Conservatives to shaft the religious right?

(Cross-posted at Galloping Beaver)

The Globe & Mail reports on the growing number of Conservatives who are getting headaches over the prospect of bringing back same-sex marriage for a vote in the House.

Like all those nervous Tories quoted in the piece, I hope, really hope, that the issue just goes away. But the reason Harper and his MPs are have gotten so sketchy on fulfilling this particular campaign promise is that, if C-38 does get reopened, they lose. From the Hill Times:

A few weeks ago, the [Defend Marriage] coalition took part in a multi-group lobby day on the Hill, in which interest groups, including lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry, a firefighter's union and an environmental group, rented rooms for visiting Senators and MPs. The Defend Marriage Coalition "had one of the biggest rooms on the Hill, but was the most sparsely attended," The Lobby Monitor reported last week.

...Lining up against the Defend Marriage Coalition is Canadians for Equal Marriage, and according to its research, it says it currently has a majority of support in the Commons.

"Our numbers show that this motion is going to be defeated if it happens in this Parliament," Laurie Arron, national coordinator of Canadians for Equal Marriage, said in an interview. He said that their research shows that 158 are in favour of same-sex marriage, 137 are against, and 12 are undecided. "If you add 12 to 137, you get 149. It still gets defeated," he said.


Marriagevote.ca also finds enough support to keep C-38.

As well, two polls in the last six months by Environics Research found about 66 per cent of Canadians considered the issue settled and/or did not want to see the Tories re-open the same-sex marriage debate. Only 2% of voters identified it in a CBC/Radio-Canada poll before the election as their most pressing concern. Depending on wording, slim to sizable pluralities of Canadians have generally supported gay marriage over the past decade, and the support is concentrated among the young. As in the U.S., the trends are bad for anti same-sex marriage advocates.


This, from the G&M is also kind of nice:

...During the last Commons vote on the issue a year ago, only three Conservative MPs voted in favour of same-sex marriage: Jim Prentice (now Indian Affairs minister), James Moore and Gerald Keddy.

Mr. Keddy said his caucus colleagues should take him as example of what happens when you support gay rights: absolutely nothing.

His Nova Scotia riding is predominantly rural and socially conservative, but he was re-elected with a bigger majority.

“Now, people have moved on, it's just not an issue. It is for a very small minority of people,” Mr. Keddy said.


My take (feel free to disagree) is that Harper can't win by reopening the debate. Voters will dislike it. If he wins his free vote, it's a national embarrassment out of step with popular opinion and gives the Libs (surely all the leadership candidates will support keeping C-38) a made-to-order campaign issue next election. But in fact he's almost sure to lose the vote and to get trashed in the press as a demagogue in the process. And it's not like losing is going to make these freaks give up the battle and go home either, or make them into stronger Conservatives than they are. No wonder the Tory caucus is mumbling and shuffling its feet.

Tom Vilsack should stop talking to Al From.

From Jeffrey Goldberg's latest New Yorker whither-the-Dems piece:

Though Vilsack is no optimist on Iraq, he still puts himself on the more conservative side of the Democratic spectrum. “I don’t think the face of the Democratic Party is Nancy Pelosi,” he said pointedly. When we discussed why there had been no domestic terrorist attacks since September 11th, he even echoed Bush’s argument that fighting jihadists in the Middle East is preferable to fighting them in America: “We have a hundred and thirty-two thousand Americans in a country where they have a lot easier shot at hitting us than they have here. It’s a lot easier to attack us in Iraq and Afghanistan, since they’re a lot closer.”


I'm not sure that Vilsack is really trying to repeat Bush's "fight them over there" argument with that statement. If that's really what he's saying, though, then he's exactly the sort of hopeless dilletante that being from Iowa isn't going to fix. Just imagine how that sort of our-soldiers-are-human-shields-for-suburban-soccor-moms quote would go down during a national campaign in 2008.

Closer to home, though, the face of the Dems is Nancy Pelosi. And Vilsack's nervous calling-out of a controversial party House leader absolutely reeks. I'd hoped that Vilsack would help move the DLC away from this sort of thing. Guess not.

Shake Hands with the Devil... the movie?

So they're making Shake Hands with the Devil -- which, in addition to being a very dense book and also the title of a documentary on Daillaire's 2004 return to Rwanda -- into a movie.

I'm intrigued. The interesting thing about Hotel Rwanda, in which a fictional (but rather un-Canadian) Dallaire also appears, is that there was almost no violence, or at least no gore. I wonder if the film adaption of Shake Hands will follow a similar course? Dallaire himself doesn't actually witness a lot of killing first-hand, even as he and the UN forces drive around Kigali and continuously force their through the Hutu roadblocks where people are being stopped and massacred. It'll be interesting to see.

From the annals of embarrassing rightwing governments.

Like Canada's for instance. Dana brings attention to Tory defence minister Gordon O'Connor's intervention to stop the Royal Military College of Canada from awarding an honorary degree to retired General Zinni. Get this:

Mr. Cowan confirmed that Mr. O'Connor, who as Defence Minister is also chancellor of the college, made the decision not to confer the degree on the retired Marine Corps general.

"The Minister was concerned that doing this would appear to be taking sides in a domestic political dispute in the United States," he said.


Um, how about just staying the fuck out of internal College decisions? From the RMC webpage Dana linked to, here's the relevant section of the Board of Governors page:

Formed in 1997, the RMC Board of Governors provides advice and recommendations to the Minister of National Defence concerning all matters related to the Royal Military College. It also works at improving lines of communication with both College alumni and the community in order to enhance resources for the operation of the College, as well as ensuring that Officer Professional Military Education remains at the forefront of policy....Members of the Board are prominent Canadians, the majority of whom are non-military, appointed by the Minister, who is also the Chancellor of the College. Hence, the Board is an important source of external advice for the Minister on all matters pertaining to the professional education of Canadian Forces Officers. The Chairman of the Board reports directly to the Minister.

The Board is a governance body, separate from the College, to ensure that officer professional military education is sustained in the long-term.


There's nothing in there that I can see to suggest that the Minister should be interfering in or reversing decisions about who gets honorary degrees; certainly not that failing to do so would constitute "taking sides" in a dispute. Zinni getting the degree wouldn't even have made headlines in the States most likely. And why bother sucking up to Bush and Rumsfeld so blatantly anyway? It's a lame duck administration. They're not even popular in their own country, let alone in Canada.

Meanwhile, a subject on which the Harper Conservatives really are likely to do serious damage rather than just behave embarrassingly is crime. Although they've already been linked all over the place, The Rev at the Woodshed, Alison at Creekside and Jacob at his eponymous blog (all via Dave, natch) all have indespensible posts up on the subject.

Gregg Easterbrook and the problem with neoliberalism.

Andrew Sullivan, who hasn't actually seen An Inconvenient Truth says that Gregg Easterbrook has "the best" review of it.

Since I haven't seen the movie either -- and haven't been blessed with the sort of ESP that Jacob Weisberg uses to decipher the political calculation behind Hillary Clinton's iPod lineup -- I don't actually know if Easterbrook's tangential complaint that it too much like a campaign commercial is accurate or not. But I do think Easterbrook's column, taken as a whole, displays a lot of the problems inherent to neoliberal punditry.

Central to the neoliberal worldview is the belief in human rationality, and the assumption that everyone, at some level, and including your political enemies, is rational and therefore deserves a hearing. There's also huge emphasis on the individual and the world, the individual's ability to reason, to accept responsibility, to specifically choose to be part of the community while standing distinct from the mob (or, as the case may be, the interest group.) The belief that we can work through our problems using the power of our secular technology, by harnessing progress, by the whiring of our beautiful minds, is fundamentally hopeful, profoundly elegant even, and maybe even broadly accurate. But it requires first and foremost the banishment of demagoguery, which is incompatable with the rationality of the cutting-edge modern man we want to encourage.

And then that beautiful worldview runs smack into politics, which, in the US, comprises largely the desires, demands, and obsessions of two broad coalitions of loosely alligned interest groups who compete against each other every two years and whose members must be kept in a party's fold over the course of interminable election cycles, then turned out regularly at the polls. To lose a part of the coalition is basically to lose an election for the whole coalition. Plus, there's the famous "swing contingent" of people who actually believe things like that presidents directly influence the price of gas or the number of days we can expect before the apocolypse in whatever form you believe it's going to take. It's not just that voters aren't rational, it's that when they are rational, it's usually in terms of promoting a fairly narrow set of policy goals that yield direct payoffs to their closest interest group. Those goals vary enormously and in meeting them all, politicians sometimes are thematically ineloquent or a bit intellectually dishonest.

Neoliberals have a lot of trouble dealing with this discrepency between Rational Man and the Political Animal. Take Joe Klein's new book, which is -- from my reading -- mainly a lament about how most people don't share his exact views on everything. Or, more accurately, it's a lament that people problably do share his views... they must share them, because Klein so damn rational, so modern, so centrist, so jolly, yet so demanding of excellence in our leaders. But fucking Democrats and fucking Bob Shrum (who fucking refused to be interviewed!) just don't seem to get it. That's partly because the same discrepency invariably turns neoliberal politicians (like, say, Al Gore) who would move us beyond the old liberalism of self-interested interest-groups into regular politicians who give those groups exactly what they want in order to keep them in line and turn them out on election day.

This is the ultimate fall from grace, and it only ups the bitterness of the neoliberal pundit. Klein's optimism is perpetually thwarted by the people he wishes he could idolize. That thwarting, repeated enough times, can turn Neoliberal Man into a cynical crypto-conservative like Mickey Kaus, or into a self-impressed perpetual yearner like Klein. It creates world-weariness by the bucketload. But it also provides an easy intellectual out: the disgrace of modern politics isn't the failure of Rational Man; it's the failure of the irrational, pandering politician to reach Rational Man! In this way, politicians haven't changed much since Washington Monthly put out its first issue*. But neoliberal pundits' political analysis has become increasingly detached from reality.

Easterbrook is an especially sad example. Unlike a lot of people I admire in the blogosphere, I often enjoy Easterbrook's policy work (though that may because I don't know enough about his subjects -- environmentalism, livability, technology and space issues -- to challenge.) But it doesn't bother me like it does Atrios that Easterbrook is sympathetic to ID, or at least it doesn't make him irrelevent on the other subjects he writes about. It doesn't bother me that only now, after years of following the science, he's decided to accept the liberal case on climate change. Informed skepticism is mainly a good thing, and Easterbrook's optimism about finding policy solutions to climate change -- based on earlier environmental policy successes -- is comforting.

From my perspective, the problem with Easterbrook is that he doesn't, as far as I can tell, understand a goddamn thing about politics. On the subject, he's a pure pollyanna and he writes like a churl. His view on campaigning is invariably that liberal politicians are not optimistic enough, and don't appeal to our sense of pride in all the progress we've made, that they instead try (and fail, fail!) to make us angry and irrational. He searches still for that enlightened perfectability in his own side, and despairs still of finding only demagoguery and various forms of crassness.

And partisanship. If man is rational, the other side can't be all wrong. And yet certain unenlightened people would still, in our modern world with its falling rates of violence, seem to think it is! In An Inconvenient Truth, for instance, Gore insinuates all sorts of things about anti-science rightwingers, but doesn't attack Hollywood liberals for their conspicuous consumption! He doesn't propose the sort of concrete but demanding solutions that he tragically fails to recognise in an electorate hungry to make sacrifices, so long as they understand that their would-be leaders are as enlightened and rational as they are. (The last time Gore proposed a carbon tax against the wails of Democratic strategists his party went on to lose the Congress for the first time in 50 years.)

But Gore's biggest "moral flaw" is simply that he doesn't acknowledge the good in technology, how far it's brought us, how wondeful modern life is! He completely underplays the legitimate view -- voiced recently by lots of conservatives -- that we should be thankful for the fruits of carbon-based industrialism, not denigrate them. This might seem like a strange criticism to make of an Atari Democrat. And various people have pointed out the irony (and fatuity) of Easterbrook's coming around on climate change on the same day he trashes the latest effort of a fellow neolib who has been arguing the case for years. But that misses the essential neoliberal dilemma. The science might be right, but the politics is always wrong. And so long as the politics is wrong, the best -- a nebulous concept for sure -- remains unattainable.

Of course, after so many years of disappointment, Easterbrook hardly expects any better. He looks on the political world in sorrow rather than anger. Rational man finds no outlets here for joy. Political animal always raises its angry, demagogic, partisan head. The Dems will never defeat their interest groups. They're always focused on getting themselves elected -- Easterbrook just wishes Guggenheim and Gore would be a little more honest about it. In the process, neoliberal pundits will forever be disappointed. Faced with this great tragedy, the messy issues about how voters actually think about dealing with global warming, or why certain conservative groups want them to think a different way from how Gore and his allies do, or, you know, who actually wins elections -- are relatively minor details.


* The Washington Monthly itself, in my opinion, suffers from some of these problems in some of its articles. But it's still a really fine magazine. And many individual neoliberal writers are still really excellent.


Update: Media Matters actually has a pretty devastating attack on Easterbrook's hisotry of writing about global warming.

Litter as strawman?

Brad Plumer has a fascinating post up about litter as cultural-political phenomenon:

I've never known anyone who was objectively pro-litter. Litter's awful. It's disgusting. We're all agreed. But it seems that the nationwide anti-litter campaign, which began in the 1950s, was a bit less pure in its origins. According to Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, the entire anti-litter movement was initiated by a consortium of industry groups who wanted to divert the nation's attention away from even more radical legislation to control the amount of waste these companies were putting out. It's a good story worth retelling.

...In 1953, the packaging industry—led by American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company, inventors of the one-way can and bottle, respectively—joined up with other industry leaders, including Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Company to form Keep America Beautiful (KAB), which still exists today. KAB was well-funded and started a massive media campaign to rail against bad environmental habits on the part of individuals rather than businesses. And that meant cracking down on litter. Within the first few years, KAB had statewide antilitter campaigns planned or running in thirty-two states.

In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America's garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the "litterbug" became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, "littering" is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn't realize what was happening until years later.


Nobody compares to Brad at making me think about issues in totally unintuitive ways, and I certainly don't dispute the point. But isn't industry's anti-litter campaign also sort of compatable with the mid-century heyday of welfare capitalism? I've always thought of littering as the ultimate statement of social nihilism -- a spooky, sort of passive-aggressive unwillingness to endure any personal inconvenience at all in deference to the public interest. Littering is the sort of thing my classmates in junior high school did to rebel against all those dumb Woodsy Owl movies we'd had to watch in elementary school. (The littering and the endless casual gay-bashing are actually the two things I remember most about the junior high zeitgeist.) Now it's something we strongly associate not so much with poverty per se as with economic hopelessness, estrangement from the economic community. In my privileged world it was something most of us -- and all people you'd want to spend time with -- simply grew out of. And that the community, of which employers and merchants were part, encouraged us to grow out of...more or less as part of joining the responsible adult community.

Business-based public-interest campaigns and demands on individuals on behalf of the community still exist, and may even be coming back in different forms. But Keep America Beautiful sounds pretty anacronistic. There may have been a dark underbelly (there always is. Think of how ominous "ask what you can do for your country" sounds now coming just a few years before the ramp-up to Vietnam). On the other hand, aren't appeals to the greater interest more likely to eminate from a business community whose employer practices reflect, and are expected to reflect, some kind of economic solidarity? And isn't a community that flat-out rejects paternalistic gestures from business as cynical more likely to reject them from government as well? That includes things like packaging laws that even the most socially interested commercial goods industry is unlikely to provide for itself. I expect there's more than a straight substitution effect at work here. Brad points out how much more effective Finland's refillable bottle laws are at reducing waste. I couldn't find a good source on Finnish litter laws (just that littering is subject to a 50 Euro fine under Finland's Waste Act), but I would guess that they're pretty strong too.

Bullderized.

I know I'm harping here but, frankly, Marshall Wittman's latest post is strange even by his standards. The idea is that Tony Blair is a real progressive and, well, Harold Meyerson is an asshole. My question though is whether Bull Moose reads anything other than Blueprint? If he did, he might be able to distinguish Blair's campaign speech of an essay from serious analysis... or serious news. Wittman writes:

[Blair] realizes that it would be disastrous to abandon Iraq to the tender mercies of Zarqawi. Moreover, the British PM deeply understands that this is now the central battleground in the fight against the Jihadists - if we lose our will, we will reap the whirlwind for many decades to come.


But the news just a couple of days ago was full of reports that:

Tony Blair will use the restoration of a democratic government in Iraq to activate a pull-out programme that could see UK troops start to withdraw within weeks.

Although Iraq remains convulsed by violence and under constant threat of civil war, Blair and US President George Bush will this week thrash out the final details of their plan to leave Iraq.

And:

British officials said they expected all foreign combat troops to withdraw from Iraq within four years, as Prime Minister Tony Blair flew into Baghdad to show support to its new government on Monday.

It was the firmest statement yet from one of the two main allies in the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein on a date for pulling out troops from Iraq. Washington has said it is too soon to discuss such a timetable.


I'm not saying the news of Britian's impending formalized withdrawal from Iraq -- exactly what many liberals to Blair's left are calling for -- can't be reconciled with Blair's Blueprint essay, but you think Wittman would at least address the issue before swinging into attack mode:

The Moose makes a distinction between "left" and "progressive." Indeed, in this fight against radical Jihadism, some conservatives promote progressive international objectives while some liberals would capitulate to reaction most foul. And this is a moment of unusual bedfellows. When it comes to national security policy, the American Prospect and the American Conservative are kissing cousins.

The Moose suggests that Old Robert Taft could identify more with these Democratic lefties than could Harry Truman.


Truman I don't know. But if the Moose would have stifled his incohate rage for a few minutes to read the Tomasky piece at the top of the page he links to at TAP, he'd see this:

The answer to the above question about whether the Iraq War belongs to the tradition of Cold War liberalism is a reverberating, ear-splitting “no.” The ’48ers, according to Beinart’s own argument, were masters of restraint. They would never have endorsed a unilateral and “preventive” war like the current one. They fought conservatives advocating “rollback” then (precursors to today’s neoconservatives); and, as of early 2003, two of them, Schlesinger and George F. Kennan, were still around to tell us that they opposed an invasion of Iraq.


For what it's worth, I just recently sat down and read The Vital Center and was going to blog on something similar. Like Tomasky says, Schlesinger explicitly argues in it against escalating the Cold War. His essential point is that liberalism ought to be confident enough in itself (without being overconfident in humanity in general) to believe that simply containing the totalitarian world and engaging in the diplomatic and humantarian arenas with marginal states that might be tempted by its embrace will be enough to eventually prevail in the battle of ideologies.

Moreover, as Tomasky notes, the "doughfaces" actually were, in many cases, members of the Amerian Communist Party, or at least overt communist sympathisers in the face of all the evidence of Stalin's Terror and even the ugliness an violence of Lenin's politics. Schlesinger harped on this fact. In The Vital Center, he specifically grounds the danger of communism to liberalism in the fact that it claims much of the same agenda and many of the same goals. Mainly that's economic and social egalitarianism and the fair return for labour services provided. But communism also espoused modern attitudes toward gender and race shared by many liberals, as well as the rejection of formal religion. The latter three are absolutely antithetical to radical Islam; the first two are only a secondary concern, not the driving force of the various Islamist movements that they were for communism. There's just no reason to fear that the appeal of jihadism as a philosophy will undermine a lazy liberalism. None at all.

I don't agree with the entirety of Tomasky's article. But nobody could possibly embody his basic point -- that, in the absense of any real doughfaces, the would-be neo-Schlesingers like Peter Beinart had to invent them out of serious liberals just slightly more skeptical about the use of force in the world -- better than Wittman. Wittman's analogies (not just in this post) are totally specious. There is no American Jihadi Party today. No serious voices on the left are defending Sharia law or the political tactics of radical Islam or actually hope to see it spread. (Or, for that matter -- though Wittman makes no apparent distinction -- Baathism.) In this debate, the questions whose answers TAP and TNR liberals differ over are far more practical than ideological. And, in a practical sense, the doves were apparently right with regard to Iraq. It follows, Tomasky and his colleagues say, that they should be listened to with regard to Iran and other future conflicts in the "War on Terror".

Wittman will never engage with arguments like these, or with Tomasky who, by all appearances, knows a hell of a lot more about the world than Wittman ever will. He bridles with outrage at a bit of Harold Meyerson snark, and dismisses the TAP brand of liberalism as a new form of doughface, both dangerous to and antithetical to "real" progressivism. This is grandiose and ignorant. The DLC embarrasses itself by continue to associate with his brand of non-argument.

Who's the lewdest of them all?

Just a short month ago, Ezra was saying over at TAPPED:

Can I just say, as a twenty-something male, that I'm quite pleased with TNR's transformation under the leadership of Frank Foer? Last week, not only did I have a piece in the magazine, but the cover featured an Anna Nicole Smith nipple slip. This week, we get a stylized Paris Hilton look alike. Counterintuitive wonkery never looked so good. Except at The American Prospect, of course, which you should subscribe to lest you miss our upcoming "Men Of The Economic Left" cheesecake calendar. I hear we're going to make Fast Leon don a thong...


Well, maybe not a cheesecake calender, but I'm happy to see TAP escalating the lewd cover art conflict. More sex please, we're liberals.


Update: The accompanying cover story makes all the obvious, and not so obvious, points about Republicanism, Bush and the cult of masculinity. One point about the flight suit routine, though: the Bushies have been thoroughly criticized for the incident because it was (a) hopelessly silly, (b) disrespectful to those who wear flight suits for a reason and (c) totally manufactured -- and the stunt-nature of the stunt then the lied about copiously. Also, I think, because only a man of Bush's basic incuriosity could even pull it off -- you'd have to decentextualize completely. Even a hint of effeminate irony would have been deadly... which if fine if what you want in a commander in chief is a Big Dumb Animal...

...And that's the point that I rarely see made: the whole incident was actually pretty gut-level revolting. Bush just doesn't make a good Big Dumb Animal, even if that's what you're after. He's a fifty five year old man, a fifty-five year old conservative man. Worse, he was the supposed answer to Clinton-era loose ways, and one reason that selling-point worked was because Bush (like most politicians and all Republicans) was completely sexless. Even had I voted for Bush, the last thing I'd ever want to ask myself about him is "how many inches!?", which is the exact question posed by those flight suit pictures. Chris Matthews, I think it was, said something about how Bush just won over every woman in America with his... size. No. No. A million times no. Good God, no.

Odd man out.

Interesting: from Political Wire, the five highest approval-rated senators are either Ds in red states or Rs in blue states. The five lowest rated are just the opposite... except for Rick Santorum.

Horses.

...So very fragile for such big animals.

Schlock season.

At the Talking Points Memo/TPMCafe blog complex, everyone was complaining yesterday, and rightly so, about the latest dumbass bit of political "observation" in the New York Times. Mark Leibovich's Week in Review piece is another one of those articles in which a reporter pulls some stock Washington theme -- say, Nancy Pelosi is shrill! or, in this case, failed Democratic nominees get stigmatized! -- out of his back pocket and then calls around to a bunch of DC insiders to make their familiar points about the familiar theme. Because it's about politicians rather than celebrities, it passes as news.

Still, reading the piece, I wonder how possible it would be for a smart political operation to totally offset this sort of article by crowding out the reporter's lazy storyline with irresitable quotes in praise of the target. During the 2004 campaign, the very smart Ryan Lizza wrote an article complementing the Kerry campaign's ability to separate the national and local press storylines without the populism-averse national press ever realizing it. Yet it's the Kerry people who provide the saddest evidence of how difficult it is to control the flow of these insider perspective pieces:

"The bitterness towards Kerry is much greater from the chattering classes in Washington," said Michael D. McCurry, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry during his 2004 presidential campaign. Mr. McCurry posits the example of his father, a Democratic activist in South Carolina, who still admires Mr. Kerry and resents the ridicule that's been heaped on him by onetime loyalists. Mr. Kerry's current staff is quick to share news of the large turnouts and ebullient receptions the senator is getting as he travels the country, exploring another run in 2008.


Basically, when the protestations of an army of aides can be mushed into "Mr. Kerry's current staff say he's still cool", you've lost the the deflection battle. Maybe what a successful politician needs to do is cultivate his own roster of Eccentric Quotable Hacks: James Carville or Marshall Wittman or even Chris Lehane-style quote machines whose verbal filibusters must, by press corps law, be quoted at length in articles like this. (Would Leibovich paraphrase a Lehane yarn about his southern-fried pap's political views?) Isn't that a large part of the secret of Bill Clinton's success since he left office and became the stuff of retrospective rather than of news?

But it's not that simple either. In the quest to be Instantly Quotable, hacks can discredit themselves as well as their candidates. (Lehane's "man of sabotage" routine may have brought him close to that point. And Wittman's support could conceivably be toxic in a primary). For instance, leaving the spinning to Susan Estrich rather than cultivating a roster of more respectable and instantly recognizable flacks early in the game strikes me as a rather serious risk on Hillary Clinton's part. Anyway, Estrich is far too silly to influence the anti-HRC direction of Horowitz' piece.

Back with Leibovich and the eternal damnation of the failed nominee, the usually estimable Elaine Kamarck barely fills a paragraph on behalf of Gore:

"I've always been puzzled by all the hostility to Gore, especially after he was essentially robbed of the election," said Elaine Kamarck, a longtime aide to Mr. Gore who is now a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Gore's experience should be a plus, not a stigma, she says.


In Kamarck's defence, she's probably still exhausted from her valiant -- if ultimately unsuccessful -- effort to fill up the 2000 election chapter of Joe Klein's latest novel with printable tidbits her old boss would like. Still, my sense is that -- with a few exceptions -- the Gore people have collectively always been worse than the Kerry people at pushing articles like this one in helpful directions. What a candidate needs is not one but an army of Kamarcks, who manage to blend loyalty with respectability and can hog column inches like nobody's business. And yes, of course I'm totally being flippant here. And possibly I misunderstand the process fundamentally. And possibly we all, not least myself, overstate the importance of the press' background noise -- raise it from the level of annoyance to the level of threat. But good God I'd love to see a candidate operation that could turn Leibovich into its bitch.

The problem with Bush the moderate.

There's something rather man-bites-dog about the WaPo's headline: Bush Is Losing Hispanics' Support, Polls Show; Surveys Find the Immigration Debate Is Also Alienating White Conservatives. But, for me, this graf really gets at the heart of the problem:

A survey of 800 registered Hispanic voters conducted May 11-15 by the nonpartisan Latino Coalition showed that Democrats were viewed as better able to handle immigration issues than Republicans, by nearly 3 to 1: 50 percent to 17 percent. Pitting the Democrats against Bush on immigration issues produced a 2 to 1 Democratic advantage, 45 percent to 22 percent.

By formally staking out a (genuinely I think, except for a few showy details, like the National Guard border deployment) moderate position on border security and immigration, and chiding far-right xenophobia on the subject, Bush may have improved his overall poll position a little bit from the previous week. He reminded Andrew Sullivan of the Bush he thought we were getting in 2001. Steve Soto genuinely approved of Bush's speech. According to a recent survey, majorities of Americans share his basic take on the issue.

And -- not surprisingly -- that's reflected in Bush's numbers among Hispanics, who prefer him to his party and who, regardless of which 2004 exit poll result you believe -- have been trending strongly Republican since the 1996 election. But while, on this issue at least, Bush deserves his margin, he's still tied in popular opinion to his nutso party. Just like Clinton being a "third way" Democrat didn't change the fact that he was irreparably tied to the party of liberals and its values among voters who dislike liberal values, Bush is tied to the wackiness of the GOP coalition. The big difference is that the Bush White House has done absolutely nothing over the past 6 years to challenge his base's assumptions in a serious way -- which probably explains why the GOP base and blogs have reacted with such venum to the perceived condescension of Bush's recent centrist chidings.

That's the essential problem for the GOP. Whatever Glenn Reynolds and the rightwing blogs say, the Democratic activist base is pretty damn moderate today on policy, even those who don't like the Clintons personally. The base-popular politicians in the Democratic Party -- Russ Feingold, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Wes Clark -- are all essentially policy moderates. The GOP activists, by contrast, aren't moderate at all. And neither are the pols. High-ranking elected Republicans still say that cutting taxes raises public revenue; that hiring illegal immigrants is morally equivalent to slavery; that constitutionally outlawing gay marriage (always in election years) would do something to solve the nation's moral problems. That's not to say that the less-informed non-activist parts of the GOP coalition (who, for instance, seem to favour Giuliani, or at least McCain, for the 2008 nomination) aren't relatively moderate. But the activists want their Mexican border fence and mass deportations, their excalating war with the Jihadis, their constitutional ban on gay marriage, and they want it all now. And hopefully, come 2007, they'll demand a politician who eschews Bush's weasle words and swears in no uncertain terms this time that he'll deliver it all to them.

Bush campaigned and won election in 2000 as a centrist, on the grounds that everybody in politics was a centrist, that being moderate was the only way to win, that bases were meant to be tamed. Granted that, as applied to Republicans, "moderate" essentially means favouring business interests over Buchananite conservative interests, with little relevance for the public interest. But even within those iffy constraints, the Bushies squandered their moderation, did nothing to discipline the GOP's worse instincts or prepare the base to deal with the reality of how politics was going to have to adjust to demographic trends, like the growth of the Hispanic population. And now a party in which Bush stands out as a moderate -- a failed one at that -- and whose white conservative base is completely used to being pandered to ideologically, is a party in deep shit. Starting, but probably not ending, with the Hispanic vote.

Marshall Wittman's head explodes.

I'm actually pretty shocked, but Joe Lieberman is in some serious trouble...

Update: I see Wittman is threatening to become Lieberman's Marty Peretz. I say: go ahead and cut that ad!

Department of corrections.

Regarding my post a few days ago about Roth IRAs, I suggested that the provision allowing wealthy earners in the US to convert their IRAs to Roth IRAs began in 2010, but that people could continue the conversions into the future, subject to the (fairly stringent) limits on Roth contributions.

That's incorrect, though in my defence, it seems to be what early press reports were suggesting -- for instance that the full conversion of regular IRAs into Roths wouldn't be complete until 2018.

David Cay Johnson reported today in the NYT that it's actually a one-shot deal, with no contribution limit:

Roth IRAs are now available only to couples making less than $160,000 and single people making less than $110,000. But in 2010 anyone, regardless of income, would be permitted to roll over unlimited sums from IRA's into a Roth.


As current IRA contribution limits keep going up under current law over the next four years, wealthy savers in the US should stuff them full so they can be rolled over into Roths in 2010. Johnson and the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation suggest that "By paying $1 in income taxes before the taxes are due, these investors may be able to avoid future taxes equivalent to $3.50." Since the $1 will come due in 2010, short-run treasury revenues will rise. The $3.50 cost will be felt over the long run -- to the tune of about $50 billion.

The only upside is that converting to Roths encourages people not to tap into the saving accounts prematurely, because the tax saving grows the longer interest accumulates inside the account. But there's a 10% early withdrawal fee on regular IRAs too.

In short: bad tax policy. But you already knew that.

Liberal leadership candidates on the Afghanistan free vote.

Update: The Toronto Star has a more complete tally of the Liberal hopefuls:

Scott Brison and Michael Ignatieff, two of the eight MPs who are candidates for the Liberal leadership, voted to extend the mission. The other six — Ken Dryden, Maurizio Bevilacqua, Stéphane Dion, Hedy Fry, Joe Volpe and Carolyn Bennett — voted against.

Earlier last night, former Ontario premier Bob Rae and former Ontario education minister Gerard Kennedy, who are also running for the Liberal leadership, told Canadian Press they'd have opposed the motion if they could have voted on it.

Interim Liberal Leader Bill Graham voted for the motion. Former prime minister Paul Martin was absent.


I haven't exactly been following the Liberal leadership race with an eagle eye, but the candidates' votes on "General Harper"'s snap House vote to extend the Afghanistan deployment for two years provides an important bit of information on the field. Kudos, I think, to Bill Graham for the decision to give his caucus a free vote on this one, particulary since Graham himself was a yes, the minority position among the Liberal MPs, and he's not an elected leader. In the end, the motion squeaked through, 149-145, against NDP and Bloc opposition, on the strength of 29 or 30 (depending on what report you read) Liberal votes.

Anyway, regarding the leadership candidates, Canada.com reports:

According to caucus members, some of the strongest interventions against the motion came from leadership hopefuls Stephane Dion and Joe Volpe.

Two of the three leadership hopefuls who do not hold seats in Parliament - former Ontario NDP premier Bob Rae and former Ontario education minister Gerard Kennedy - also said they'd have opposed the motion had they been able to vote on it.

...According to insiders, the strongest interventions at caucus in favour of the motion came from Quebec MP Raymonde Folco, Yukon MP Larry Bagnell and Senator Romeo Dallaire.

And from the Globe & Mail report:

Roughly 25 [other reports say 30] Liberals voted in favour of the motion, including such notables as Liberal Leader Bill Graham, and leadership hopefuls Scott Brison and Michael Ignateiff.


No word on how Bevilacqua or Bennett voted, though the odds are they were negatives. I'm also curious as to how Paul Martin voted -- I assume he was a yes. I'm embarrassed to say I don't know how to locate this sort of data for votes in Commons. I tried the Liberal and the Commons website to no avail, though maybe it's just too soon. Anybody know where to find the roll call?*


p.s. On a related topic, I stumbled on this great, sad take by blogger Red Tory on Afghanistan, Darfur and the military's change of heart since the Conservatives came to power (not to mention -- ok, hobbyhorse alert! -- the idealism we gave up in the last election.)


* From the newest Globe & Mail report, Ken Dryden was also a no. Martin wasn't in the House to vote.

Poor little Big Oil.

Iain Murray at The Corner hawks the climate change counteroffensive (emphasis mine):

Today Al Gore is jetting across the country to be at the Washington premiere of his movie warning about ManBearPig [South Park reference], erm no sorry, global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. With rather less of a budget, CEI held a press conference to announce the debut of two TV ads it has produced that seek to challenge the demonization of energy use and to demonstrate that there are plenty of scientific studies out there that are rather inconvenient to the alarmist agenda. There's a supporting web site too.


Really, it hardly seems fair, does it? I mean, how on earth is a little independent conservative thinktank going to compete with the all that Hollywood liberal money and influence in making its views understood? ThinkProgress has a few of the details:

Exxon documents reveal the company gave $270,000 to CEI in 2004 alone. $180,000 of that was earmarked for “global climate change and global climate change outreach.” Exxon has contributed over $1.6 million to CEI since 1998.


Technically, I suppose, it's still a smaller budget than what Mirimax is spending on An Inconvenient Truth. But, as Think Progress points out, it's not exactly because the money isn't there. Really, the blatancy of conservative moustache-twirling on climate issues is funny enough, but when pundits like Murray have to go further and try to pass off Big Oil's periodic panic attacks as some sort of plucky grassroots speaking truth to power the whole thing just reaches an unbelieable level of surreality.

It's part of the canon though. I remember back in 2004 when the Swift Vets were on the scene and the conservative blogs and print media couldn't stop throwing the word "independent" around and, moreover, insisting how the Swifties were tragically underfunded, swimming against the pro-Kerry MSM tide to air their ads with only the donations of average workin' joes who cared in their dim patriotic way about the national interest, just a bunch of underrepresented citizens trying to get the word out and restore their honour as vets. Jerome Corsi's Freeper past? Those ties to Texas GOP organizations? Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.

It seemed impossible then, but it worked. It worked because the right has no shortage of Hugh Hewitts who learned when young to suppress whatever part of the brain generates irony and just shout and shout and shout convenient absurdities. And still today, high-end Hugh Hewitts like Iain Murray will always intellectually embarrass themselves for the cause, reflexively even. Bullshit is a small price to pay for the health of the conservative movement, and the health of the movement is strongly tied to Exxon's profits.


Update: Wampum has more on poor plucky little CEI.

What's with Andorra?

This is interesting: people apparently live forever there. According to this 2002 SSA document (p.22), women's life expectancy is 86.5 years, the highest in Eureope. (Second among European countries is San Marino at 85.1 years, then Monaco at 83.1 years.) Among men, Andorra's life expectancy is 80.5 years (!) -- way ahead of second place San Marino at 77.6.

According to the CIA World FactBook, the comparable numbers for Canada currently are 76.9 years for men and 83.7 years for women.

It ain't because they're rich. Andorra is growing quickly, but its 2002 per-capita GDP -- $18,000 USD -- was just over half of San Marino's and 2/3 of Monaco's, and it's relatively low among the group of Western European nations. (The CIA World Factbook has it at $24,000 in 2004, which would put it in the middle of the pack of Western European nations.)

Is it that Andorrans don't have many kids? Andorra's depency ratio is apparently the lowest in Europe at 38.7 (for comparison, Germany's is 46.8 and the UK's is 53.3). Is there some sort of self-selection bias to living there? It's a tiny little country of 71,000 people.

It's also sort of an economic wild west. As in Monaco, there's no income tax and (unlike Monaco) a low payroll tax, and unemployment insurance and family allowances are apparently done on a case-by-case basis. And from the Factbook entry on Andorra's economy:

Tourism, the mainstay of Andorra's tiny, well-to-do economy, accounts for more than 80% of GDP. An estimated 11.6 million tourists visit annually, attracted by Andorra's duty-free status and by its summer and winter resorts. Andorra's comparative advantage has recently eroded as the economies of neighboring France and Spain have been opened up, providing broader availability of goods and lower tariffs. The banking sector, with its partial "tax haven" status, also contributes substantially to the economy. Agricultural production is limited - only 2% of the land is arable - and most food has to be imported. The principal livestock activity is sheep raising. Manufacturing output consists mainly of cigarettes, cigars, and furniture. Andorra is a member of the EU Customs Union and is treated as an EU member for trade in manufactured goods (no tariffs) and as a non-EU member for agricultural products.


Curious, curious stuff.


Update: Chris points out the obvious in comments: it's Andorra's traditional lack of industry (combined with everything else that makes people live long in southern Europe). Even among micro-states, San Marino has 42% of its labour force in industry, which probably accounts for much of the difference between the two in longevity.

Another tax strawman.

(Cross-posted at the Galloping Beaver.)

John McIntyre, railing against those who favour higher US taxes, says:

Why have the U.S. and Britain shown tremendous growth since Reagan and Thatcher while Continental Europe with their pseudo-socialism putters along with chronic double-digit unemployment? Go around the world these last 25 years and compare nations with high tax rates to countries with low tax rates, you'll find a pattern.


Absolutely you will. There is such thing as the equity-efficiency tradeoff, and it's at the heart of the democratic economic decision. I believe that Sweden pays for the high rate of social insurance it provides its citizens with some measure of long-run growth and economic dynamism. Making that tradeoff between growth and publicly guaranteed economic equality is something that majorities in Sweden have traditionally accepted and that majorities of Americans have rejected.

To further underscore McIntyre's point, from the Fraser Institute's latest TaxFacts, here are the major Western countries ranked by the share of their GDP that goes to taxes. With the possible exception of Mexico, the countries at the top of the list tend to be the fastest-growing, and those at the bottom are the most redistributive:

Mexico: 19%
Korea 25.3%
Japan 25.3%
United States: 25.6%
Switzerland: 29.5%
Ireland: 29.7%
Slovak Republic: 31.1%
Australia: 31.6%
Turkey: 32.8%
Canada: 33.8%
Poland: 34.2%
Spain: 34.9%
New Zealand: 34.9%
Germany: 35.5%
United Kingdom: 35.6%
Greece: 35.7%
Portugal: 37.1%
Czech Republic: 37.7%
Hungary: 38.5%
Netherlands: 38.8%
Iceland: 39.8%
Luxembourg: 41.3%
Austria: 43.1%
Italy: 43.1%
France: 43.4%
Norway: 43.4%
Finland: 44.8%
Belgium: 45.4%
Denmark: 48.3%
Sweden: 50.6%


The list also shows the big flaw in McIntyre's argument: the differences in growth and economic insurance take place over a massive range in national tax shares -- 30% of a country's GDP. But, for better or worse, very few North American liberals are actually advocating the kind of economic upheaval that would reroute 50% of GDP through the government. US liberals don't argue for the US to adopt overall tax rates comparable to those found in Sweden or even France. McIntyre's traget, Sabastian Mallaby, certainly doesn't. Few of the bloggers or pundits I read have Denmark in mind when they complain about tax giveaways to corporations or to the rich or to the amazing shelf-life of long-discredited supply side nostrums.

A more relevant way to approach the issue is to examine the sort of highly developed, low-union-density, limited-regulation, free-market economies that are actually comparable to the US... like Canada. From the list above, Canada and the UK (since McIntyre brought it up) have, respectively, gross tax rates of 8.2% and 10% higher than the current gross US rate. At least as between Canada and the US, the ratio has been fairly stable since 1994, though federal rates at least have fallen since then in both countries. From the US Department of Labor's statistics (Table 1), the US GDP per capita grew 24.0% between 1994 and 2004. Canada's grew by 25.9%. The UK's grew by 28.0%.

Raise the US tax take to Sweden's 51% share and I'm in full agreement that, in the long run, Americans will pay a massive price in terms of GDP growth and entrepreneurial dynamism. It's not something I would vote for. Raise the tax share to Canada's modest 34% or the UK's 35% -- rates that could wipe out the budget deficit and cover a pretty nice universal public health care plan to boot -- and the international evidence that the US would pay much of a price in terms of long-run growth gets a lot weaker. That's a risk I'd be willing to take.


Update: For the record, a commenter points out that Sweden's growth isn't too shabby -- and using the numbers from the same BoL table, Sweden has actually outgrown the US in % terms since 1994. So even if nobody is arguing for turning the US into Sweden, it's still not the best country to pick on right now. There's always France...

Indulging oneself with books.

Since finishing Lenin's Tomb recently, I couldn't be more excited about this.

Whack-a-Dem 2006: Nancy Pelosi.

When insider pundits decide they don't like a certain politician, it can get very rough. This year's victim of the press swarm seems increasingly to be Nancy Pelosi. First, there was this broadside from John Dickerson in Slate last week, his argument being that Pelosi is such a wild-eyed Bush hater (well, more accurately a pathetic panderer to wild-eyed Bush hatred) that she can't be trusted to speak in public for her own party's interests. Dickerson went so far as to assert, ludicrously, that one interview she gave to the Washington Post was so bad that "the GOP congressional majorities may now be secure." Huh?

Now -- once everyone has had time to suck in their breaths and raise their eyebrows -- we can see the conventional wisdom solifying nicely in the new Adam Nagourney piece that everyone is bitching about today. Pelosi, the crazy bitch, is all about payback:

Another worry [about Dems regaining power in Congress] is whether some Democrats would use their power in what could be perceived as payback against Republicans. Party leaders like Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, have talked of investigations into allegations of malfeasance across all parts of the Bush administration.


But on Thursday --Thursday -- the Washington Post reported on Pelosi laying down the law to her own caucus, telling her excitable colleagues straight-up that "impeachment is off the table" -- the idea being that investigations will mark renewed oversight, and explicitly not "payback". Despite the fact that this is exactly what official Washington claims to want from Pelosi, there's no mention of it at all in Nagourney's uber-insidery piece. Though he does make space to snidely suggest that the main reason Dems might not want to take back the House is because then Pelosi would be even more in evidence:

The new Democratic leaders will also find themselves under new scrutiny. On "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Ms. Pelosi, who would become speaker if Democrats take back the House, came across as tentative and halting when questioned about her party's plans. Even though Ms. Pelosi enjoys notable support in her party, her performance was panned even by fellow Democrats...


...like Mickey Kaus' brother. Judging by the transcript, Pelosi wasn't all that great on Meet the Press. On the other hand, except for questions about raising taxes that he knew Pelosi couldn't painlessly answer, Russert didn't really ask her about the Democrats' "plans" so much as throw a lot of inside baseball and semantics claptrap at her of the sort with which pundits always batter pols whom they don't feel they need to show respect.

So why has press contempt for Pelosi finally overflowed its banks? Mainly, I think, because she's a pretty relentless partisan, and distaste for partisanship is the first law of the insider pundit. She's definitely not "authentic" in the Joe Klein sense (that is, she's not smooth, not even a little bit.) Also because official Washington is already bored with the concept of the Dems just rolling on toward victory in November. That story has been done and it's time to stir the pot. That would also help explain why the media caricature of Pelosi fits so well with the GOP narrative on the subject. Ross Baker, writing a sensible (outsider) op-ed in the L.A. Times, has a pretty good take on why that might be:

For starters, Pelosi is a woman — a fit representative of what conservatives delight in calling the "Mommy Party." The toxic molecules that attach to this term include a craven shrinking from the use of force in international politics and excessive solicitude for society's unfortunates.

Strike two is Pelosi's 8th Congressional District, which takes in roughly 80% of the city of San Francisco. This conjures up in conservative minds carnality, sensuality and immoral excess, and it casts Pelosi as the front-woman for the dreaded "homosexual agenda." Finally, there is the aura of white-glove political dilettantism that hovers over Pelosi, which leaves her open to the charge of being a well-turned-out political commissar oblivious to the daily concerns of ordinary Americans — such as stem cell research and civil unions.


Lovely, lovely political media. Personally, I wouldn't be so sympathetic to pols if it weren't for the pundits who cover them. Pelosi is worth 20 of Nagourney any day.

Reverse in the savings decline?

Martin Feldstein, writing in Foreign Affairs, predicts "the return of saving" in the US. Brad Delong has the relevant excerpts:

Share prices are not likely to double again in the next decade, nor will housing prices continue to rise at double-digit rates. Accordingly, households will be able to increase their wealth for retirement and other purposes only by reducing the growth of their spending so that it is less than the growth of their after-tax incomes -- that is, by saving more. Most important, mortgage interest rates have stopped falling, bringing an end to the dissaving that occurred when homeowners simultaneously reduced their monthly mortgage payments and extracted massive amounts of cash simply by refinancing their mortgages. This suggests that there will be a relatively rapid rise in the savings rate.


This is also interesting:

The flow of funds to the United States should be a matter of concern not only because it has increased so rapidly but also because those funds now come in what may prove to be a much less sustainable form. In the late 1990s, most of the capital that flowed into the United States came in the form of equity investment by private investors.... Today, the capital inflows to the United States primarily go toward purchasing bonds and making bank deposits, including very sizable deposits by foreign governments at the Federal Reserve.... The available data do not distinguish between purchases by banks on behalf of private investors and purchases by banks on behalf of foreign governments. But extensive conversations with officials and private bankers suggest that an overwhelming share of the foreign capital inflows in recent years has come from foreign governments...

Since governments do not make investment decisions by simply balancing risk and return the way private investors do, it is particularly difficult to anticipate their future behavior. How long will foreign governments want to keep running large current account surpluses and investing those surpluses in relatively low-yield foreign bonds? And how will they respond to developments in the United States or in the global economy in the future? These unanswerable questions add to the overall uncertainty of the global economic outlook...


What's interesting to me is that Feldstein, logically, thinks household saving will be stimulated by a negative wealth effect, since in the future just holding a stock of housing and shares in mutual funds without adding to it out of current income will no longer adequately increase a household's wealth during the asset-accumulating part of the lifecycle. (This effect would presumably be partially offset by the incentive to substitute away from less lucritive saving toward current consumption, but not enough to cancel out the wealth effect.)

But if a negative wealth effect triggers greater saving and reduces current consumption, shouldn't we also worry that the positive wealth effect of say, giving the US millionaire lobby large new or continued tax breaks on their current investments will in fact have a negative (or at least closer to neutral) effect on their overall saving? Especially since taking advantage of the particular provision on Roth IRAs entails a sharp tax-hike in the short run as the money transfered between types of IRA becomes subject to income tax.

Incidently...

...LWC turned one year old yesterday. Happy birthday to me!

The rich get their Roths.

Disclaimer: The following tax-wonking is more for my benefit than for that of any readers. I'm fairly confident of the information, but feel free to notify me of any errors that you see.

In the debate over the taxation of investment income, liberal economists tend to argue that, if favourable tax treatment of investment income is to occur, the tax benefits of saving should be directed at individuals with relatively low income, whose marginal contribution decision to a saving account takes place at a low dollar value (corresponding to their relatively low dollar value of income).

This can be done in one of two ways: (1) by conditioning the tax treatment of contributions to saving on the financial or demographic characteristics of the contributors themselves; or (2) by offering favourable tax treatment only at the low levels of investment income feasible for the non-rich. Combinations of these approaches can be and often are also used: the amount of saving eligible for favourable tax treatment can vary by the contributor's income, health or age status.

However, some rightwing economists argue something close to the opposite: it's actually more efficient to give favourable tax treatment only to very high dollar levels of investment contributions, i.e. to those made disportionately by the rich. The basic reasoning is that (a) the saving of the rich has a disproportionately large effect on the economy and (b) the marginal saving decision of the rich (i.e. the amount of saving at which the value of contributing an additional dollar to saving is just equal to the value of consuming it now) takes place at a relatively high contribution level.

To explain the latter point: suppose the income tax rate I face is 15% and I'm planning to save $12,000 of my income this year in a regular non-tax-prefered saving account. If the government implements a policy that allows me to write off the first $2000 of that saving from my current taxable income, then it will have only a small effect on my saving decision through my slight ($300) increase in after-tax income. But if the government institutes a policy that allows me to write off any contribution I make to my saving above $12,000, then every additional dollar I contribute to saving suddenly has a lower cost in terms of current consumption (instead of $1, it costs me only $0.85) -- which will probably induce me to save quite a bit more.

Traditionally in the US, the structure of Roth IRAs has conformed more to the former (liberal) theory than to the latter (conservative) one: that saving incentives should be designed to encourage a more equal distribution of wealth holdings than just to stimulate the total gross amount of saving being done by the private sector. Roth IRAs are a very lucritive way of saving, because contributions are taxable in the year they are made (i.e. they are not tax deductible), but eligible withdrawals (after retirement or disability or for homebuying) are not taxable. The result is that the interest earnings on Roth IRAs end up untaxed. Worse, from an equity point of view, the likelihood of their being untaxed increases with the certainty the individual faces in his lifecycle path -- the unlikelihood of having to make early withdrawals. By contrast, regular IRAs and Canadian RRSPs are tax deductible in the year they are made, but are taxable as earned income in the year they are withdrawn. The result is that both the principle and the interest end up being taxed -- though they may be taxed at lower rates in a progressive income tax system if withdrawals are made in periods of otherwise low earnings.

The progressivity of Roth IRAs comes from the fact that they are limited to people having what we might consider upper-middle-class earning status or less. Currently, a single filer need an earned income of $110,000 or less to be eligible to contribute. In other words, Roth IRAS are not presently a way for the super-rich to avoid paying tax on investment earnings. Shockingly, the Republicans want to change all that by allowing anybody -- regardless of income -- to convert regular IRAs to Roth IRAs starting in 2010.

Though it's being called a gimmick, it looks to me (without reading the details) like a fairly pure way around the income-limit on contributing to Roth IRAs. Under the policy as described, the rich can simply make a contribution to their regular IRA starting in 2010, then redirect it to their Roth IRA, paying imcome tax on it when it moves, in 2011, and so on going forward. Even if this tactic is prohibited, recall that the Bush tax cuts have greatly increased the contribution limits on regular IRAs over the next few years. This makes for a larger pot of money that can be shifted into the Roth IRA tax shelter starting in 2010. All that's left is for the Republicans to push for raising contribution the contribution limits into Roth IRAs in the future.

By definition, this amounts to a giant tax cut to the wealthy. There are also budget effects. As Kevin Drum points out, one effect is to make short term budget deficit projections look nicer, because of the income tax that gets paid when the population of US millionaires switches their holdings from regular to Roth IRAS in the first few years after 2010. (In this way, it works a lot like the 1997 capital gains tax cut, which pushed the federal budget across the lines into surplus, as stock holders, free from the full capital-gains tax burdan, rearranged their portfolios and paid out the reduced taxes on the profits from their stock sales.) But the long-run cost to the treasury is the interest earnings that accrue to the principle once it moves into the Roth IRAs.

There's no defence of such a plan to be made on equity grounds. To the extent that any additional private saving generated is offset by public dissaving as the treasury bleeds future revenues, there's no aggregate saving defence to be made either. But what about the "efficiency" or pro-growth grounds of, as Bush put it, "extend[ing] policies that have helped our economy flourish"?

Bear with me. What follows certainly isn't cutting-edge theory, and I'm sure models exist that can spin the effects positively. But using traditional economic theory, the growth argument is based on the idea that domestic (private) saving has a direct influence on the domestic capital stock -- the basic version of the supply-side stimulus. But in the global economy with liquid financial markets and a prevailing world interest rate, the relationship doesn't hold, because saving will flow to any international arbitrage opportunity. (This is not, of course, a very accurate description of the real world, but neither is the traditional domestic saving = domestic investment relationship on which a lot of pro-growth arguments were originally based.) The returns to capital will still increase domestic wealth, but only through the private wealth of the individual actually holding the capital.

As well, the greater wealth of those domestic rich owners of capital might cause them to consume more, stimulating domestic demand, i.e. the demand-side version of ye olde trickle down effect. And the US economy is in fact growing at a good clip -- even though domestic private saving, particularly household saving, continues to be historically low. But a pretty good case can be made that, right now, other than through the effect on employment, the additional returns of economic growth are accruing almost exclusively to capital and to "entrepreneurship" (i.e. upper-level management, also the main capital-holding class) -- not to labour.

Explaining why that is isn't my intention here. But suffice to say that, to the extent that the returns to growth benefit only the holders of capital, and that growth doesn't appear to be related in a very systematic way to domestic saving anyway, encouraging the current capital owners to hold and reap the returns to ever greater quantities of capital seems like basically useless public policy -- and downright destructive when the cost is in terms of public saving or public services. A serious (Democratic) Congress would be more interested in spreading the distribution of capital holding -- and hence returns -- across the entire population, thereby spreading that the positive micro-effects of holding wealth rather than trying to maximize the dubious macro effects of more saving by the rich. The liberal economists are right.

I hate Stephen Harper.

Fucking hell. It will never end. And where the fuck is that $40 million figure the Tories are throwing around coming from?

This just can't keep going on forever. A little perspective. At long last, please, a little goddamn perspective.


Update: Declan points out yet another reason to pull my Liberal hair out.

One small blot on the NYT poll results...

Nathan Newman yesterday wrote about the good political news in the Times poll on immigration -- not just illegal immigration, but attitudes toward legal immigration as well. Wouldn't it be amusing if the final result of the current illegal immigration culture-economics war in the US -- including all the right wing appeals to the honour of those who "waited in line" and "made it honestly" -- were to rustle up renewed affection of the institution of immigration itself rather than the unfairness of illegals "jumping the queue"? It seems like a plausible result to me, and that's what p.33 the NYT poll results seem to suggest. You have to scroll through about 32 pages of similarly good news to get there. Happy poll!

I did notice, though, one small area of bad news for Democrats that I haven't seen anyone write about yet: the survey responses on Medicare Part D. When asked how easy or difficult they had "heard or read" the plan was to understand, 75% of seniors (and 70% of all respondants) said somewhat or very difficult. But the perspective of respondants who are actually enrolled in the program was much different: the percentage who found the experience of enrolling very or fairly easy was a full 61%, compared to only 33% who found the experience onerous.

On the related question of how the benefit would affect their spending on drugs, the results were similarly not awful for the GOP. A plurality (42%) of enrollees said they were spending less on drugs since enrolling (19% said they were spending more). And seniors were fairly evenly split (40-44%) on whether Medicare Part D would actually save them money over the long run. As well, the popular opinion of the program seems to have improved rather dramatically since early 2005 (question 87, p.39).

Those aren't the greatest numbers by any means, but they do suggest that Medicare Part D won't be the backlash debacle for the Republicans in November that it ought to be and that I was rubbing my hands about earlier. And they also suggest that, if the Dems regain control of Congress, they may have to be a bit careful of stepping into a political minefield when they try to repeal the worst parts of it.

More Darfur...

Whatever The Editors' weirdly disconnected sanctimony on the subject, Eric Reeves' Darfur 101 is really necessary reading if you want to understand the conflict well and quickly.

Instapundit spins a poll.

So the New York Times' most recent round of polling (pdf) is pretty bad for the GOP. How is the Right Wing Clearing House known as Glenn Reynolds handling it?

Well, first, all bad news for Bush must confirm Glenn's (and Mickey Kaus') pet convictions, like that Bush is being killed by his liberal stance on immigration.

Actually, from the NYT article on today's poll results:

Immigration is another issue undercutting Republicans and Mr. Bush. As Republicans battle over how to respond to illegal immigration, the poll found considerable opposition to the strict measures being pressed by conservative Republicans in the House.

About 60 percent of respondents said they favored the plan proposed by some Republicans in the Senate that would permit illegal immigrants who had worked in the United States for at least two years to keep their jobs and apply for citizenship. Just 35 percent endorsed the view of some conservatives that illegal immigrants should be deported. Two-thirds opposed building a 700-mile fence along the United States-Mexican border.


I'd love to see Kaus and Reynolds try to untangle their apparent belief that Bush should pander harder to the conservative base on this particular issue in order to stop bleeding true believer support for the midterms against poll results that have Americans favouring the generic Dem position over the generic GOP position 45-29. (Bush, after all, may be losing popularity among his base, but they're still his staunchest supporters, and they won't be voting directly for the White House in November anyway.)*


Then we get a link to Thomas Bray at Real Clear Politics, who writes:

Democrats hope that George Bush's miserable poll numbers will help them reclaim control of Congress this fall. But polls also show that the Democratic Party's overall approval ratings are almost as deep in the tank as the Republican rating. Voters may be expressing dismay at the alternatives.


Well, maybe. But today's NYT poll reports that 55% of respondants now have a favourable view of the Dems, the donkey's highest in two years, vs. 37% who have a favourable view Republicans, the lowest the elephant has been since the Clinton impeachment fiasco. Glenn doesn't know this either because he hasn't read the poll, or even apparently the NYT article about the poll. Instead, he culls this excerpt from another right wing blog:

The political situation has not helped some of the more prominent members of the Democratic Party. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who was Mr. Bush's opponent in 2004, had a lower approval rating than Mr. Bush: 26 percent, down from 40 percent in a poll conducted right after the election.

And just 28 percent said they had a favorable view of Al Gore, one of Mr. Bush's more vocal critics.


To which Glenn adds:

I wonder how Hillary's polling? More seriously, I think we're seeing a general meltdown in support for the entire governing class as the result of a perception (which is largely true) that it lacks the seriousness and self-restraint necessary to run a major nation.


If Glenn had read the poll, he'd know that HRC has 34% favourable (35% unfavourable, 32% undecided). He'd also know that, despite Kerry's 26% favouable (38% unfavourable, 34% undecided -- compared to Bush's 55% unfavourable), he still narrowly beats Bush in a hypothetical rematch, 37-35%. But reading too much stuff slows down the insta-linking, and, anyway, I don't know if I'd read the poll either in Glenn's place. It's a much sweeter job when we can just grab at anything out there to make sweeping generalizations in line with our pet convictions, like about how Americans have rejected the entire federal government, which just happens to be controlled by Republicans. This is Glenn's fallback libertarianism -- either the Dems suck alone or, if that position can't be maintained, everybody sucks together because the governing class is inherently corrupt. I'm sure it will see him through to November just fine.


*To be fair, Byron York has a pretty convincing take, based on numbers from a recent Gallup poll, that moderate support was long gone and by assuming a "third way" type position on immigration, Bush has caused some of his remaining base support to peel off. It's not a ludicrous argument by any means, but 40-52 support among Republicans for Bush's immigration policy doesn't strike me as really too bad to begin with (it implies only about half of Republican identifiers support a more draconian policy in the first place, roughly what the NYT numbers suggest.) Going draconian would (a) entail a blatant White House flip-flop when Bush's lone remaining virtue, according to the NYT analysis is that voters consider him more honest than your average pol; and (b) would be yet another position alienating to a majority of Americans who favour a middle ground. Also, there's something rather sinister about the way supposed neoliberal Mickey Kaus and supposed libertarian Glenn Reynolds egg Bush on toward pandering to his base of zenophobes in order to scare his approval rating up a couple of points just because the moderates who once formed a Bushie cushion of support have likely abandonned the White House for good.

The Conservatives ditch Darfur.

(Cross-posted at Galloping Beaver)

From the Globe & Mail, the Tories say no Canadian troops can go to Darfur:

The Canadian army doesn't have enough soldiers to deploy to the Darfur crisis in Sudan while maintaining its current commitment to Afghanistan, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor said Monday.

Mr. O'Connor told a Senate committee on national security that the military has sufficient ground troops to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely.

”We would be challenged to take anything else on,” he testified.


The Tories have been downplaying Darfur as a foreign policy priority for a while now. Now that Darfur is back in the news, and the prospect of opening up Darfur to Western peacekeepers is back on the table, they seem to be making their non-interest official. The NDP for its part would very much like to see Canada assume a role in post peace-treaty Darfur, but Jack Layton and NDP defence critic Dawn Black agree with O'Connor that a Candian presence there would have to come at the expense of the Afghan mission:

NDP defence critic Dawn Black, whose riding Mr. Layton visited, said it is unlikely the armed forces can make the necessary commitment to a Darfur mission and maintain its forces in Afghanistan at current levels."

"There seems to be a difference of opinion as to whether we can do both," she said. "Roméo Dallaire thinks we can put some troops into Darfur.

"But I think to meet the kind of commitment the UN is asking for in Darfur, it's not likely that we can do that with what [Defence Minister Gordon] O'Connor has said, [that] we're fully extended already into southern Afghanistan."


Remember, Dallaire supported the Liberals' decision not to send troops into Darfur against Khartoum's wishes last year. But now that the gridlock between Khartoum and the main Darfuri African rebel group has been broken, here's what he said in a recent op-ed:

The concept of operations must revolve around a highly skilled and fully equipped, core ground force that is supported by approximately 20,000 troops -- two battle groups for each of Darfur's eight subregions.

The UN Multinational Stand-by High Readiness Brigade for United Nations Operations, or SHIRBRIG, is the ideal core force for the task. This multinational brigade-size force of about 4,000 troops was created to provide a rapid deployment capability of up to six months. Canada is one of a dozen Western powers that have signed on as a full participant to SHIRBRIG, a Danish initiative. It provides a highly trained force with operational experience, efficient command and control, and credible deterrent capabilities when needed.

SHIRBRIG's signatory countries must provide equipment such as command and control, armoured personnel carriers, unmanned aerial vehicles and air defence systems, which would make SHIRBRIG the force commander's reserve or the "force de frappe". This core force must be supported by a large observation capability, the bulk of which should be provided by developing countries from the region and abroad.

...Finally, Canada must demonstrate its commitment to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine it has endorsed by supporting the United Nations in this mission -- by providing not only resources and expertise but, most importantly [once the force deploys], boots on the ground. A reinforced battle group of approximately 1,500 soldiers, with a sizable transport capability for return and humanitarian support, should be Canada's contribution to a robust UN mission to bring peace and stability to the region.


So are the Conservatives and the NDP right that Darfur and Afghanistan make an either-or proposition for Canada, even though they'd be quite different types of mission? Is it purely a question of insufficient manpower for two large missions? (Dave, I'd love to know your opinion on this one.) And are we heading toward the same sort of debate American (and American-centric) pundits are currently having about the theoretical and practical compatibility of Iraq and Darfur, but with regard to Afghanistan and Darfur? (Will the Liberals take the position that we can and should engage in both conflicts?) I have my opinion on this, but,without a good understanding of what Canada's military limitations really are, it's a relatively uninformed one. Thoughts?

Where presidents come from.

Noam Scheiber makes fun of Tad Devine for suggesting in a Wall Street Journal piece that Al Gore won't run for president again because he's too successful in private life. Scheiber responds:

Good point! After all, the people who run for president are normally down-on-their-luck types who've washed out of multiple jobs and are just hoping to land some generous government benefits and three square meals a day...


Wait. Doesn't that basically describe the current president... failed oilman... semi-successful baseball team owner... no apparent ambition until he turned 40... affably took up the family tradition... at least a little bit? Or am I missing Scheiber's irony?

Darfur and howling at the moon.

Sadly, I think the guys at TAPPED are pretty much right about TNR's Darfur issue. There's a lot of (interesting) history, a lot of theory, a lot of context, a lot of complaint, a lot of rage, and no non-theoretical solutions -- nothing, for instance, to rival the substance of Marc Leon Goldberg's recent piece outlining the non-troop alternatives, including a Kosovo-like intervention from the air, or a threat to hit Sudanese military technology if the killing doesn't stop. (That's assuming Khartoum has the same direct control over the militias that Milosevic did over the army.) The Editors don't even attempt a serious rebuttal of the liberal doves' argument that an American military presence in Sudan is undesirable or impossible.

Really, though, the choice of theory over wonkery isn't so damning in itself... there's lots of good stuff in the issue. But the lack of specific substance seems to me part of the larger weirdness of the Western intellectual response to Darfur: the unwillingness to confront the total screaming irrelevance of all the outrage. Eric Reeves, writing about Darfur's future in the TNR Darfur issue gets at the heart of it:

The attacks were comprehensive and revealed a rich understanding of what was most likely to destroy the future ability of African groups to live in Darfur. Irrigation systems were destroyed; water wells were poisoned with human and animal corpses; pottery vessels were broken to make carrying water impossible; foodstocks were annihilated; cattle were killed or looted; fruit trees were cut down or burned; agricultural tools were smashed; mosques and Korans were desecrated; buildings were torched. And, of course, people were displaced, raped, and killed. Estimates of how many have died vary, but my calculations place the number well over 400,000. Many of the survivors now live in camps for refugees and internally displaced persons, both in eastern Chad and Darfur. Separated from their livelihoods, they are wholly dependent for survival on humanitarian organizations (which are forever on the brink of having to leave for lack of money, lack of security, or both). They arrived in the camps with nothing, and they have nothing to go back to.


The pillaging in Darfur has been going on for almost three years at this point -- and over all this time, there's been essentially no lack of editorializing (from the left and right), political interest in Congress, or effective, targetted grassroots activism. Samantha Power points all this out in her essay suggesting that American public interest is what prompted the leading, if weak, U.S. role in confronting the Darfur genocide. But her line of thinking -- what actually works?, how do we get more of it? -- is pretty mmuch lost elsewhere in the issue. The fact is, in its broadest form -- the tragedy of the killing and the need to stop it -- Darfur isn't an issue on which left-liberals and liberal hawks, or activists and intellectuals ostensibly disagree. The search for public intellectual villains is a fairly futile one. Official elected villians are easier to find, but, outside of Sudan or maybe South Africa, even they seem in somewhat short supply relative to the nature of the atrocity. Marisa Katz' article makes the startling half-accusation that the Republican establishment has downplayed a solution in Darfur at least partly as a way of favouring the resolution of Christian persecution in the south at the expense of Muslem suffering in the west of Sudan. But, mainly, the reasons for inaction from the Bush Administration are startlingly mundane and unsurprising: suitable for the sharp policy critique Katz gives it rather than the sputtering disgust and outrage engendered by the Clintonites' feckless, then ass-covering, approach to the flash-violence of Rwanda.

If anything, the recent breakthrough in negotiations makes TNR's continuing outrage all the more hollow. Not because diplomacy paid off undermining The Editors' demands for some sort of military solution, but for exactly the opposite reason. In Sudan, just like in Rwanda, it was the finalizing of one peace agreement (in Sudan's case, between the Khartoum-based government and southern-based rebels) that facilitated the movement toward a new conflict -- with Khartoum newly determined to ensure that one successful rebellion didn't perpetrate another, and holding up its part of the peace agreement, and other goodies like help in the WoT, as leverage against Western intervention. Three years later, if the Sudanese government and (most of) the main African rebel groups have, in fact, come to a lasting agreement (a debatable prospect), it's more likely because they figured they may as well: from Khartoum's perspective, the damange to the agricultural Darfuri tribal culture is already done. Genocides can't go on forever, but apparently, once started, they pretty much stop on their own time.

I don't mean to say there's no place for outrage. But three solid years of it produced nothing, and as TNR's editors fire off another round of prosy accusations -- domestic liberals betraying liberalism, squishes who fear American power, indecently hardassed Republican realists, incompetent Bushies, crooked, self-praising diplomats, self-interested Security Council members -- they ought to include their own advocacy as an equal partner in ineffectuality. The heart of the political issue isn't -- as Richard Just puts it, that some progressives "want Darfur saved and they want American power curbed, [and] they cannot have both". The Editors dream of a world in which that sort of thing is the essential question. But in our world, next to the basic ineffecuality of everyone, of every political stripe, to stop the killing, it's just the ultimate strawman. For three years now the conscience of the West (at least North America) has hummed along in apparent overdrive with regard to Darfur. The Bushies responded here and there to political pressure. And lo, the conflict in the Sudan continued unabated. The louder the rage, the demand for better philosophy and better protests, the more obvious the impotence behind it all. In this case, sadness, resignation is at least honest.