Notes to Sarah Palin's ghost writer

I wrote a couple of posts replying to Sarah Palin's new Facebook note,
More of the Same, Only More Expensive:

In ten years, "Allowing people to buy insurance across state lines" will effectively mean, "Everybody buys insurance from South Dakota, because they have the weakest regulations on health insurers. It's exactly what happened to the credit card industry, so anyone who thinks this "free market solution" will do anything but make our health care system worse is simply not paying attention.

Second:

You link to a poll showing the current Democratic proposals to be unpopular. But you miss three crucial facts:

1) Many individual elements of the health care bill (employer mandates, ban on pre-existing conditions, the insurance exchange) poll *extremely* well. The public option also polls very well.

2) Polling has also shown that, if you give people straightforward, unbiased information (read: NOT Democratic talking points, just a non-partisan description of what the bill does) then the poll numbers improve dramatically.

3) Much of the opposition to the current bill comes *from the left.* Like me, they want to kick insurers to the curb by either giving America a strong public option or (even better) moving to a pure single-payer system.

Update: Apparently, this is the sort of hate speech that gets you a comment ban from Sarah Palin's people. My comments seem to have been deleted, and I'm no longer able to add comments.

Oh well, more time to practice my dolphin calls.

A short thingy on the merits of cap and trade (repost)

Catnlion said:
Climate change, don't you like how they don't call it global warming anymore, people want to use this to put in Cap and Trade, aka Cap and Tax. On the face C&T makes no sense. The point is to lower CO2. So what are we going to do, say you have to quit producing CO2, unless you pay us? Since taxes are a business expense that are passed along to the final customer the polluter is just going to pay the tax, pass the cost along, and keep putting out CO2. How does this cut the amount of CO2?

------------------------------

You seem to be missing some essential features of cap and trade, so I'll try to explain it as well as I can. To illustrate, we'll go with a simplified form of cap and trade. The United States emits a total of 5.7 gigatons of emissions annually. To begin reducing emissions, say we implement a cap at 5.5 gigatons. Then, the government sells 5.5 billion permits, each one granting the holder the right to emit a ton of CO2. If a coal plant can't buy a permit, then it can't emit any CO2.

Within this system, individual actors can continue doing exactly what they've been doing, so long as they buy a permit from somebody, either the government or some private entity that has already purchased one.

But because there are only a limited number of permits, somebody has to reduce their emissions and sell their permits to those who wish to continue emitting. To reiterate: you have to have a permit to emit a ton of CO2, and not enough permits are available to emit as much as we did the prior year.

The companies which choose to sell permits are the ones who can most cost-effectively reduce their emissions, while those which choose to buy the permits are the ones which would find it very expensive to reduce their emissions.

Cap and trade makes great sense, because it doesn't matter at all which molecule of carbon was emitted where or to what end. All that matters is the aggregate amount. If we have to choose between two plans for stopping a gigaton of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, one which costs a trillion dollars, and one which costs six billion dollars, all else being equal we should go with the latter. Cap and trade sets a goal, and lets the market figure out the most cost-effective approaches to meeting the target.

Now, the cap and trade bill before the Senate is more complex, because it also includes unrelated research funding, but more because it has to deal with real-world issues like verifying emission levels and all the other things needed to keep people from gaming the system. But the overall effect is the same: give the market the ability to internalize the costs of greenhouse emissions.

[Originally from the comments section of David Brin's blog at Salon]

Part 3: Drowning the Government in the Bathtub

The last few days -- because I'm bored -- I've been going over UT-3's (a.k.a. Jason "Hundreds of Billions for Defense, But Not One Penny for Pensioners" Chaffetz) "Contract for the American Dream.

Part 1: Pointed out that, back when the "American Dream" of shared economic prosperity was strongest, the government played a strong role in America.

Part 2: Took issue with both the sincerity of the "debt crisis"-mongers and the slash-and-burn approach they want to take to solving it.

Part 3 (current): Continuing onward, starting with the section entitled "Limited Government":

Further, it is not the government that will create jobs, wealth, or propel the United States of America to reach its fullest potential. It is the American people who will drive America forward.

I don't know which irks me more, the profound disrespect shown to the many positive roles government plays in our civic life, the implication that government employees are separate and distinct from "the American people", or the Trebuchet MS font-face it's written in. I mean, why not just mark it up in Comic Sans and be done with it?

Individuals should have the freedom to succeed or fail in this country. It is not the government's role to stand in the way of either outcome or to choose winners and losers.

Had he written that "corporations should have the freedom to succeed or fail," I might be inclined to agree. But that's not what he writes. He's saying government shouldn't help individuals who find themselves on the losing end of life. To describe government as "standing in the way" of a losing outcome is to imply that the outcome is earned, and that there is something morally suspect about preventing the suffering that accompanies losing. He's preaching Social Darwinism, the message that perpetrates so much of the misery and suffering that happens around our country: there is no such thing as systemic injustice, the world is fair, and anyone who is having a rough time of things has -- one way or another -- brought the misery upon him or herself.

Fortunately, not all Americans are as indifferent to suffering as Rep. Chaffetz. We decided, as a nation, to tackle the enormous problem of elderly poverty, by starting a program called Social Security to deliver the same. It has some kinks to work out, and yes, it's expensive. But you can't expect to lift millions of elderly Americans out of poverty on the cheap. The same goes for Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, welfare payments, and a whole host of other problems. As a tax-paying citizen, I'm glad that these programs are there to help people who need it. I want them to be run as efficiently as possible, and I'm eager to see any clever proposals for making them better.

The Contract says that it is in our nature as Americans not to sit around and wait for government to solve our problems. There is some truth to that. But neither is it in our nature to turn a blind eye to the needy and the suffering. I don't believe these two instincts need to be at war, but clearly Mr. Chaffetz wants us all to think that they are.

Jason, if you believe that Americans are a hard-working, ingenious people, ready to tackle challenges, then you should have faith that they can apply that problem-solving ingenuity in the realm of improving government. Instead, you propose that we throw in the towel; declare defeat, pare the entire thing down to the bone, sell big chunks of it off to private enterprises that literally cannot represent the best interests of the American people, and hope that somehow, somewhere, prosperity emerges.

More specifics!

• Repeal TARP and commit to no more "stimulus" bills that are merely a ruse to grow government.

TARP was mismanaged from the get-go, like pretty much everything else Bush did. Obama at least came in and made it more transparent and increased oversight. Now the money is mostly being repaid, Obama is proposing a tax on the biggest banks to make sure we get the rest of it, and the Democrats are hard at work trying to craft regulations to make sure the financial industry can't wreck the country quite so badly next time. Not surprisingly, Republicans are stonewalling the effort, because despite Alan Greenspan's mea culpa, they can't imagine that the free market was capable of footbulleting itself the way it did.

In the mind of the free marketeers, the economic collapse was caused by the Feds forcing banks to give homes to black people. Or something.

The stimulus was separate legislation, though Republicans benefit greatly from public confusion between the stimulus bill (ARRA) and the bank bailout (TARP). My main complaint about the bill was that it was too small, and focused too heavily on tax cuts.

Now that we're through the worst of it, and we're pretty sure the economy is no longer going to tip over if someone exhales, the Republicans can yammer about how the money spent fixing Bush's mess was ill-spent. I'm glad things are going well enough that they have that luxury.

Meanwhile, they're in lockstep opposition to a jobs bill to help put Americans back to work. It was your own fault for losing your jobs, stupid unemployed people.

• Appoint a bi-partisan "Sunset Commission" to identify at least 100 federal departments or programs recommended for elimination by December 31, 2011.

I'm all in favor of getting rid of programs that are ineffective or harmful. But when you throw out an arbitrary number to be decommissioned by an arbitrary date, you're just grandstanding.

My alternative would be, every three years each program and each department would create a report that basically justified their existence, and outlined any roadblocks they faced in fulfilling their purpose. The reports wouldn't give us all the answers, but it would give everyone in the federal government a chance to hash out which expenditures were important and why.

• Reduce the corporate income tax to a flat 10%. This will eliminate the wide array of corporate loopholes, incentivize business in the U.S.A., and simplify the tax code.

Fewer taxes for megacorps, less spending on the education, health, and welfare of Americans. I'm starting to sense a theme. At least

• Reject the "Cap & Trade" scheme and repeal all EPA funding related to carbon policy.

If you read this blog -- and I know both of you do -- then you know that this proposal should generate three or four blog posts in its own right. I'll just start it off by asking, does Mr. Chaffetz propose this because he doesn't believe CO2 emissions are a problem, or because he believes that free markets have the problem well in hand?

I'm guessing the former. Global warming is a textbook case of a serious problem that cannot be addressed by purely free market mechanisms. No wonder the drown government in a bathtub crowd has to keep telling itself that it's a giant hoax; if it's real, it's like the whole planet is telling them that their ideology is crap.

• Sell back to private ownership the three million acres of federal land identified under the Clinton Administration as having no federal purpose.

I'd need more detail on this one. Just for reference, three million acres is about four times the size of Rhode Island. I would be surprised if Chaffetz were interested in getting maximum value from the sale, even though it would go a long way in getting us out of this manufactured "debt crisis."

I know that I've come across as a staunch defender of all things governmenty these last few posts. I'm really not. I was all over government's case back when Bush was in office, pointing out the litany of bad things government causes. I'm a huge fan of Glenn Greenwald, who is no friend to the Washington establishment.

I'd like to put my government boosterism into context. I think of government and the corporate world as two separate spheres of power with competing goals. Government at its best can act as a check on corporate power and temper capitalism with the bit of humanity it needs to avoid a violent revolution of the proletariat. But in order to do so, it has to be allied with the interests of the people, not the corporations, and it has to have the size and scope to make an actual difference. You lose the first principle, you get fascism. You lose the second, you get Somalia.

I'm on the pro-government bandwagon right now, because the current flare-up of anti-government rhetoric is so blindly, willfully stupid. Just one example: the health care bill represents a grand compromise, bringing insurance to millions of Americans while intruding minimally into our unique employer-based system, and putting us on equal footing with every other industrialized nation (who somehow manage to provide universal coverage at relatively low cost). But if you listened to the tea partiers, they sound like Obama called for the immediate government takeover of the health care industry, then started rounding people up and forcing them through medical school at gunpoint.

Government needs serious reform, but the Tea Party -- and the politicians who court them -- are indiscriminate in their outrage. In their narrow, unthinking view, all government programs are useless (except defense, which we should continue to fund at rates comparable to the spending of the whole rest of the world), all recipients of government aid are unworthy, and all the government ever does is keep free enterprise from solving our problems. That breeds cynicism of the worst sort, which discourages bright and talented people from joining public service, which eventually gives us the crappy, ineffectual government Republicans -- and their corporate masters -- want us to have.

Contract for the American Dream, part 2: The Nightmare Begins

In part 1, I argued that during the period most closely linked with "The American Dream," (the 1950s), government action was key to the broad-based prosperity of that era. This was in response to Jason Chaffetz' statement called The Contract for the American Dream, which calls for taking the wrecking ball to vast swaths of government.

In part 2, I'd like to take a closer look at some of the problems he lays out in his contract, and the -- and here I really, really have to use quotation marks -- "solutions" he proposes for them.

The American dream wasn't built on higher taxes, Czars, "Cash for Clunkers," or corporate bailouts. And it wasn’t built on a limitless government credit card.

Wow, there is a lot to unpack in that bizarre statement. As I mentioned in part 1, our current taxes are actually fairly low by historical standards, especially for the wealthiest Americans. I can't find a coherent explanation of why I should be outraged over "czars", much less why I should be outraged over Obama's czars and not the dozens that Bush had. Cash for Clunkers was actually a pretty reasonable program.

But the last point, about the limitless government credit card, makes no sense from a historical standard. Let me just quickly point out that, in the aforelinked chart, Republican presidents have overseen the vast majority of the increase in debt to GDP. But the more important point is, looking at it from a historical context, we've been far worse off. America has always had an unlimited credit card. We charged World War II to it, so it's not exactly easy to max it out.

I'll agree that the national debt is a very real problem, and we have to have a long term strategy for getting it down to zero. But most Republicans didn't utter a peep back when they were the ones holding the credit card, then started screaming their fool heads off when they had to turn it over to The Kenyan Crusader. And even with the existential debt crisis, Chaffetz still believes that it is in America's most vital national interest to continue spending nearly as much as the entire rest of the world on national defense. So it's hard to believe that he's serious about tackling the debt problem, rather than using it as an excuse to jettison the chunks of the government that don't fit his ideological whims.

Rather, the best hope for the United States of America is to return to the core principles of fiscal discipline, limited government, accountability, and a strong national defense.

Adherence to these core principles will result in more jobs, more opportunity, more freedom, and consequently a better quality of life now and for future generations.

Since limiting the size and scope of government is supposed to create all these bounties for a country's citizens, I have a challenge for the good representative. Imagine that you have to leave the Socialist United States for parts unknown, and you cannot take any significant wealth with you. That is, you have to live in some other country, as one of the lower or middle class.

Now, make a list of the ten countries you could see yourself spending the rest of your life in. Now cross-reference that list with this one, showing government expenditures as a percentage of GDP. With the possible exceptions of Hong Kong and Singapore, every country you would think of as "industrialized" or as "having a health care system I would willingly subject my dog to" spends a higher fraction of their national wealth on government services. Brazil might be fun to live in for a few years, but not for reasons that have anything to do with "jobs, opportunities, and freedom."

Of course, plenty of hellholes on the list also have high shares of government spending. But consider this: France and Moldova[1] have about the same share of government spending, and France is clearly the better place to live. The Republican assumption that government spending has a powerful negative effect on the quality of life of its country is really hard to justify.

We pay approximately $600 million per day in interest payments.

That does sound like a really big number. Probably because it is. But a bit of perspective is called for. The national GDP is about $13 trillion dollars. $600M a day comes out to about $200 billion dollars, or about 1.5% of the national budget. We have a debt problem, not a debt crisis. The Republicans want it to be a crisis so that they can unravel the social safety net, as Chaffetz' statement of principles makes abundantly clear.

Imagine a federal government that treats the national treasure with respect and responsibility by living within its means-where every American pays a fair share.

Yeah, that does sound good. Unfortunately, as we delve into the specifics of his proposals, we find that "every American pays a fair share" means "tax cuts for the rich," while "living within its means" translates to "tax cuts for the rich, then balance the budget on the backs of the poor."

The specifics begin.... NOW!

• Reduce total federal payroll and workforce by 10%, except for military. This action will force all federal departments to identify and eliminate waste.

That's your plan for getting the economy back on track and getting people back to work? Throw 400,000 workers out of their jobs, and jack up unemployment another half percent? It has a certain audacity to it, I'll grant you that.

He's half right. If everyone loses 10% of their workforce, federal programs will have to eliminate something. But that's the problem with the whole notion of equating "small government" to "good government." If the government is so inherently corrupt that cutting its budget can only be a good thing, then the processes by which the government decides to cut back its services in response to that pressure is going to be corrupt as well.

I'm saying that the two premises are contradictory. "Cutting their budgets will make them more efficient" assumes that the government bodies in question are able to see where their money is being wasted and that they are motivated to deliver the best services they can. "Cutting their budgets has to be a good thing" assumes that the same bodies are hopelessly incompetent and corrupt, with no interest in delivering those same services.

Of course, the whole idea that a smaller budget and staff leads to a more efficient workplace is a crock. Let me offer an anecdote from my workplace. When I first got hired on, my goal was to set up an online order system. It should have taken a few months. If I'd been able to spend all my time on it, it probably would have. But most of my time was actually spent doing the day-to-day business of the organization, because the place was hectic, because we didn't have online ordering, so it actually took well over a year.

Had there been more "waste" in the budget, in the form of people to handle a larger share of the office work, I would have been able to "waste" more of my time doing something that would only pay off in the long run. This isn't to knock my employer, but to illustrate that not every organization can be made more efficient by giving it a 10% haircut.[2] Some government programs need to be cut, sure. But others are already dangerously underfunded.

By proposing a 10% across the board cut, Chaffetz is feeding the overarching Republican narrative: the government serves no important purpose, so decimating[3] its workforce without regard for the work they do couldn't cause any damage, right?

If you are one of the millions of people who keep our borders secure, our food supply and workplaces safe, our laws enforced, our skies Osama-free, our radio transmissions clear, and our youth productively engaged, you should be deeply offended by this proposal. Because you choose to put your time and talents to use in the service of your country, you are a leech in the eyes of the Republican party.

• Support a balanced budget amendment.


• Require 2/3 majority vote for any tax increase.

Yeah, because it worked so well for California.

• Cut non-defense discretionary spending by inflation minus 3% across the board.

Another brilliant across-the-board cut. I don't want to fall into the nasty habit of comparing the government budget to a household budget, but in this case, I'll make an exception. If a family were sitting down to their bills and seeing a 3% shortfall, they would not respond by spending 3% less on food, 3% less on clothing, 3% less on swimming lessons, 3% less on cable, 3% less on their mortgage, etc. They would cut from their budget in proportion to the value the spending was bringing to them. One family might cut the entire cable bill. Another might stop spending money on clothes, but plan to increase their vacation budget.

Across-the-board cuts make about as much sense as having a CEO fire twenty people at random, and nobody who seriously proposes such a course of action can claim to have any respect for the work the employees are doing.

• Impose a moratorium on all appropriations earmarks until the process is reformed legislatively. Work to maximize openness and transparency with filters, to ensure only expenditures with a federal nexus, and prohibit allocations to for-profit companies.

I've never understood Chaffetz' obsession with earmarks. They come out to something like 2% of the federal budget, so even banning them outright isn't going to get our financial house in order. They do seem to make people cynical about government[4], so I agree that they should be reformed. But anyone who says earmark reform is a key issue is grandstanding.

• Reduce the capital gains rate to 10%. This will lead to increased receipts to the federal treasury and will also increase investment in the USA.

This is nothing but a tax cut for the rich. Fewer than one in seven taxpayers pay any capital gains at all, and the wealthiest 3% of the population (minimum income: $200,000/year) paid 83% of all capital gains [source]. It is already the case that money earned by sitting on your ass and watching other people turn your money into more money is taxed at a far lower rate than money earned by busting your ass to turn other peoples money into more money.

Now the Republican signatories to this travesty want to make it even more lucrative to play the sort of financial roulette that busted our economy in the first place. Remember this when you vote in November.

Oh, and one last thing: Tax. Cuts. Don't. Increase. Revenues.

• Engage in entitlement reform.

If this were being said by a Democrat, it would have very different implications. It would mean ferreting out actual waste, fraud, and abuse. It would mean cutting costs, including making the sort of long-term investments that would lead to cost savings down the road. It would mean slowing the growth of Medicare by emphasizing preventative care and building programs that would find out which treatments were most cost-effective. It would mean, well, doing the sort of things that are in the health care reform bill.

From the mouth of Jason Chaffetz, it means pay for the aforementioned tax cuts for the wealthy by cutting off assistance to the poor.

Remember, the Republicans have no serious plans for containing the cost of health care. Their plan boils down to, "Keep the government out of it, and let the free market do its magic." Which is what we've been doing lo these last hundred years, and to ill effect.

Wow. All that, and I'm still only through the first set of bullet points. I suppose a part 3 will have to be written. Representative Chaffetz, if you could refrain from saying stupid things, it would save me a lot of time, and drastically improve my quality of life.


Notes:

[1] Moldova has been cited in happiness-related studies as the single most depressing place on Earth.

[2] Except the military. We must always except the military.

[3] Literally.

[4] Which if anything is good for Republicans.

Contract for the American Dream: A nightmarish proposal

Once again my favorite congressional whipping boy, Jason Chaffetz, has released -- to great fanfare -- something really icky. He calls it the Contract for the American Dream, and I guess it is dreamy, if you're rich, a defense contractor, a climate contrarian, a union buster, or someone who, after careful, measured consideration, has decided he's paying too much in taxes..

Mister Chaffetz, let me tell you about the American Dream. Arguably, the American Dream was at its healthiest back in the 1950s. There's a lot of bad things to be said about the Fifties, but I'm going to talk about the bright spots. As I do so, think about how Republicans today might feel about this America.

In the 1950s, a single man with nothing more than a high school education had a good shot at a union job that paid enough to support a family in a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle. About one in three jobs was a union job.

Between 1950 and 1970, the minimum wage rose from $7/hour (where we are today) to peak at $10/hr. Figures are, of course, adjusted for inflation.

The top marginal tax rate was 91%, and the average CEO earned 30 times the average worker's salary, not 300 times.

Millions of young Americans were going to college on the government's dime. Thanks to the GI Bill -- a government program -- education had never been more accessible. Well, if you were white.

People back then held deep, probably excessive respect for the institutions of government. I mean, they were loath to show the president's face in movies. I still think that's weird, especially given that the government had hijacked the whole economy plus most of the menfolk just a decade before.

Sure, the government was smaller back then, with government spending representing 25% of the economy rather than 40%. But it's hard to argue that 15% is the difference between liberation and servitude. More to the point, the government was doing all the things it's doing now, providing for the health, welfare, defense, education, and comfortable retirement of its citizenry, just on a slightly smaller scale.

The American Dream was never a dream of an America without government, without a social safety net, without worker protections. Jason Chaffetz clearly does not see that, and it shows in his proud, willful lack of decent ideas. Really, Jason and his Republican clones only have one idea: government bad. Everything will get better if we just cut taxes, cut spending, jettison every regulation or government department we can, and... make sure we cut absolutely nothing from our bloated, wasteful, $700B annual Pentagon budget? Republicans want to go line-by-line over your grandma's medical bills, looking for "waste, fraud, and abuse," but god forbid the people building the F-22 get the same scrutiny.

That, in a nutshell, is the Republican American Dream. More on the specific proposals later.*




* If I'm bored.

Does organic farming mean mass starvation?

I hate arguing politics when I'm not jacked into the Internet. Without the Internet, you can say pretty much whatever you want, and nobody can prove you wrong. I got into an Internet-disabled political discussion last night, wherein the claim was made that organic farming techniques (if universally adopted) would lead to the starvation of one third of the world's population.

Now my first inclination was to think that there are other ways we could respond under the "universal organic" constraint. We could put more land under agricultural production. We could feed more of our grain harvest directly to people, rather than feeding it to animals at 10-20% calorie conversion efficiency. We could give everyone composting toilets, or find other new sources of organic fertilizer. We could slow the growth rate of the population, so that we don't have to feed ten or twelve billion people down the line. We could stop harvesting low- and zero-calorie foods like celery and iceberg lettuce, and eliminate the production of indigestible calorie substitutes, like Olean and Splenda. We could throw away less of the food that we produce.

Now, I can see people having various problems with any of these suggestions, but any and all are more humane and less disruptive than the mass starvation of two or three billion people.

But none of these suggestions -- desirable as I might find them -- should be necessary, because I don't believe that the premise is accurate. According to one study called "Organic agriculture and the global food supply", found here or here (PDF):

The principal objections to the proposition that organic agriculture can contribute significantly to the global food supply are low yields and insufficient quantities of organically acceptable fertilizers. We evaluated the universality of both claims.

For the first claim, we compared yields of organic versus conventional or low-intensive food production for a global dataset of 293 examples and estimated the average yield ratio (organic : non-organic) of different food categories for the developed and the developing world. For most food categories, the average yield ratio was slightly <1.0 for studies in the developed world and >1.0 for studies in the developing world. With the average yield ratios, we modeled the global food supply that could be grown organically on the current agricultural land base. Model estimates indicate that organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base.

We also evaluated the amount of nitrogen potentially available from fixation by leguminous cover crops used as fertilizer. Data from temperate and tropical agroecosystems suggest that leguminous cover crops could fix enough nitrogen to replace the amount of synthetic fertilizer currently in use. These results indicate that organic agriculture has the potential to contribute quite substantially to the global food supply, while reducing the detrimental environmental impacts of conventional agriculture.

Right now, most of the land under cultivation isn't being farmed using the high-yield, high-input farming methods that organic's critics claim are necessary to feed our growing population. Most farmland is in the developing world, and cultivated using subsistence farming techniques. The study looked at yield comparison studies from the developting world, and found that yields generally increased when farmers incorporated organic techniques. This is wonderful news, because organic techniques are cheap as hell when compared to having impoverished farmers buy tons of synthetic fertilizer and genetically modified seeds from ConAgra.

To me, the whole "organic farming == starvation" meme seems like something designed by some nefarious right wing think tank, then bounced around their echo chamber until it got traction in the mainstream media, where basically reasonable people started getting the message. It has all the crucial elements. It paints liberals as elitists who would protect the environment even at the cost of vast human suffering. It turns the multinationals who churn out synthetic fertilizers and GMO seeds into the heroes of the starving masses. It tries to create a rift between competing progressive values (as so many bullshit right-wing memes do; they know the value of tricking the opposition into fighting amongst themselves).

This is how democracy dies

Not with a scream, but with a muffled whimper, as it drowns under a flood of corporate money.

At this point, our only hope is for Google to run for president.

A modified health care bill

My health care bill would consist of a single paragraph:

"Health insurance companies may no longer deny applicants coverage due to pre-existing conditions. They may not change their premiums based on a person's medical history."

This would make for a very popular bill. Of course, there would be an enormous incentive for people to jump off the insurance roles until they ran into a situation where they needed intensive medical care. That's what the individual mandate was supposed to fix.

Without a mandate to get coverage, premiums for those who remain on the insurance rolls would skyrocket, causing even more people to jump off the rolls. Within a decade, the health insurance industry would be dead.

Then we could finally get a decent Medicare-style single payer system for all Americans.

It's simple, people: If you're going to get to universal coverage (which most Americans want) and you're not going to cut the insurance industry out of the picture (which most Americans want, God only knows why) then you have to mandate that insurance companies take anyone who comes along. If you mandate that, you also have to mandate that everyone purchase insurance, in order to avoid the premiums death spiral I described above, and you need subsidies for Americans who are too poor to afford health insurance on their own.

This plan, or something very much like it, is what is needed to effect universal coverage without socializing the entire health insurance industry*.

Ask the right wingers what their ideas are for reforming health care. I've heard three ideas, none of which would work:

1) Tort reform: According to the CBO, "defensive medicine" and malpractice payouts comprise about 2% of overall health care spending. You can't make big gains there. Health insurance overheads, on the other hand, takes about 30% from the top.

2) Let insurers sell across state lines: We'll end up with something like the credit card industry, where all insurance is sold by companies based out of the one state with the fewest consumer protections.

3) Let people feel the costs of their health care decisions: Sounds market friendly in theory, and it has been shown that people who pay more out of pocket for individual treatments use less medical services. But the studies have shown that people don't have the expertise to distinguish between medically necessary and unnecessary treatments, and when exposed to greater market pressures, they are as likely to cut back on the former as the latter. Which is why health care services make for a lousy market in the first place.

The Republican idea barrel is pretty empty. According to the CBO, the Republican alternative bill for health care reform would leave the uninsured population unchanged in ten years. They have absolutely no idea how to get more people more access to health care, and they know it.




* Which wouldn't be such a bad thing. Health insurance isn't an industry where massive innovation is either needed or desirable.

Avatar: The free market speaks, calls America a douche

[spoiler alert, blah blah who cares you've probably seen it already]

Conservatives are up in arms over Avatar. Does it surprise anyone that David Brooks is too?

His whole review has an air of self-pity to it. How dare James Cameron portray the military industrial complex as ruthless? Why should I have to spend a moment questioning the superiority of my culture? And how can those ingrates -- whether within our borders or beyond our shores -- enjoy the sight of a clearly American force being beaten, even killed, after all we've done for the world these last ten years? And psssh, the environment? Are we really still talking about that elitist liberal stuff? We live in a post-Climategate world, you know.

But to avoid being outed as the reactionary he is, he dresses up his objections, couching them in terms of how disrespectful the movie is to the natives. Er, yeah. The movie that shows a clearly Americanized military slaughtering the natives and pouring explosives into their holiest sites, all so they can strip mine the planet, is doing a grievous disservice to, well, whatever culture or cultures the Na'vi represent. That's what Brooks is really steamed about.

So rather than speaking plainly about how he thinks his side is being slandered, he tries to tap into the same rich vein of white guilt and use it to his advantage. Isn't it disrespectful, the way those poor, benighted Na'vi needed a white warrior to come save them? Isn't it suspicious that the white guy is not just part of the tribe, but the awesomest tribesman ever?

Not only is it sneaky, I don't think it's even a fair reading of the movie. Jake doesn't become the bravest or the boldest of the tribe's warriors, or the most skilled hunter or flier. At least, I saw no evidence of it. He eventually gets skilled enough to endure the same coming of age ritual that everyone else in the tribe underwent as teenagers.

He gets the girl, yes, but not through the power of White Awesome. He does so because they spent time together, shared adventures, and found common ground. Also, never underestimate the power of a sexy, exotic accent.

Only in mastering the "big red bird" does Jake step fully into the realm of awesome, and even then it isn't made clear why nobody else did it first. What did seem clear is that a long military career taught him to approach it as he would any tactical situation, and that he was taking a new and untested approach to the bird problem.

This is something that Brooks' criticism doesn't make allowances for. Cameron is pulling out one of the ancient archetypes/tropes: a man who shares the heritage of two worlds, and who is exceptional because he can draw on the strengths of each. Jake is exceptional, but not because he's smarter, or stronger, or braver than the other members of his tribe. He leads the attack because he has the best understanding of the enemy. He eventually wins the war not by his own strength, but because only an outsider could convey to The Great Treebrain the true nature of the threat it faced.

The point of movies like these isn't that we should all dump our iPhones and MRI machines, break out the loincloths, and go smoke peyote in the desert until we find our spirit guides. The Right just likes to spin it that way because it's easier than trying to tackle the actual, more reasonable message. You remember the line about "seeing" that Cameron drove into our heads with all the subtlety of an Irishman pounding in a railroad spike?* Maybe he was so blatant about it because that was the real message. Jake couldn't be anything to the tribe until he learned to cast aside his old preconceptions and see the world with new eyes.

A bit corny, perhaps. But eight years into the "war on terror," and our elected officials still seem unable to articulate why the terrorists want to do us harm. To the detriment of both our military efforts and the greater peace, we insist on treating Al Qaeda not just as evil,** but as moustache-twirling cartoon villains. The message is simple, maybe even simplistic, but it's relevant, and we would do well to heed it.

Yes, underneath the blue, tattooed skin of Avatar lies a blunt morality tale about respect for other cultures, the perils of technological exuberance, and the merits of a simple, peaceful life. Oh, and not invading foreign lands to secure their mineral wealth. In that way, Avatar is a litmus test of sorts. If you think the basic premise of the United States as benevolent dictator to the world is a wonderful one -- and I've always gotten the impression that Brooks does -- then I can see why you might have a problem with Avatar.

For others, for those who can see the ugliness of America's recent past, maybe a movie where we can root for the demise of that ugliness could be a small step toward recommitting to the ideals we still hope to uphold.

And for the rest of us, omigod this 3D stuff is awesome!



Afterthought: Brooks closes with the deep-sounding thought, "benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind." As condescending perhaps, but less dangerous. When America adopted the attitude that Native Americans needed our religion, our political structures, our writing, we sent federal agents to take their children, uproot them from their homes, taught our ways, and forbidden to speak their own language. When Americans adopted the attitude that we needed their culture, we sent a small army of hippies out to ask for wise words and maybe a hit of peyote.



* What? Too soon?

** Which it is, of course. But I shouldn't have to go on the record and say that, yes, it's evil to try and blow up a plane full of civilians, or to crash a plane into a tower full of people. Really, some right wingers don't seem to grasp the idea that we all hate terrorism.

Jason Chaffetz is an inspiration

Well, he's an inspiration to me. He's constantly inspiring me to blog, and that counts for something.

Here's his speech from the floor of the House yesterday:

Mr. Speaker, I rise with deep concern about families of United States of America. The economics of this credit card congress are not working. Where are the jobs?
You cannot tax and spend our way out of our challenges. I fervently believe that President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and the Democrats in Congress are taxing, spending, and borrowing too much money.

This credit card congress has now put us nearly twelve trillion dollars in debt. We're spending nearly 600 [million? billion? it sounds like he said "billion", though that makes no sense] dollars per day, just in interest on that debt. Bailouts, stimulus money by the billions it is not helping the average person at home.

And now we have a proposal to slam through a government run, Chinese-financed health care system, that puts a Washington D.C. politician between our doctor and my wife.

The tax and spend, credit card driven, Chinese-financed economics driven by the Democrats don't work. We need fiscal discipline, limited government, accountability, and a strong national defense.

We need to restore liberty to the American people and small business men and women. That's where you'll find the jobs. Stand up, America, let your voice be heard, put a stop to this credit card congress.

He was proud enough of this performance that he pointed to it on Twitter. He really shouldn't have been, because the whole speech sounds like he's attempting some sort of Republican Buzzword Bingo record, a bunch of half-baked ideas delivered auctioneer-style.

But let's focus on the substance of his comments.

First up, his deep concern for the families of the United States. Where is the concern for the families without health insurance? Or for those who have seen their premiums skyrocket? Does Chaffetz have any ideas for dealing with these?

We need fiscal discipline, limited government, accountability, and a strong national defense.

It's the only idea he's got.

The accusation that the bank bailout hasn't helped ordinary Americans seems fairly accurate to me. If the goal was to keep credit available, I think there were better ways to do it. But despite the fact that lots of fat, rich bastards got fatter, richer, and bastardier from the bailout, it did keep us from plunging off an economic abyss of George Bush's making, which was good for everybody.

But the stimulus bill is a completely different and far superior animal, and by lumping the two together, Chaffetz shows either his ideological myopia, or an actual intent to deceive. You can't talk about the stimulus package solely as money spent, or money added to the national debt. You have to go line by line, project by project, and ask if the thing we're spending the money on is a good investment. By and large, Republican attempts to show the waste and pork in these projects have left me unconvinced.

But even if the stimulus spending was wasted, it has still created jobs, and will continue to create more. Elsewhere, Chaffetz has argued that the price per job is too high. Well, we could have slashed those numbers by just giving people $30K a year, plus $30 for a shovel to lean on. But in order for those jobs to actually be investments in the future, those workers need equipment to run, material to move, concrete to pour, etc. Those things tend to drive the cost up.

The Republicans in general have been very dishonest in their handling of the stimulus jobs numbers, and Chaffetz has happily cited these arguments. Their argument essentially boils down to, "The stimulus is supposed to create jobs, yet unemployment keeps rising. The stimulus is therefore a failure." Which is akin to tapping lightly on the brakes (the stimulus was, by Paul Krugman's estimation, far too small), then saying that your brakes are out because you're still moving forward. Things would look much bleaker right now without the stimulus bill.

The "Chinese-financed" meme is making a mountain out of a molehill. China owns about $1T in U.S. debt, which isn't exactly a good thing, but that's only 1/12th of the outstanding debt. The Chinese are just a useful bogeyman for Chaffetz to invoke. Boo!

The debt presents a serious long-term problem. But Chaffetz wants to tackle it in the middle of a recession, which is a horrible idea for the same reason that raising taxes in a recession is a horrible idea. Government spending -- whether Chaffetz likes it or not -- is an important part of the economy. If that sector contracts suddenly, people lose their jobs, businesses with government contracts scale back or go out of business, and suffering ensues. Whereas if government increases its spending, these businesses flourish, which provides a buffer against economic downturns. That's Keynesian economics in a nutshell.

Government should be ratcheting up the debt right now, and tackling the debt problem when the economy is good. Clinton did that, lowering the deficit during good years. Bush did the opposite, piling up a mountain of debt when the economy was doing okay, mostly to pay for tax cuts for the rich and a war that should never have been fought.

Health care is an investment, just like the stimulus package was an investment. We should have been making these investments when the economy was doing okay. But we're stuck with the present. The investments we make in health care now are going to reap long term rewards. The bill isn't perfect by any means, but it will give us a healthier, more productive population, lower health care costs, more competition in the insurance market, and hopefully a greater focus on preventative care. Plus, when everyone has insurance, fewer people will rely on expensive emergency room visits for their health insurance needs, driving down costs for everybody.

This plan is characterized as a government takeover of health care, but it should really be talked about as a takeover of the health insurance industry. Lots of people like their doctors (Chaffetz doesn't seem to want anyone standing between his doctor and his wife, so he must be really fond of his doctor). But who has nostalgic feelings about their family HMO?

Health insurance is a market that cries out for government takeover like no other. Insurance companies compete not just on price and services, but on selecting the healthiest populations, by excluding the people who need it most, and by denying claims, regardless of whether the procedures were medically justified. In short, the free market demands that health insurance companies be very bad at what they are supposed to do: spread risk.*

Chaffetz believes -- ignoring the evidence of the last eight years -- that the government is invariably worse at choosing wise investments than the private sector. Chaffetz also fears that a "D.C. politician" will stand between his family and health care, even though his plan probably wouldn't change. Yet he cares not a whit that, for forty-five million Americans, what stands between them and the health care they need is a hospital security officer with a tazer.

He's a bit of a tool, is what I'm saying.



* Note: This is one reason why the public option shouldn't have to compete on an equal footing with private sector plans. I want a public plan that would be required to take all comers, and that would pay for medically justifiable procedures without trying to weasel out of its obligations. That puts it at a huge disadvantage in competition with private insurers.