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LAT vs. CFL: The PC Times turns against compact flourescent bulbs, on aesthetic and environmental grounds. I'm with the Times, against the times. Does that put me to the right of Wal-Mart or the left? ... P.S.: Or just in the Shade? ... 6:08 P.M.
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Friday, December 19, 2008
Mo' Bailout:
1) The Treasury Department has now posted the terms of the bailout.
2) How does the UAW's Gettelfinger get away with saying these terms are "singling out workers"? The deal calls for creditors to convert two thirds of their debt into equity. There are also limits on executive compensation. Maybe they're mostly toothless in practice--but the terms directed at the UAW are explicitly toothless. They're just "targets."
3) It's not a deal: Note that Gettelfinger says he's unwilling to abide by these provisions and makes it clear he intends to "work with the Obama administration and the new Congress to ensure that these unfair conditions are removed." So it's not really a deal. It's a deal that one party has pledged to undo as quickly as possible. Think of the fuss if there were a Republican adminstration on the way and GM vowed to undo its obligations under the arangement as soon as possible.
4) We like it except for the parts that, you know, make our constituency change: Indeed, Barney Frank has joined in the call for removal of the UAW-sacrifice "targets" once Obama takes office. Is he actually amping up the pressure on the incoming President to protect the UAW, or is he just scoring cheap points with labor at a time when feelings are raw and he can't be expected to actually do anything? I smell Kabuki! They stick in non-binding targets. Labor and its allies rebel and righteously remove the non-binding targets. Everyone wins. Gettelfinger looks strong. Dems like Frank repay their debt to labor. Republicans get an anti-union cause. Nothing has happened. The real issue is whether Obama actually forces unionzed autoworkers to shave wages and (a much bigger issue) change restrictive work rules when the actual crunch date comes around next year.
5) Here are two paragraphs for my pro-union friends who doubt that Wagner Act work rules are a) at the core of Detroit's problem and b) the hardest thing to get the UAW to reform, because they require more than an incremental increase or decrease in compensation:
The Bush plan requires work rule parity between U.S. automakers and foreign automakers — not a simple task, said Aaron Bragman, an automotive industry analyst at consultancy IHS Global Insight.
“Work rule parity is very different between the UAW and the foreign automakers,” Bragman said. “Work rules govern how you make the cars, or who can touch what in the factory. There’s such a level of detail, and how a Japanese automaker makes cars is totally different to how a U.S. company makes cars. So there are a lot of difficult issues to be fixed very quickly. GM’s Rick Wagoner says they can fix them, but analysts are not so sure.” [E.A.]
As far as the UAW is concerned, this was not a change election! ... 11:24 P.M.
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Jobs Americans Won't Will Do: A WSJ report contradicts two pieces of pro-legalization CW:
1) 'Crops will rot in the fields without legalization and a "guest worker" program': Not this year--
Growers across the country are reporting that farmhands are plentiful; in fact, they are turning down potential field workers.
2) 'Non-immigrant Americans just won't do tough, dirty jobs like agricultural field work and day labor' Not any more--
In particular, Mr. Gray has observed an influx of U.S.-born Latinos and other workers who previously shunned field work. "These are domestic workers who appear to be displacing immigrants," says Mr. Gray.
A similar situation has emerged in U.S. cities from New York to Los Angeles, where unemployed, nonimmigrant laborers are seeking informal work that typically has been performed by low-skilled immigrants ...
Note that if Americans will do the work when they're desperate--i.e. when they can't get better jobs--that suggests that at least some of them will do the work if they're paid sufficient wages (i.e. when they can't get better jobs). The point is they will work on farms. We're just haggling over the price, and the alternatives. That means, when the economy picks up, that farmers could get much of the labor they need by ... raising wages. What a concept. ... [As long as we don't raise autoworker wages, eh?--ed The UAW's members negotiated above-market wages, demanded lots of legalistic work rules, and now want taxes on people like $10/hour agricultural laborers to bail them out when their firms go under (while deferring modest wage adjustments until 2011). Seems like a different case! But maybe your point is that restricting the flow of illegal immigrant labor can raise the wages at the bottom of the ladder, for the "least among us," while protecting the UAW protects the $50/hour "aristocracy" of the labor movement. That must be it. I wonder which course the Democratic party dogma prefers.] ... 10:29 P.M.
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Monday, December 15, 2008
From Taylorism to Wagnerism: Sympathetic but ultimately damning analysis of the U.A.W. from Michael Barone. ... P.S.: A misguided Warren Court decision--basically requiring unions to prosecute individual grievances under a "duty of representation"--magnified the Wagner Act's inherent adversarialism, it should be noted. Before the decision, unions could pick and choose only the best grievances and drop the rest. (In 1957 at GM, for example, the UAW only pursued 24 grievances to arbitration, according to Robert M. Kaus). After the 60s-era liberal legalists were through creating a right of individual workers to sue their unions, even a labor stalwart like AFSCME's Victor Gotbaum would say "It's almost as if we have to protect bad workers." ... 2:00 P.M.
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We need a Czar Czar, to crack the whip on all the czars. ... P.S.: Also a federal czar policy. Right now, czar decisions are made on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, with no attempt at czar harmonization. ... 12:40 A.M.
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A Coming GM/UAW Split? I'd missed Clive Crook's Nov. 11 article on Detroit's collapse. It's behind a National Journal subscription wall now, and a subscription to the National Journal costs roughly as much as a controlling share in the Chrysler Corporation. But here's the most relevant passage:
[T]he unions raised wages and benefits to insupportable levels, and for years blocked efforts to cut costs and increase efficiency. Worst of all, by anointing themselves co-managers, they reduced the domestic industry's ability to react promptly to shifts in demand. Is this how the Democratic Party intends to strengthen the economy?
By their own standards, admittedly, U.S. car producers have raised their game recently, and they have done it with the unions' help. Productivity in some of the domestic producers' plants is now as good as in nonunion plants run by foreigners. But this came late, and only under duress. It took the imminent collapse of the industry to moderate the unions' demands.
Unions destroyed Britain's car industry, and during the 1960s and '70s they accelerated the decline of British manufacturing and of the wider economy as well. Of course, they were far more powerful in those days than U.S. unions have ever been. Unions in America today are weak and getting weaker -- a trend that they hope to reverse with the incoming administration's help.
The point of the comparison is not to suggest that America might get a case of the pre-Thatcher British disease, but simply to question the Democrats' conviction that stronger unions serve their voters' wider interests. Look at GM, and tell me that strong unions are good for the economy. [E.A.]
P.S.: Paul Ingrassia updates the run-to-momma politics of the bailout, in which the Bush administration may give the U.A.W. what it wants, namely bailout money without either a) further specific contract concessions (as demanded by Sen. Corker and other Republicans) or b) a quasi-bankruptcy proceeding that could nullify the unions' labor contracts entirely. ...
P.P.P.S.--'But It Took Us a Year to Negotiate': The sense of victimhood that Ingrassia criticizes comes through in the following passage from Saturday's NYT:
Alan Reuther, the chief lobbyist for the union, said labor leaders back in Detroit were astonished at what Mr. Corker was attempting to accomplish — a virtual rewriting of the U.A.W. contract, which typically takes the better part of a year to negotiate. “That’s one thing that our folks in Detroit were just amazed at,” Mr. Reuther said. “Does Senator Corker really think he can do a restructuring of the industry in six hours?” [E.A.]
Hmm. I guess that's sort of what happens when you go bankrupt! The work of a year can disappear in a few hours! Did they expect Congress to (as the saying goes) leave the money on a stump in the middle of the night? ... Note also the almost reverent concern for process--as if what's being protected here isn't the workers' wages or standard of living but the traditional painstaking dance of adversarial negotiation. It's always about respect--in this case, respect for the Wagner Act's elaborate formalities. Corker was short-circuiting them. But of course it's those elaborate formalities that got in the way of innovation and helped bankrupt the industry in the first place.
P.P.P.S.: I do think that in seeking a middle ground of specific wage concessions--but stopping short of a general contract nullification--Senator Corker wound up giving the unfortunate impression of political meddling in the details of wage rates, etc. It would have been simpler to just demand that the "auto czar" have bankruptcy-like powers to void the contracts. But of course the UAW, which is now vilifying Corker, would have liked that non-meddling solution even less than what Corker proposed. ...
More--Solidarity Not Forever: If the whole bailout deal is now really about protecting this (the U.A.W. contract) from a bankruptcy-style proceeding, how long will it be before General Motors realizes its interests are sharply different--and parts company with its union co-pleader? GM might like the UAW contract to be voided, after all. GM might also like the way a bankruptcy style proceed would give it the freedom to prune its dealer networks. The main factor encouraging GM to join with the U.A.W. in avoiding bankruptcy has been the fear that consumers would stop buying cars from a bankrupt manufacturer. But as the Weekend Journal noted, consumers may have stopped buying GM cars already, in anticipation of bankruptcy. If that's true, why wouldn't it be in GM's interest to just go ahead and have a bankruptcy or bankruptcy-by-another name? Which is exactly what the U.A.W. is counting on the politicians to stop. ...
Update: The entire Clive Crook article is here, free. ... 12:02 A.M.
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Sunday, December 14, 2008
Maybe the Mumbai attacks really were originally supposed to take place before the U.S. election. ... 10:37 P.M.
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What Wagner Act unions are good at producing. ... P.S.: The Japanese have nothing like it! ... 9:42 P.M.
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